Not Hither, Not Farther

 

DNA testing may have opened our eyes to multiple ancestral possibilities, but genetic genealogy's tools still have some growing room. As I explore my paternal roots, based on the tried and true paper trail relied upon by traditional genealogy, I've discovered that at least my paternal grandfather's mother's roots—Zegarski and Wojtaś families—were documented in villages in northern Poland apparently considered to be part of Pomerania. More to the point, their villages were located in a specific subregion called Pomeralia—not Hither, and not Farther Pomerania, as one website warns me—containing a specific ethnocultural location called Kociewie.

Yet, when I went looking for any mention of those ethnic regions in my DNA test results, despite recent updates at some companies, I don't quite see any mention to that fine a degree of specificity. Yesterday, we looked at ethnicity updates at Ancestry.com, where it seems we are now closer to such a possibility. But what about MyHeritage?

When puzzling over my Polish heritage, I prefer relying on DNA matches I've found at MyHeritage, given their worldwide reach. Indeed, I already have found several European DNA cousins with Polish roots through that company. But is there any mention of further ethnicity refinement to their DNA results, based on this year's update?

The MyHeritage update had been long in coming. They beta-tested the release of an update in 2024 to a select sampling of current customers, but felt the response merited more work on their part. The update has apparently been live since earlier this year, but was offered in an opt-in format. 

While the revision represents a reference set of seventy nine ethnicities worldwide versus forty two in the previous version, my report still amassed my paternal results into general regions, such as East European, Germanic, and Baltic. Only by independently researching the broad history of the Pomeranian and Pomeralian subsets do I see migration patterns over centuries which may explain my minor percentages attributed to, for instance, Danish or Balkan roots.

There is a second subset of ethnicity discussions at MyHeritage which I looked to in hopes of seeing them drill down deeper into my family history. That separate tab is labeled "Ancient Origins." From that tab, I can select points on a timeline: Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman Era, and Middle Ages. Yet, examining the results by selecting "Middle Ages," I still am left with broad categories: Germanic and Slavic.

True, as MyHeritage noted in the readout for their ethnicity estimates section, not all ethnic roots in my own heritage will be passed down through multiple generations to me. Inheritance patterns vary, due to the randomness of recombination from generation to generation. Then, too, a significant aspect of each update depends on the reference panels used in each revision.

The greater the specificity, the larger the number of assembled reference populations, the more the DNA company can zero in on smaller regional variations representing the inheritance of these older groups, such as the original West Slavic tribe known as Pomeranians, who settled by the Baltic Sea in that northern region of what is now Poland in the fifth to sixth century.

Perhaps that will be a long wait for me, but at least I now have the paper trail to confirm that geographic origin in my paternal heritage.