How Irish are we? Part One, the Wrights

With St. Patrick's Day coming up, I thought it would be fun to work on the question: How Irish are we? Thinking about it, there are really three ways to answer the question,  Genealogically, genetically, and spiritually.  I am not sure how to quantify the spiritual question, so will leave that for you to decide.
Genealogically, I have a lot of information on the different immigrants to America and there country of origin.  In some cases I can even say the city/town of origin.  Where I don't have the details I have made assumptions based on the surname, location and date of the last know ancestor.  I am sure I could be off, but what I show should be pretty close. I am starting at my grandparent's generation to be relevant to more of the cousins.

I'll add what genetic information we have were we can make a comparison.  You should note that being labeled Irish genetically, at least with the Ancestry.com test, actually covers Ireland, Scotland and Northern England.  So it will not be an apples to apples comparison.

Lets start with the Smiths.  This is my mother's mother's, Florence Edna Smith, branch of the family.

David Sanders Wright	Florence Edna Smith
Mother
Writer

We don't have to go very far to find the Irish connection here.  She ends up being 50% Irish and 50% English.  Her Grandfather and Grandmother where both born in Ireland.  The family story say they came County Mayo, but I don't have any of that documentation yet.  I've done some interesting research on the McCann family that I'll share in another post, but for now, here is a quick tree.

John McCann	Mary Clasby
Catherine Ellen McCann
Florence Edna Smith

As a quick note, though I don't know the exact date, both John McCann's family and Mary Clasby appear to have immigrated in the 1850's.  This was likely due to the Irish potato famine.

Now, the Wrights:  My grandfather, David Sanders Wright doesn't appear to have any Irish blood.  Tracing the tree back, he is 98% English, 0.8% Welch, 0.8% Scottish, and 0.4% Dutch.  The Dutch connection are from our pilgrim ancestors.

If we carry this information down to my Mother, she ends up being:

• 25% Irish
• 74% English
• 0.4% Welch
• 0.4% Scottish
• 0.2% Dutch

This is where we can start to compare the genetics.  Both my Mother and her brother have had their DNA tested threw Ancestry.com.  The results are below:

	Mother	Uncle
Europe West	68%	56%
Ireland	21%	31%
Scandinavia	6%	1%
Great Britain	3%	11%
Iberian Peninsula	1%	Less then 1%
Finland/Northwest Russia	Less then 1%	0%
Italy/Greece	Less then 1%	0%

It is interesting that my Uncle's percent Irish is considerably more then my Mother's.  It actually comes out more then the predicted amount from our know ancestry.   This can be explained by a number of different factors.

• There is a error calculation of plus or minus 18% on the results of the test.  which could move it into the predicted range.
• Some of the English ancestors are showing up as Irish.
• My Uncle inherited more of the McCann DNA then my Mother did.
• I have misidentified some of our ancestors as English when they should have been Irish.

As a side note, the Europe West and Great Britain results likely represent ancestors from southern England as well as the Dutch.  The Scandinavian and Finland/Northwest Russia represent viking settlement in England, and the Iberian Peninsula and Italy/Greece may represent the Roman colonization.

So, that's what I have come up with for the Wright and Smith components of the family.  I plan on having the next post cover the Putnam and Connelly side of the ancestry.  I will follow that with information on my wife's family.