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Ancestry's DNA customers received ethnicity updates last month. Did anyone see any significant changes?
My changes were all minor, and in the wrong direction. They removed a few points from England, Scotland, and Germany, where I have documented ancestors, and stuck them in Norway, where I have no documented ancestors. Norway jumped from 4% to 9%.
DNA Communities remained the same and show only my paternal side. Accurate, but in overlapping and redundant regions.
No, the changes were so minor it's not even really worth talking about. At this point, I feel like they're only doing it because every year the update generates a buzz. I'm more interested to see whether at some point, my dad will finally get a Genetic Community in Sicily so I'd rather see GC updates now.
Ditto for me too. Negligible changes - reshuffling the numbers and the ethnicities to = 100%
I do however like the matches by maternal/paternal. I like to compare my matches and an elderly family member's matches.
Based on what I know about my ancestry, I'm inclined to believe that I'm higher on the Ghana/Ivory Coast range.
At this point I'm updating these threads to have an easy record of what my estimates used to be. For the September 2023 update, I have the following breakdown:
Norway was added to my ancestry, shifting from undefined northern European. Most of that is on my father's side (which is expected - likely representing Viking ancestors from his heritage in Scotland and England) but interestingly it also shows up on my mother's side. The rest of her side is Ashkenazi Jewish, more specifically Belarus and Ukraine. That was a full 51.2% of my genetic makeup but now is down to 48.1%. Curious how the Norwegian came into that mix!
Not much of a change. Minor shuffling around a very slight bit with nothing new added.
Checked my son, mother and uncle (my dad's brother) and the same - minor shuffling but nothing new added.
Same here. I am a bit less Scottish and more English. A few trace regions were eliminated in favor of Ireland (which is more accurate.) Jewish did not change.
Ancestry's DNA customers received ethnicity updates last month. Did anyone see any significant changes?
My changes were all minor, and in the wrong direction. They removed a few points from England, Scotland, and Germany, where I have documented ancestors, and stuck them in Norway, where I have no documented ancestors. Norway jumped from 4% to 9%.
DNA Communities remained the same and show only my paternal side. Accurate, but in overlapping and redundant regions.
I saw no significant change, it is still different than my 23 and Me breakdown, missing some locations.
The new regions advertised for this update were in Asia and Eastern Europe, so other regions apparently saw little change.
With such minor changes, maybe we are nearing the end of the road for ethnicity updates, except maybe for less-tested regions where they might improve in the future. There haven't been significant changes to reports at 23andMe, MyHeritage, or FTDNA in some time, IIRC.
At least for northern European DNA, there may be too much similarity and genetic mixing to be able to say accurately what the breakdown is by country. Out of the 10 ethnicities in my report, 9 of them have a range that goes down to 0%. My range for England and NW Europe is 50%-70%. For Germanic, their estimate is 10%, but their range is 0%-36%. It should be around 25% so at least their range is correct! There must be some algorithm that looks at the ranges and then assigns arbitrary "estimates" so that they add up to 100%.
Mine did change. My Italian went down and my Greek DOUBLED. England and NW Europe also went down and my Scotland Wales DOUBLED. Ok, I can understand this. Still part of the British Isles.
It has really surprised me how my Greek has been increasing over these updates. In my research I have never found any ancestors from Greece; Italy on my Mom's side.
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