The Gedmatch admixture tools can seem a little mysterious. Many of the big genealogy websites like Ancestry and 23andMe have come a long way in their admixture, or ethnicity, estimates, adding more and more people to their sample populations and attempting to identify an origin in a country or even a region of a country. Gedmatch has the ability to generate a variety of conflicting admixture estimates. Which ones should we look at?
Kitty Cooper has a good introductory presentation: Using the tools at GEDmatch to look at Ancestry Composition. She suggests starting with the MDLP Project’s World-22 calculator. Then if you are looking at a European individual, use Eurogenes K13 or K15 (or K12 if Northern European). The presentation has a few sample results for individuals with different backgrounds.
The Genealogical Musings blog also has a guide to Gedmatch admixture: Finally! A Gedmatch Admixture Guide. This includes a description of each of the calculators.
I would suggest going to Kitty Cooper’s site first for an overview, and then reading more at Genealogical Musings.
MDLP World-22
For another sample point, here are my own MDLP World-22 results. According to the other testing companies, my results are mainly British and German with small contributions from some other European areas.
These results indeed are mostly European. (Maps showing these areas can be seen or downloaded from here.) The largest component is North-East-European, centered east of but extending to Germany and other areas my family originated. Next is Atlantic_Mediterranean_Neolithic, centered on western and southern Europe. However the third is 8.70% West-Asian, centered over the Middle East. That seems off. A similar area is covered by the Near-East, which has 3.96%. Some of the other non-European areas have just small percentages, so they could be in the noise. But these two non-European areas make up 12.66%, when none of the major testing companies show significant non-European contributions.
Eurogenes EUtest V2 K15
The following are the results of my Eurogenes K15 test:
As expected for a Europe-centered test, this result indeed shows more European origin. The main exception is the 5.60% West Asian. Overall these results are better for me than MDLP World-22, but they still show significant non-European ancestry.
Explore the Gedmatch admixture tool. Just be aware that although the results of the major testing companies are pretty accurate to the continent, these Gedmatch admixture results tend to be less accurate.
Liane Jensen Research 