Resa, They won't be able to put a mapping zone over all the island regions of the world. Since we are Portuguese and Portugal is in on the Iberian Peninsula with Spain, we are *supposed* to show up Iberian (purple, I think), over Spain and Portugal. Generally, you can count the North African (categorized under Middle East) along with being Portuguese as well. I see some people get categorized as Southeast Europe (Italy and Greece). If you have no know Italian or Greece, you can count that in Portuguese as well (I think when FTDNA split Spain & Portugal from Italy & Greece, well, it doesn't quite read it right). A lot of Portuguese get West & Central Europe too. This may be from the Flemish, French and others that settled the Azores. I kinda think the problem of France gobbling up too much of Europe and over reaching in these ethnicity estimates is back. Also, the English were in the Azores too. So some people get British Isles in their estimates. And way back in time with the pirates and Vikings and whoever those types were that raided the islands....some people show up Scandinavian. Some people have trace amounts of Jewish. The Sephardic shows up with Iberian and the Ashkenazi shows up in East Europe. So some with Jewish ancestry can show East Europe.
At this point, I think I've covered all of Europe. Because this new ethnicity estimate goes back hundreds or thousands of years, it's going to say you are from Europe. I don't find that helpful. But it's the way FTDNA redesigned their ethnicity estimates. Last version, they had only 25 Portuguese samples. Those 25 are to cover all of Portugal, the Azores, Madeira, Brazil, Cape Verde. Those 25 aren't enough to predict all that. They need a larger sample size. If your only interest is the ethnicity estimates and not genealogy, I'd test with other companies too. If your interest is mainly genealogy, then FTDNA is great and has a lot of tools (and admins) to help you. Cheri Mello, Family Tree DNA Admin (volunteer) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Azores Genealogy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/azores.
