Question about DNA ancestry test results...?

Question

My great-aunt has been doing a lot genealogy research. She recently took a DNA test and the results came back that she shares direct maternal ancestry with

Mbundu of Angola; Fulbe, of Cameroon; Hausa of Niger/Nigeria, Wolof of Senegal/Gambia/Mauritania; Mende, of Sierra Leone; 38 people of Ashkenazi heritage in Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.

Okay...so, I don't really understand much about DNA tests and genetics, but I'm interested in starting my own genealogy stuff, so I'd like to learn. What exactly do these results mean? She shares genetic heritage with people in ALL those countries? And does that in term mean that I share the same heritage as she does because her mother is my grandma? If she were to tell someone where her ancestry (specifically African) came from, how would she know whether to say Angola, Cameroon or Mauritania, etc? I'm a little lost :/

Answer 1

The results sound like one side of her family were slaves in the USA. Once they were kidnapped and brought to, for instance, Virginia, slaves married each other without too much regard for tribe. They didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. It would be a rare African-American who had just one tribe in his/her genertic makeup, especially after five generations. Very few European-Americans have just one nation in their genetic makeup after five generations, either.

Those countries are the current ones. Borders shift over time. The tribal names are more accurate. If someone was really interested, she could list the tribes; "Africa" is accurate enough for most people.

Ashkenazi are Jewish, and they wandered. Again, when they got to the USA, they inter-married without much regard for which exact country their ancestors came from, after a generation or two.

Yes, you share the same heritage, although yours has been diluted by the other lines you have from the other side of your family.

Answer 2

Yes you share exactly the same heritage as each of your maternal ancestors, although it should not really be called 'heritage', it is mitochondrial dna, and it traces, virtually undiluted, back to the origin of each one of your earliest maternal ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.

You share DNA with people who now live in many different areas of the world, the countries they live in, as named today, did not exist at the time your and their ancestors were together in other areas of the world, so it is something of a misnomer to say that you have ancestry rooted in a specific modern country. As you probably know, the human race originated on the African continent, and gradually spread into and throughout Asia and Europe and eventually to all parts of the world over a period of many thousands of years, not everyone of the same 'tribe', for want of a better word, migrated to exactly the same areas of the world, and that is why you find people who share with you the same DNA haplogroup, or more precisely haplotype, in different areas of the world today.

Designating ancestors by country of origin is never a very practical or sensible exercise really, because of the fact that we are, all of us, such a mixture, it is, in my view, ridiculous to get into percentages of nationality or race. If you are under peer pressure to say what your 'heritage' is, just go by what you know your most recent family history tells you, your genetic genealogy is a much more complex, interesting and fascinating subject, I can only recommend that you learn more about it.

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