Sunday, March 31, 2013

Admixture proportions

Many DNA-genealogists like to find out what admixture proportions they get when running their autosomal DNA results in these different tools that are available from GedMatch.com and other.

One of the more popular tools at the moment are the Eurogens K36 Admixture Proportions.

I have also used this tool on both my fathers- and mothers DNA results and came up with the following admixture results;

My Father;
North_Sea        24.08%
Fennoscandian        19.14%
North_Atlantic        12.47%
Eastern_Euro        11.49%
French             6.85%
East_Central_Euro     6.60%
Iberian             6.29%
Italian             5.34%
Central_Euro         5.10%
North_Caucasian         1.40%
Basque             0.56%
Volga-Ural         0.35% 
West_Med         0.25%
Oceanian         0.09%


My Mother;
Fennoscandian        23.85%
North_Sea        19.11%
North_Atlantic        11.40%
Eastern_Euro         9.76%
East_Central_Euro     7.60%
Central_Euro         6.91%
Iberian             5.47%
French             5.02%
East_Balkan         4.68%
Basque             3.65%
Volga-Ural         1.28%
West_Med         1.26%

As you can see its rather similar in most parts. My mother have some more eastern ancestry.

I am a bit curious about the French and Italian parts in my fathers results (and Oceanian?), but as with most of these deep ancestral results, its hard or impossible to find anything about it in the available sources.

I also did the Hunter/Gatherer vs. Farmer test also from Eurogene and got the following results;

Father:
Baltic Hunter Gatherer        66.48%
Mediterranean Farmer        25.16%
Anatolian Farmer         5.92%
Oceanian Hunter Gatherer     1.05%
North Eurasian Hunter Gatherer     0.89%
Bantu Farmer             0.28%
South American Hunter Gatherer     0.22%

Mother:
Baltic Hunter Gatherer        67.10%
Mediterranean Farmer        26.03%
Anatolian Farmer         3.09%
North Eurasian Hunter Gatherer     2.29%
Middle Eastern Herder         0.52%
South Asian Hunter Gatherer     0.50%
South American Hunter Gatherer     0.30%
Pygmy Hunter Gatherer         0.16%

As these results indicate 3/4 of my ancient ancestors where hunters/gatherers and 1/4 farmers.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Swedish surname statistics 2012

I get a lot of questions from people in USA with the surname Lindberg. They usually want to know how we are related since they have Swedish ancestry and share the surname Lindberg.

I have to explain that Lindberg is one of the most common surnames in Sweden, and that is not because we are a large family, the majority of all Lindberg´s are not even remotely related to each other.

In December 31 2012, there were 27350 people with the surname Lindberg living in Sweden. Thats ranking it number 17 on the most common surname list for 2012.

The top outstanding 3 surnames in Sweden (2012) was;

Andersson with 251621 individuals
Johansson with 251495 individuals
Karlsson with 223151 individuals

Followed by;
Nilsson, Eriksson, Larsson, Olsson, Persson, Svensson and Gustafsson, rounding up the top 10.



I have earlier explained why we have this kind of surnames and how the became so widely used. But probably this will eventually change as it becomes more usual and popular to change common surnames into unique newly created surnames, or to reuse an old surname from your ancestors.

If anyone are interested in statistics for Sweden and also names and surnames, please check out the SCB website (in English).

Thursday, January 31, 2013

The "red-haired sailor"...

My fathers maternal grandfather have always been "unknown" for us. The church-records don´t give any clues and since my grandmother was born in 1908, there are no one still alive to ask about it, that may have had any knowledge.

A rather vague story in our family said that the unknown father could have been a "red-haired sailor".
(Actually it was said he should have been a "captain" on a boat...)

My grandmother was extremely red-haired but neither her mother or any of her half-siblings were, so maybe it could be the truth about him being red-haired?
My grandmother gave birth to 10 children and almost everyone of them are more or less red-haired!. Also many of her grandchildren are red-haired in some degree, even myself and my son have a trace of it...

In Sweden there are of course red-haired people, but they are not common, perhaps 1-2 % of the population is said to be red-haired, some experts say it can be even less.

According to Wiki, red-hair are most frequent in Ireland and Scotland.

So its now very interesting that many of my fathers autosomal DNA-matches indicates he have an 25 % Irish or Scottish ancestry. Since all known parts of my fathers ancestry is all from Sweden, it sure make it very possible that my grandmothers unknown father was indeed Irish or Scottish (and most probably very red-haired..).

Today most of these matches are quite distant, but sooner or later a closer match will show up and make things more interesting.