My father's parents were both half Native American but from different tribes. My mother has no Native American claims. What percentage NA am I?

~10–20% you could end up with more or less because genetics is more complicated than simple percentages.

I would say 25%.

Grandparents: 50_50__0_0
Parents: _______50 ___0
You: _____________25

To illustrate what @ARE_you_kidding_me and @Zaku said:

On my mothers side my grandfather was 100% Irish, my grandmother 100% English, On my fathers side both grandparents were 100% English. That would make my mother 50% Irish and my father 100% English and me 25% Irish and 75% English If it worked on simple percentages.

But according to a DNA test my genetic make-up is 41% Irish, 32% English and 19% Scandinavian. The remainder is a toss-up with about 4% from Western Europe/Northern Russia and a minor amount from several other corners of the world.. Putting this simply it means that my mother got a lot more of from her dad than her mom or, more likely, my maternal grandmother had Irish in her background as well. And while we know I got the Irish from my mother, what I don’t know is what percentage of the English DNA came from her.

Simplified? Yes, but it helps put things in perspective

I’d say 50%.

@rojo Everyone always gets exactly 50% of their DNA from their mother and 50% from their father except in very rare circumstances such as an extra chomosome. That’s because an egg or sperm copies 50% of the producer’s DNA when it is formed, so when an egg and sperm join up, that’s what’s there (again, barring very unusual sperm/egg or something).

When your DNA test comes back with 41% Irish and 19% Scandinavian, that’s because you’ve switched what you were talking about, not because you’re an uneven mix. Your ancestors were not really 100% genetically “English” and “Irish”, for a few reasons. You probably don’t have DNA tests for them, and if you ran them, they’d probably show a mix of specific origins too because:

* Their ancestors may have stayed in England and Ireland as far as you know, but the people in Ireland and (especially) England have a mix of origins, whether Vikings, Normans, Romans, or other travelers, or simply that if you go back far enough, other places and times before any of those place names were used.

* The way DNA is labelled as being from a place is a statistical labeling approximation where a subset of genes are known to have been found in the population at a certain place and time, to aid in estimating where a sample’s ancestors may likely have been from based on statistics. It’s not like each piece of DNA can be labeled as a specific nationality. A lot of genes don’t have a known specific time/place association.

^^^ What @Zaku

I say I’m of English and Scottish ancestry (though there’s some French and Spanish background in there as well), because that’s where my more recent ancestors came to America from and what my family names reflect. But I also know, from researching my family line, that in the more distant past both mom’s and dad’s families were founded by folks who came from Scandinavia during the Viking era and settled in the British Isles.

@Zaku As I said, a very simplified explanation and I agree with you but thank you for your input..

When Rick and I first started dating there was something about his face that made me curious. He had very high cheekbones. He’s obviously white but there was some thing else there, something that neither of his brothers showed. Both of his brothers look 100% European. Their paternal grandfather immigrated from Greece.
About a month later his daughter mentioned to me that Rick’s maternal great grandmother was a Cherokee. It all clicked then. And it’s more than just his cheekbones. One of my daughter’s boyfriends said he looks like Mr. Miyagi. He was spot on, too!
It is so interesting how genes present so differently from one sibling to another.
I have a sister who is constantly asked if she is American Indian. Pretty sure that is the Indonesian genes from our Dutch ancestors showing.
But my other sister and I are very white, with blue eyes.
My first husband was 1/8th Indonesian.
My grandkids are a beautiful mess! None of them match, not even the twins!

@Dutchess_III

Yup. I had a great-grandfather who many folks, including most of the family, assumed has American Indian – likely because of his dark hair, darker eyes and slightly swarthy complexion, and the fact that he had been born in Texas, near the Indian Territory and had been orphaned and “taken in” by a white family. But researching our family tree I found nothing to suggest Native ancestry, and found out that he wasn’t taken in so much as his father died when he was a year old, his mother remarried, then she died when he was 10 and he remained with his stepfather’s family and that his English last name was, in fact, the name he was born with and not an adopted name.

Granted, that’s not to say absolutely that there was no native ancestry there, just that I could find no sign of such (and dark hair, eyes, etc aren’t exactly unheard of among British peoples).

It’s just fascinating.

My father doesn’t know much about his side. He was born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas. There are some rumors that the family owned slaves at one time, in Virginia some place.
Once, at a family reunion, I saw a very old picture of a long-gone ancestor and blurted out “She looks black!”
The room went dead silent.
Geez people.

@Dutchess_III I’m part Cherokee as well. Perhaps Rick and I are related…

Possibly! We’re all related somewhere back down then line.

Mom swore up and down we were a good percentage cherokee. DNA test shows… 0%

I meant more than any normally scant amount.