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Thursday, 4 July 2019

Updated genetic communities at AncestryDNA

On 19th June AncestryDNA rolled out over 225 new communities for people with ancestry from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and "French North America". These new communities are in addition to the 92 regions in Ireland that were introduced in January this year.  If you have taken a DNA test with AncestryDNA and have ancestry from any of these places you will probably find that your results have been updated and that the regions are now more granular.


I previously had just one genetic community for Southern England with South-East England as a sub-region. I am now in the Central Southern England community and have two sub-regions: (1) Dorset and Somerset; (2) Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and West Oxfordshire. Here is a screenshot of my updated results.


My dad previously had two communities: (1) Southern England with East Anglia and Essex as a sub-region; (2) Wales and the West Midlands. My dad now has three communities: Central Southern England, Devon and Cornwall, and East of England. He does not yet have any sub-regions. Below is a screenshot of his updated results. Note that although Norway and Sweden appear in his "ethnicity" estimate he does not have any documented ancestry from either country in the last 400 years or so. I fully expect Norway and Sweden to disappear from his estimate the next time Ancestry update their reference populations.


My mum was previously in two communities: (1) Southern England with South East England as a sub-region; (2) Wales and the West Midlands. She is now in the Central Southern England community and has Dorset and Somerset has a sub-region. See below for a screenshot of my mum's updated results.


Previously it was possible to access the confidence score for each community/region. I can no longer find a way to do this. I hope this feature will eventually be restored. We also used to have the ability to filter matches by region. This option has now disappeared but I understand that there are plans to restore it.

For my family the results haven't changed too drastically but the new communities do provide a marginal improvement on the previous results and are a good reflection of some of our predominant ancestries. As more people test and more people are added to the genetic networks that form the basis of the communities we can expect the results to change over time. I imagine that it will eventually possible to break the results down into more individual counties.

Have you had some updated communities? What do you think of your results?

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3 comments:

  1. My mother's mother was born in Dublin, father's name Halpin, an old Irish name. I have multiple other connections to Ireland, although their more distant origins may have been British/Scottish. And yet the Irish communities say I have no connection.
    My mother's father's family were from western Scotland and this community is acknowledged.

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  2. Not all of your ancestry is necessarily reflected in the communities. The feature only seems to pick up the predominant ancestry. There was a lot of mixing between Northern Ireland and Scotland.

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  3. I am a 5th generation Australian with a lot of DNA matches all in australia, but nothing on the maps.

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