Welsh people: Who overlaps with them?

[Watersater79]

Why do you think the North Welsh are so distinct ?

South Wales (the Pembrokeshire clusters) are not all that less distinct than the North Welsh are from the English. I think some people forget that Wales is almost entirely 'upland'. King Offa of Mercia built a freakin' dyke to protect his subjects from being raided by those from the mountainous west. To this day, the Dyke basically forms the modern Anglo-Welsh border. Excluding the hills of Shropshire, the rest of the Anglo-Welsh border is defined by the contrast of mountains on one side (Cymru) and a more pastoral landscape on the other (Inglaterra). The Anglo-Saxons mainly settled in southern/central/eastern England owing to its fantastic, fertile farmland, but of the fewer ones who settled further west (modern day Gloucestershire/Herefordshire/Shropshire/Cheshire) I don't think there is much that would have enticed them any further west into the rather inhospitable rugged landscape of modern-day Wales. The most sparsely populated part of Wales is actually the central portion of the country. It's often remarked on as to how 'empty it feels. The rugged landscape that defines the centre was totally unattainable to sustain any kind of worthy population. Aside from that it goes without saying it acted as a bulwark against 'English' incursions.

[Grace O'Malley]

I am sort of glad you say that, hahaha, because my Gedmatch results were weird AF. I still don't understand how I got such a high showing of 'East Med' when at least 94% of my ancestry is Irish/English. How are the Irish genetically closer to the English than the Welsh and to reiterate, how unusual is that a North Welsh person would get a whoppingly high amount of 'Irish' on a DNA test?

I don't think Irish are closer to English than Welsh. I think Irish are obviously more distant than either Welsh or Scottish. Also the DNA test you are talking about is it Ancestry? I would like the see the result. Did they get some Irish, some England etc. Also I'd be interested in seeing their GCs if it was with Ancestry. Also you would need a large amount of results to see if there was a pattern. In the end all Isles populations overlap and then when you put in populations from Northwestern European they overlap with them also. There was some Irish migration to Wales also. So as I've said above I would like to see a good dna study done on Wales. Wales is the least studied area of Britain and Ireland and my information is just from studies done on those populations. A more indepth study on the Welsh might offer some surprises and it would definitely help with understanding their relationship to other populations.

[Watersater79]

I go by dna studies as they are much more accurate than using amateur calculators like Gedmatch and yes Welsh are closer to English which shouldn't surprise anyone as they share a border with England. West and Southwest Scots are closest to Irish and other Scots closest to Northern English. With the Irish it is Scots, English and then Welsh. This is from reading studies which use finescale techniques and also IBD. There is no pure populations anyway and they have all had some admixture from each other.

You can also see this here from the Irish Traveller dna study. North Wales though is definitely drifted and if you look at genetic distance even Irish are closer to English than North Wales looking at this diagram anyway.



I enjoy Gedmatch and G25 and find it useful and informative but no I don't think they trump dna studies and IBD etc. On Gedmatch and G25 after Irish I'm closest to Icelanders but I doubt that is accurate if using things like IBD and the techniques they use in dna studies.

I don't think calculators are the sole resource to use in these questions. Anyway it's most probably more complicated. IBD just shows more recent relationships and admixture is something different again.

Surely this is in a modern context because you would be hard pressed to find anyone in urban south Wales (at the very least in SE Wales) without English ancestry (due to migrations from 1850-onwards). The more distant 'South Wales' clusters no doubt belong to those in more unmixed areas from Carmarthenshire/Pembrokeshire? Other sources I see put the Scottish as being genetically closest to the English (roughly tied with the Dutch).

[Grace O'Malley]

Surely this is in a modern context because you would be hard pressed to find anyone in urban south Wales (at the very least in SE Wales) without English ancestry (due to migrations from 1850-onwards). The more distant 'South Wales' clusters no doubt belong to those in more unmixed areas from Carmarthenshire/Pembrokeshire? Other sources I see put the Scottish as being genetically closest to the English (roughly tied with the Dutch).

It would definitely depend on what populations you use. Southeast English would be closer to South Dutch/Belgians but North and Northwest English would be closer to Scots, Welsh and Irish.

[Oliver109]

It would definitely depend on what populations you use. Southeast English would be closer to South Dutch/Belgians but North and Northwest English would be closer to Scots, Welsh and Irish.

I doubt that, people from Kent etc look closer to the Welsh or even Scots than Belgians or south Dutch.

