How Likely am I to be Descended from Germanic tribes?

[apie3000]

Hello, I'm new to this forum and am glad to have found it because all the other forums dealing with these subjects are filled with vile racists and white supremacists of whom every man of conscience is right to despise. So my question is along these lines. I think the ancient Germanic peoples were awesome. Their mythology, their culture, their language and the fact that they beat Rome is really cool. So my question genetically speaking is how likely am I to be descended from Germanic tribes? My ancestry is English, south German, Swiss, and Ulster Scots/Scots Irish as well as, I suspect the Gaelic native Irish. Now, the English as an ethnic group came into being when the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons conquered what would become England from the Celtic tribes living there, but it's not clear whether they eradicated the former tribes and replaced them or just interbred with them and culturally dominated them. The English don't look like Danes so I'm assuming the latter. The south Germans and Swiss are Germanic in culture, but they seem to just be Celts that were conquered and Germanized and I'm wondering if they have any ancestry from the Allemani which conquered them? The Ulster Scots are mostly Lowland Scots which were Anglo Saxon culturally but again, they might just be Saxonized Welshmen. So my question is what are my chances of actually being descended from one of these old tribes in a genetic sense not just in a "they were some distant ancestor who contributed nothing to my genetics" sense?

 

[Maciamo]

If you wonder what is the likelihood that some of your DNA was inherited from Germanic ancestors, the answer is simple: 100%. The real question is what percentage of your genome is of Germanic origin. This is much harder to answer considering that your ancestry is so mixed. There is no reliable test to determine that at present. However, if you did a test with 23andMe it would be possible to give a broad estimate based on your Ancestry Composition (see distribution maps here). In short, the Broadly Northwest European and Scandinavian components are primarily Germanic. Some Germanic ancestry may also be contained in the British & Irish, but there is no way to know how much.

 

[Valerius]

Apie3000, you have this Germanic ancestry for sure. Modern peoples are now mixture of different tribes. You have known Celtic ancestry as well as Germanic one and that's normal. Also, I'm pretty sure that the people from Switzerland and South Germany have a lot of Germanic ancestry, they can't be "pure" Celts considering the regions history. I'm sure that the French and the Northern Italian people got this admixture too. As for the phenotypes, it's an interesting topic but some differences can't deny the Germanic nature of the English people. Here in the Balkans some people are saying that we, the South Slavs are looking different than our northern brethren and that's true considering the fact that our Slavic ancestors mixed with our Thraco-Illyrian ancestors and even some other people. There's a difference but we are still Slavs by language, by ancestry (even mixed), by traditions and many other things. In the same way your Anglo-Saxon ancestors mixed with the Celts in England but that doesn't change their Germanic nature. It's just that they were enriched genetically and culturally. Some people are going too far saying Germanic and Slavic are only language families and these people are something else which I reject as some sort of ethnic nihilism.

Sent from my LG-P710 using Eupedia Forum mobile app

 

[apie3000]

Yes, I'm planning to take the 23 and me test. But if it helps, I've already taken the ancestry DNA test and built a tree at ancestry.com. My results are as follows.

51% Great Britain
25% Europe West
16% Ireland

Low Confidence Regions

2% Scandinavian
2% Italy and Greece
1% Iberian
1% Finnish Northwest Russia

Non European Low Confidence Regions

1% Caucasus
1% Southern Asian

Now, I do kind of wonder if my European West ancestry is under counted and my Great British ancestry is very over counted because I have a crap ton of Germans in my tree and my mother's DNA test showed her to 51% Europe West (and she's from the German majority Pennsylvania) and my father is exactly half German in ancestry and apparently ancestry gets weird with these two ancestry groups.

 

[stevenarmstrong]

apie3000 I see you're part Scots-Irish, living in South Carolina. My direct paternal ancestor arrived in Duplin County NC from Ulster sometime around 1750. Any Armstrongs in your family tree?

 

[apie3000]

stevenarmstrong, no sadly I have no ancestry that I know of from the Armstrongs. My Ulster Scots ancestry comes from my mother definitely and possibly my father as well. My mothers' grandfather was a West Virginia mountain Coal miner and he as well as his wife are of large Scots Irish ancestry as well as southern and even some northern German. My father is mostly English and Alemannic (Swiss and Baden Wurttemburg) German but my surname is an extremely Gaelic surname for which I have been unable to trace back to the old country. Since my father is a southerner and many people with my surname were protestants from Northern Ireland, and a family record from people with my surname from Virginia says that they are Scots Irish of Highland Scots ancestry, I theorize that my father is also Scots Irish of Gaelic derivation. However there is also a chance that my father is native Irish. My mother is adopted so we only know about her maternal lineage and nothing about her father except that according to her birth mother he was "Irish and German." That's basically my lineage in a nutshell. I assume the Armstrongs you descend from are from the Armstrong clan that feuded with the Elliots at the Scottish borders?

 

[apie3000]

Steven Armstrong, no sadly I don't have any ancestry among the Armstrongs. Most of my Scots Irish ancestry comes from my mother who's grandparents were West Virginians coal miners.

 

[stevenarmstrong]

Steven Armstrong, no sadly I don't have any ancestry among the Armstrongs. Most of my Scots Irish ancestry comes from my mother who's grandparents were West Virginians coal miners.

Hey, we can't all be perfect

 

[apie3000]

Just had a look at the Germanic Y DNA map of Europe on Eupedia and noticed that the darker shades of blue went all through England, Germany (even the south), Zurich Switzerland (where my ancestors hail from), and the Northumbrian side of Scotland. Seeing as how the peoples of these countries have been interbreeding with each other for hundreds and hundreds of years I think that it's a good map of Germanic ancestry in Europe as a whole.

 

[Apsurdistan]

Are you perfectionist and kinda robotic?

 

[apie3000]

Are you perfectionist and kinda robotic?

Yes actually.

 

[Apsurdistan]

Well so am I and I've never been popular with the ladies. It's better to have swag.

 

[I1a3_Young]

I have tons of ancestors that came through NC and VA, and many Ulster Scots-Irish. I will check my DNA matches on Ancestry if you PM me a user name.

 

[apie3000]

Finally took the 23 and Me DNA test and the results are.

37.9% British and Irish

30.6 % French and German

12.2% Scandinavian

0.1% Finnish

17.8% Broadly Northwest European

0.7% Eastern European

0.6% Broadly European

Going by Maciamo's link that would make me about 30% Germanic in ancestry and 68.5% Celtic (adding the British Isles and Germany and France). Pretty cool.

 

[Wheal]

I have an Armstrong in my tree. Of course, I have a little bit of alot of families

 

[apie3000]

Another thing came up regarding this topic. I took multiple Eurogenes tests using Gedmatch and I'm wondering if the results given in these tests represent specific populations like the Celts and Germanics? What do the Eurogenes results actually mean?