Madeira and the Azores

[Atlas]

I'm curious to find out if anyone knows much about the settlement of both Madeira and the Azores- I understand that the population is Portuguese, but from where in Portugal did they come? I have some ancestry from these islands, and my distant relatives from there often have some minor degree of North African and West African (Senegambian) ancestry on 23andMe. I'd also like to understand a bit more about the North African heritage there, as this is the part I know least about, though I know that some distant North African heritage is very common in Iberians.

[Sailgios]

They came from all over the country, but since the NW was by far the most densely populated part of the country this is where most settlers came from. North African ancestry is just something that's part of Iberian structure, and it's higher in the west (Portugal and Galicia) and lower in the east.

[RCO]

That's a good question, I have conventional genealogy from both Azores and Madeira and they were very important in Colonial Brazil just like the Minho. My mtDNA lineage is specific from Ilha Terceira and we have a match from Lisbon and more distant matches from other Iberian regions, my Y-DNA lineage is specific from the Minho and I also have good matches in the Azores, YFull estimated both (mtDNA and Y-DNA) with a genetic distance around 1000 years. Azores and Madeira were representative of Colonists from Portugal, mainly from Northern Portugal, just like big Brazil but also from other parts of Europe and even a very small African contribution that the haplogroups can easily show in the Atlantic matches.

[Atlas]

They came from all over the country, but since the NW was by far the most densely populated part of the country this is where most settlers came from. North African ancestry is just something that's part of Iberian structure, and it's higher in the west (Portugal and Galicia) and lower in the east.

It makes sense that they came largely from the more populated areas of Portugal then. Is the North African ancestry especially distant, or is it more recent from e.g. Guanches and interactions in the last 1000 years?

In my original 23andMe results some years ago, I had about ~7% Southern European (more than half of which was in the broad category or Italian then) with >1% WANA, so I did think that my Madeiran and Azorean ancestors might have just been more WANA shifted than most of the Iberian samples. I often get a lot of WANA as well on G25 anyway, but I also come from a very mixed background so it can be difficult to interpret. It's not easy to tease apart the Iberian from my British ancestry, and they've flipped proportions throughout all the 23andMe updates lol.

[Atlas]

That's a good question, I have conventional genealogy from both Azores and Madeira and they were very important in Colonial Brazil just like the Minho. My mtDNA lineage is specific from Ilha Terceira and we have a match from Lisbon and more distant matches from other Iberian regions, my Y-DNA lineage is specific from the Minho and I also have good matches in the Azores, YFull estimated both (mtDNA and Y-DNA) with a genetic distance around 1000 years. Azores and Madeira were representative of Colonists from Portugal, mainly from Northern Portugal, just like big Brazil but also from other parts of Europe and even a very small African contribution that the haplogroups can easily show in the Atlantic matches.

That's interesting, I think I also had some Recent Ancestor Locations/Regions in South America during one of the previous 23andMe updates, as one of my siblings does now. My family has distant relatives with Portuguese heritage in Brazil and other Latin American countries as well, which is understandable from what you've said.

[Sailgios]

They came from all over the country, but since the NW was by far the most densely populated part of the country this is where most settlers came from. North African ancestry is just something that's part of Iberian structure, and it's higher in the west (Portugal and Galicia) and lower in the east.

It makes sense that they came largely from the more populated areas of Portugal then. Is the North African ancestry especially distant, or is it more recent from e.g. Guanches and interactions in the last 1000 years?

In my original 23andMe results some years ago, I had about ~7% Southern European (more than half of which was in the broad category or Italian then) with >1% WANA, so I did think that my Madeiran and Azorean ancestors might have just been more WANA shifted than most of the Iberian samples. I often get a lot of WANA as well on G25 anyway, but I also come from a very mixed background so it can be difficult to interpret. It's not easy to tease apart the Iberian from my British ancestry, and they've flipped proportions throughout all the 23andMe updates lol.

There's no absolute answer, North African ancestry starts to appear in southern Iberia during the Orientalising Period (locally called First (early) Iron Age) but no one really knows if that had a lasting impact or whether it was a localised dead end that only happened in Punic sites, or others linked with them.

Whatever the case by the Roman Imperial period it seems to have been widespread at least in Mediterranean Spain and southern Portugal, and in higher amounts than we see today, but then again most modern Iberians seem to descend largely from folks who lived further north. Naturally medieval contributions are very likely to have happened as well, so my guess is that what we see is a consequence of multiple periods of contact that happened over a few millennia that stabilised/homogenised in the last ~1000 years in the north/west and in the last 700-500 elsewhere. Actual Guanche ancestry shouldn't really exist outside the Canarias and people descended from them, which most continental Iberians are not.

[Albruic]

Does anyone have any genetic info on the Belgian settlements in Azores? It looks like it started with a guy named Willem van der Haegen https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_van_der_Haegen