DNA Results #2 - confirmation of... the same unexpected result?

As I mentioned before, I went and splurged on a 23andMe DNA test to correlate with the Ancestry one.   I did this because my DNA breakdown from Ancestry didn't match my expectations:

• 75% British/Irish (the Donahue and Hall lines, plus Bradish)
• 25% French

But the Ancestry results were:

• 91% Ireland/Scotland/Wales (59%) and Great Britain (32%)
• 9% everything else.

But the mapping of that 32% ALSO seems to include parts of France, particularly Normandie where I know is the origination of most of the French ancestors.

Probably not surprising (given that there's like little room for error in the DNA test itself), the 23andMe results are in line with the Ancestry ones:

1. British and Irish:   86.5%
2. French and German:  6.8%
3. Broadly NW European:  5.6%
4. everything else (European):  1.1%

So, lumping all of the non-British/Irish together, that's 13.5%, a little more than only half what I expected.

This leads into the whole "was Célina Boulé" actually an Irish adoptee hypothesis.

If she is French, then the 75/25 expected split is still there: there's just not enough English/Irish in the more distant ancestors to make up a 1/8th discrepancy.

BUT if she's Irish: then 13/16 of my 4th-generation ancestors are British/Irish = 81.25% and everything else is 18.75%.   Given that we know that SOME of the Québec/Acadian ancestors married non-French people (not many, but a few), then we START to get closer to the stated results.

The other thing that's cool about the 23andMe results is that their reporting is more in-depth:

Maternal Haplogroup:  J1c1

This mostly stems from central Europe, the Balkans and the Ukraine.   But I suppose it would extend to France to.

Paternal Haplogroup: R-S15280.1

Very, very Irish.

I'm also more Neaderthal than 68% of 23andMe customers!   Yay!

I was able to get Dad to do both Ancestry and 23andMe tests.   Results pending.   I did this because it will also help with the "is Célina Irish" test since it will let me immediately distinguish for all of the identified "distant cousins" that both sites offer which SIDE of the family they're on (if they're distant cousins of both Dad and me, then they're on the Irish side, otherwise the French/Irish side).  

Hopefully enough of these distant cousins might clump in THEIR overlaps to suggest who Célina really was.

Where things are now...

I've (finally) finished the first- and second-generation Acadiens.

Whew!

This was a lot of work, because most of my typical work flow had to be adjusted: the LaFrance doesn't have the Acadian records (since they only map Québec parishes).   Ancestry has some of them (many of them were destroyed by the British at one time or another).  While there are records for Beaubassin, Port Royal, and Grand-Pré, other locations had no records at all.

Fortunately, I found a web site with the Port Royal records neatly organized by family name and date.

But the abundance of gaps, combined with the entire population of French Acadia being dispersed in the 1750s made things hard to follow:  many went to the British colonies, others to France, and others to other French settlements: Louisiana, Québec or places like Miquelon (where I was also able to find some records).   At first I was puzzled by those who went to New England, the Carolinas, etc.:  why would you leave a British take-over of Acadia to go to another British colony.   Then I found out that most were forcibly deported TO those places by the British with the idea that the displaced families would re-integrate --- the attempt was made to send them to somewhat rural places (e.g., western Massachusetts); however, most didn't stay there and moved to the cities (which the British tried to avoid).    Things were particularly awful in the case of Québec City: an outbreak of measles became an epidemic, and hundreds of people died around 1757-1760, with entire families being wiped out.

Another situation happened while trying to determine if spouses of family members I was researching were also distant cousins (which with the Acadiens was extremely common: consanguine marriages of the 3rd and 4th degree were prevalent): in one case, the spouse ended up having a HUGE family tree archived on WikiTree: we're talking several THOUSAND people hitting pretty much every since royal family in Europe and aristocracy galose) - so that took several weeks to map.   (I would've quit, but my OCD kept me going, and I figure that it'll eventually come in handy if I ever get a breakthrough on the Irish parts of the family tree!)

So, now I'm going through all of the WikiTree entries for the direct descendants, filling in the blanks and getting a sense of what will be involved in finishing up the first- and second- generations mapping for the pre-Québec families.   That'll be the last "phase" of this project.

...  Then we start the third generation with (by my estimate) about 8-9,000 families to map.

Given that it took over three years to get this far, it might be 2021 or so before I'm finished with that.