The Hungarian Melting Pot

Mom's Family Tree DNA Ethnicity Map

 Since there almost 50x more American Hungarians than Canadian Hungarians, I thought an Ancestry.com DNA test for my Mom might ferret out a few genetic cousins. It was a long shot that I would learn anything useful from them, though. The closest possible American Hungarians would be at least 3rd cousins and most likely they would be even more distant.

Since online Hungarian genealogy is not particularly easy, prior to 1890 there are only baptismal records online, I've seen very few Hungarian family trees that stretched more than a generation back in the old country. Even my tree is highly speculative further than my 2nd great grandparents.

Sure enough, there were only a thimbleful of 4th or 5th cousins and they had scanty family trees, at least the Hungarian part, that were impossible to match with mine. I actually did better with 23andMe, where I found the granddaughter of John Daku, who left Kipling for the U.S. about 60 years ago.

So the most interesting result from the DNA test was Ancestry's analysis of my mother's ethnicity. There was the added bonous of being able to transfer the DNA to another company, Family Tree DNA, for their analysis as well.

My Mom is a 3rd generation Canadian but all her grandparents were Hungarian so her ethnicity estimate should be 100% Hungarian. However, DNA estimates are not that precise when it comes to Eastern European countries. In this particular instance, Hungary has been overrun by Cumans, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, and Austrian Germans. As part of the ethnically diverse Austrian Empire, the borders of Hungary at times included much of the Balkans, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. 

When I tested my Mom's DNA at 23andMe a couple years ago, they placed her at 38.6% Eastern European and 36% Balkan. My uncle Ben had very similar percentages. The Ancestry.com results seems to combine these two groups in Europe East, where it gives my mother 76% ethnicity. 

The Family Tree DNA results (no link available) only show 58% in this broad Eastern European category and then gets a little bit wild with its predictions on the remaining DNA.

​Ancestry and 23andMe are in pretty close agreement with their ethnicity estimate, with only some minor differences, such as Ancestry suggesting a bit more of the Cuman/Mongolian DNA and a hint of Ashkenazi.  Also, while 23andMe lumped a lot into the broadly European category, Ancestry guessed more, suggesting that my Mom has some ethnicity from Spain or Portugal. While this is *possible*, the Hapsburg family which ruled Austria also ruled Spain for a time, it's quite a stretch.

​The real outlier is Family Tree, which claims a large amount of British and Middle Eastern DNA. Given what we know about my Mom's ancestry, Family Tree is very likely wrong here while Ancestry and 23andMe are more on target.

In the chart below, I align the percentages in roughly analogous categories and including my Uncle Ben's 23andMe estimate for reference. Rounding means that each row many not add up to exactly 100.

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Test	East Europe	South Europe	North & West Europe	Broadly European	Middle East	Asia	Jewish
Ancestry	76	8	10	-	4	1	1
23andMe	66.9	7.7	8.3	15.3	1	1	-
FTDNA	58	-	26	-	14	1	-
Uncle Ben	65.4	6.2	9.3	18.2	-	1	-