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Ancestry DNA says I'm 10% French. My father never got tested, but my half sister and cousin on my father's side (who were both identified by the site) both tested as 100% European Jewish. My comparison to my mother (she's on the right) is below. 10% seems well outside the margin of error, but it seems that if my father had enough French for me to get that my sister and cousin would have some too. enter image description here

I got surprisingly little Italian and German. Maybe the French, Turkish, Spanish should have been Italian and German? Or can something negligible for a parent be non negligible for the child?

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    The two obvious possibilities: 1) The DNA analysis is just plain wrong. Being French is not a genetic condition, since people move around and intermarry. 2) As Homer said, it's a wise child that knows its own father :-)
    – jamesqf
    Sep 21, 2019 at 4:10
  • @jamesqf It seems highly unlikely that my father is not my father given that they identified my half sister and cousin. My mother and my sister's mother would have had to have been with the same man (my mother's not old enough to be my sister's mother).
    – Matt Samuel
    Sep 21, 2019 at 6:16
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because personal ancestry questions are not biology in the terms of this site.
    – David
    Sep 21, 2019 at 8:04

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These tests are not as accurate as you would think. It is pretty easy to tell what continent a person came from based on the DNA results. If you look at a Native American, Asian, European, or sub-Saharan African it is pretty easy to visually tell them apart, and the genes show the same thing. But if you look at an English, or a French, you might have a hard time based purely on their looks. The DNA is much the same.

France and England in particular have a history of lots of mixing, and as a result they could easily be confused.

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