Les Gaulois (2025)

Although of less importance in our research on the making of the Haitian people, we do find the flawed but attempted breakdown of France and western Europe intriguing in Ancestry's 2025 Fall Update. Our own "French" ancestry, estimated at 2% in the previous update, was broken apart into two separate categories: Brittany, France and Acadia (French Canada). We also saw Quebec in our updated results, but since it is attributed to our Hispanic parent's side, we find it more likely to be a result of the update's horrible results for people with roots in the Iberian Peninsula. 

In other words, our "France" results are basically the same. Acadia is basically "France" but Ancestry, to its credit, did not assign any French Canada regions to our Haitian parent. Our ""Northern Wales and North West England" also hails from our Haitian parent, probably a misreading of the minor French ancestry in Haitians. 

Intriguingly, for our Haitian parent, their British region was Southern Wales. If, however, 23andme is accurate, which certainly seems to be the case compared to Ancestry, our Haitian parent's European ancestry leans more heavily toward France and Belgium, the southern Dutch, and Rhinelanders. Since there is undoubtedly genetic overlap between peoples in France and Belgium as well as France and Germany, our guess is our Haitian side's European ancestry is probably derived from people from northern France who had some genetic overlap with these neighboring regions.

From our own "genealogical research" into Saint Domingue's free people of color in Bainet, we the French ancestry was mainly from the northern regions of France. This seems supported by 23andme assigning only small amounts of Spanish and Basque ancestry to our Haitian parent. Ancestry, on the other hand, assigns a mostly Spain ancestry for our Haitian parent's European admixture. Undoubtedly, 23andme is more reliable here, particularly for distinguishing between France and Spain. However, the "Brittany, France" region might be significant in that both of us inherited this region, perhaps pointing to northwestern France as the region from which the European ancestors of Bainet's free people of color often hailed from. We assume our Haitian parent's 0.2% Irish ancestry according to 23andme as well as their Southern Wales estimate via Ancestry is pinpointing to northwestern France, too.