[earthtube]

I think it is interesting to read Coon’s description of the Cornish vs. the Welsh and how it matches up with modern DNA analysis. My great-grandmother came to the US from Camborne, in Cornwall, so I assumed that my DNA test would come up Welsh-like as I expected the two regions would be quite similar genetically and phenotypically due to their shared history. It turns out in fact I have quite little Welsh DNA, matching the fact I have no traceable Welsh ancestors (I’m sure someone with more experience could have predicted this), and I have rather a very strong English genetic profile with a specific Cornish emphasis. I discovered in Coon’s work descriptions of the Cornish being taller and closer to the English phenotypically. This apparently matches up with the DNA analysis done recently. I wonder why the Welsh remained so comparatively insular, retaining much of their original genetic profile and ancestral language while the Cornish became much more “Anglicized”, with the language being nearly dead (though I understand there are revival efforts happening). Despite both being Brythonic Celtic peoples pushed to the western fringe of Britain, they seem to have had such different destinies.

[Grace O'Malley]

I doubt that, people from Kent etc look closer to the Welsh or even Scots than Belgians or south Dutch.

Who said they did? Kent would most likely be in that big red SEE cluster. Kent is in Southeast England so I'm not sure why you made that comment?

[Watersater79]

I doubt that, people from Kent etc look closer to the Welsh or even Scots than Belgians or south Dutch.

There is little genetic overlap between the south Dutch/Belgians. I find the Kentish often do look more similar to the Dutch (wholesale), although the Dutch have an enormously large swathe. They are genetically far closer anyway. However, a big heavy jawline seems to be a common trait amongst both the Dutch and Welsh (although the Dutch are probably as long-faced as the English are), something which is not found to the same extent in England. Often face shape does make an impact on how one distinguishes populations as well, and there is a substantially higher % of big, round-faced types in Wales than in England.

[Watersater79]

I think it is interesting to read Coon’s description of the Cornish vs. the Welsh and how it matches up with modern DNA analysis. My great-grandmother came to the US from Camborne, in Cornwall, so I assumed that my DNA test would come up Welsh-like as I expected the two regions would be quite similar genetically and phenotypically due to their shared history. It turns out in fact I have quite little Welsh DNA, matching the fact I have no traceable Welsh ancestors (I’m sure someone with more experience could have predicted this), and I have rather a very strong English genetic profile with a specific Cornish emphasis. I discovered in Coon’s work descriptions of the Cornish being taller and closer to the English phenotypically. This apparently matches up with the DNA analysis done recently. I wonder why the Welsh remained so comparatively insular, retaining much of their original genetic profile and ancestral language while the Cornish became much more “Anglicized”, with the language being nearly dead (though I understand there are revival efforts happening). Despite both being Brythonic Celtic peoples pushed to the western fringe of Britain, they seem to have had such different destinies.

Do you know many details about the Cornish side of your family tree? On that note, geography is integral in this context. The majority of Wales is of an upland landscape; it's harder geography provided a bulwark against English incursions. Whilst Cornwall is nestled at the very end of a peninsula, it's only bulwark is the river Tamar. Cornwall also has a more fertile, softer landscape than Wales. That would have been less of an infringement on the movement of a nomadically inclined peasant across the river in (modern day) Devon than his equivalent in modern day (Herefordshire).

[Watersater79]

I don't think Irish are closer to English than Welsh. I think Irish are obviously more distant than either Welsh or Scottish. Also the DNA test you are talking about is it Ancestry? I would like the see the result. Did they get some Irish, some England etc. Also I'd be interested in seeing their GCs if it was with Ancestry. Also you would need a large amount of results to see if there was a pattern. In the end all Isles populations overlap and then when you put in populations from Northwestern European they overlap with them also. There was some Irish migration to Wales also. So as I've said above I would like to see a good dna study done on Wales. Wales is the least studied area of Britain and Ireland and my information is just from studies done on those populations. A more indepth study on the Welsh might offer some surprises and it would definitely help with understanding their relationship to other populations.

This was LivingDNA. To be exact, 63% of his ancestry was derived from North Wales, followed by 34% from Ireland and 3% from the NW England cluster. LivingDNA is apparently fantastic for those from the British Isles, but really maybe it's more 'Anglocentric'. As you said, not an enormous amount of genetic information is known on the Welsh and they are dwarved in numbers by the English. As well as the fact Wales has a smaller population than Scotland/Ireland there was far less emigration from it than the latter two, and that certainly does not just concern the 'numbers' but the 'proportional' side of things. There is undoubtedly a pitiful sample size of those with considerable Welsh ancestry in the rest of the Anglosphere which does nothing to help our desire for 'information'.