Ancestry Taps Into Cultural Moments and DNA of Canadians and Americans

As Canadians celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday on July 1, experts at AncestryDNA decided to determine what really makes a Canadian? Thanks to the country’s diverse population, every single ethnic group found its way into the colourful pie that is the average Canadian person.

“We said, let’s take 70,000 people from our Canadian database and look at their DNA to find out all of the different ethnicities that make the average Canadian person,” said Julie Granka, manager of personalized genomics at AncestryDNA, told the PostMedia Network.

The survey coincided with a Canada Day weekend special (dubbed, of course, AncestryDNeh) and an ad campaign (with voiceovers stating “Celebrate the diversity within you—discover your story” and “Every Canadian has a story”) that keys into Canadians’ pride in their diversity.

As we noted in our recent Q&A with Ancestry Chief Marketing Officer Vineet Mehra,

Today [Ancestry] operates a state-of-the art R&D lab in Silicon Valley and is the largest consumer genomics company in the world, with more than 4 million genomes in its AncestryDNA database. With a marketing budget of over $100 million, Ancestry is positioning itself as the brand that helps us discover who we really are—through genomics, documents, genealogy and any other method available—and is looking to establish a solid place in the cultural moment in the process.

In tapping in to Canada’s cultural moment of its sesquicentennial celebration, Ancestry’s research team found that 46% of the average Canadian’s DNA traced back to origins in continental Europe. That’s more than the 43% of British, Irish or Scottish roots that came second-highest in the ancestry study.

The average Canadian had a high percentage of Eastern European DNA—three times that of people in the UK. In provinces such as Ontario and Quebec, there are high percentages of Jewish European DNA, reflecting the large migration of Jews to Toronto and Montreal after the Second World War.

“When we look at these results, often the next place we want to look at is why the results are the way they are,” she says. “We can make our hypotheses about how our ancestry is made, for example certain immigration and migration patterns, but ultimately more research needs to be done. Certainly, Canada’s long-standing culture of inclusion has helped shape the collective DNA of the nation.”

Participants in the study provided DNA samples via saliva to AncestryDNA’s database, where it was then studied to estimate each person’s genetic makeup. Compared to the United States, the UK and Australia/New Zealand, Canada boast the highest percentages of DNA from Finland and North Russia combined with Iran/Syria and the Middle East.

While Canada’s population may already be vast and diverse, data from Statistics Canada indicates the country is growing at an accelerating rate. By 2063, it’s estimated that the Canadian population will reach over 63 million people.

“This analysis has highlighted that the average Canadian isn’t so average after all, and that there’s an impressive amount of diversity that does exist in this country, which Canadians should be very proud of,” says Granka.

South of the border, Ancestry’s pre-Fourth of July campaign rang a slightly different tone: “241 years ago, our founders signed the Declaration of Independence. To celebrate July 4th, we brought together their descendants.”

The ad campaign is accompanied by profiles of individual descendants of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and XX:

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