Englishness at 78% and still rising

 Happy Halloween! October is a special month not just because of my birthday, but because of ancestry.co.uk's annual update of their DNA ethnicity estimate! It's become something of an annual tradition - check out my previous blogs on the subject!

In October 2022, I got the results of the sample I'd sent in, and found that it said I'm 69% from "England & Northwestern Europe". A bit on the low side, I thought. And significantly Swedish or Danish on my mother's side too, with a big chunk of Scotland on my father's. Plus 1% of Norway.

In October 2023, Ancestry had improved their estimations, and upgraded me to 76% Englishness, draining away a bit of the Swedishness and Scottishness.

In October 2024, I had inched up to 77% on the Englandometer, with decreasing Danishness and a surprising shift in my father's heritage into the unexplored regions of "Germanic Europe" and the Netherlands. What will this latest year's update bring?

Well, it's the biggest update ever, and England has fractured into at least three independent parts!

Which makes it a little harder to track just how English the Ancestry world thinks I am, but we can just add together the East Midlands, West Midlands and "Southwestern England & Northwestern Europe" to see I've gone up one more percentage point, making 78%! I'm getting ever closer to being the Full English Breakfast!

"East Midlands" seems to include Sheffield, where a big chunk of my father's side come from (his father's family originated in Rutland and moved to Sheffield in the 1800s; the Millership side were longer-established in Sheffield), so it does work. And people who aren't familiar with the precise details of my family tree and can't be bothered to read those old blogs might need to know that my maternal grandfather (who died when my mum was a baby) came from London, so giving me 25% of that doesn't seem unreasonable.

But let's have a look by parent. You have to give Ancestry money to get it to say "mother" and "father", apparently, but we can see from the cheap version that "Parent 1" is my dad and "Parent 2" my mum...

My dad is now twice as Dutch as he used to be, and 2% Irish too! Meanwhile, my Scandinavian side has shrunk sharply, leaving me just 3% of Denmark, with a big part of my mum suddenly having become Scottish or Northern Irish. Parts of me are shifting slowly around Europe, but it's gradually coalescing into making me English. Give it another couple of decades...

My dad did go to Amsterdam once, you know. Among his effects I found an old temporary passport dating to 1976, and I very vaguely remember that there was some kind of anecdote about "the time I went to Amsterdam, before you were born." So maybe he was getting in touch with the distant ancestors.