DNA pickle....

Good grief. If we go back far enough we will find we are all related to each other…………
See what Adam Rutherford, a geneticist has to say about DNA testing.

Your Scottish and Welsh makes up 45% of your DNA which is a lot. The only way you can solve it is to make contact with any close cousin DNA matches, although they may not be interested of course. Do not give up though, I have solved some unbelievable mysteries in my tree which you would never believe possible. The best way is probably by process of elimination. In other words, if it can't be that then it might be this. There is something unexpected here so think outside the box. Keep going until you unravel the puzzle.

Because the percentage is so large you should maybe start with your grandparents and then their parents. Your DNA cousins will reveal things just by how they are linked to you. Click on one of them and then look at their Ethnicity and their Shared Matches. You can group people through the Shared Matches, it's great! Use the Groups feature for different families, then add people to the correct colour group. Hope I've explained that properly.

I'm showing 5% Irish which is a puzzle as I've gone back to 1700 and the families are all living in little villages in Dorset, Wiltshire and Essex. As far as I know they came from there, but maybe some Irish lad came a'courting in the 1600s or earlier.

I'm also 3% Norwegian but that must have been Viking invaders in Essex.

I turned out to be 67% Scots. I knew my mother had a Scots great grandfather x3 and my father's family are Reivers from the English side of the border. I can only guess there has been a lot of taking women as well as cows and sheep.
My mother has Stewarts way back but they are living in Northern England and I cannot make the connection back.
My cousin found she was 75% Scots and is now looking into her fathers side and Reivers not the same as mine on her maternal side through which we are related.
We have come to the conclusion that people just wandered from one side of the border to the other and thought of themselves by their family name rather than English or Scots .

This article may help explain. Here's an extract:

There are many scientific limitations to the home DNA test. “These companies aren’t actually testing your ancestry at all,” says Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London. “They’re problematic in their claims to be able to infer an individual’s ancestry.”

There are a few reasons for this. First, the genetic information these DNA testing companies hold is based on living populations. When you send your spit off in a little tube, it is specific snippets, or markers, in your genome (the total collection of DNA that resides in your cells) that are being analysed, and then compared to the markers of others who are good representatives for distinct regions or ethnicities around the world. But as Thomas notes, the companies are only looking at very recent samples, from a relatively small group, in one specific database. “They are just saying: ‘If I wanted to make your genome, I could pull bits of your DNA from people all over the world who are around today. And this is just one way I could do it,’” he says.

The databases are skewed towards different parts of the world, too. “23andMe has more American customers, and AncestryDNA has more British and Australian,” Thomas explains. “And none of these companies asks: ‘What do we know about the genetics of the past, and which of those past inferred genetic clusters do we get our ancestry from?’ They are giving us what the market wants, not what the genetics tells us.”

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/11/question-ancestry-does-dna-testing-really-understand-race

Yes, apparently I’m 24% Scottish, but I haven’t found any Scottish ancestors even though I’ve gone a long way back, I have Welsh ancestry but I have no Welsh DNA.
It seems such a large amount to have just been 1 person who strayed.
It seems that we have something in common!