PDA

View Full Version : Could use some help; Poles with Baltic ancestry



Zzig
12-23-2023, 11:17 PM
Hey, folks. I've been trying to figure out a bit of a family mystery for a bit, but people over on Reddit don't really seem to know what they're talking about. I've seen users here do some heavy work on admixture analysis, so I figured I'd bring it up.

My grandmother, aunt, uncle, and I all did the testing from Ancestry, and all of us have Baltic ancestry, ranging from my 1% to my aunt's 14%. We don't have any known Baltic ancestors, but we haven't had much luck in building family trees.

And this is where things start to get complicated.

My grandmother's and aunt's family lived right on the southern border of historical Old Prussian territory, but never as far northeast as Podlaskie or Warmia-Masuria; Węgiersk, Golub-Dobrzyn, etc. That could be enough to explain plain Baltic, however, my aunt strangely has Finnish as well, and we have no known family from Finland or even the Nordic region. Knowing that the modern-day Balts have significant Finnic mixed in, it would seem to imply some relative came from there, maybe far in the past. This does, of course, assume the Old Prussians or related groups weren't part Finnic as well.

Bear in mind, I'm using "Finnic" loosely. I know there's some odd overlap with linguistic terms, but you know what I mean.

What do you guys think? Any help would be incredibly appreciated, and genuinely interesting. Dzięki bardzo!

Zohor
12-23-2023, 11:27 PM
Ethnic Polish get Baltic in their DNA test regularly, it doesn't have to indicate Baltic ancestry. Most of tests give Polish East Euro, Baltic, Balkan sometimes even Germanic and Finnic in DNA, the results show how your DNA could be modeled, not what ethnicity you are. If there would be many DNA matches from Baltic States then it could mean anything, in any other case ignore it

Zzig
12-23-2023, 11:38 PM
That was my original thought as well, but given that basically every testing service and calc we've used has said Baltic, I wasn't too sure. Not to mention, while it would make sense to falsely assign just Baltic to Poles, doing so with Finnish is very odd. As far as DNA matches go, we don't seem to have many from even Poland, or anywhere in EE; again, odd, because my dad was born in Poland.