New AncestryDNA communities bring people and places together

Digital illustration of a dna

Ancestry, the family history and consumer genomics website, has launched an update to its AncestryDNA service, adding county-level detail to UK ethnicity results and bringing the total number of UK communities to 73.

One of many innovations available to users as part of the AncestryDNA test, communities take your DNA story one step further, connecting you to the places and people that have shaped your personal family history.

The new updated UK communities are part of a wider global update to AncestryDNA, which from today now offers over 225 communities to help our members who have ties to France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, empowering them to unlock even more discoveries about their family history.

AncestryDNA ethnicity results are based on 1000 years of migration within a user’s DNA and are broken down into regions across the world. Ancestry’s Genetic Communities™technology is based on macro-international analysis, used to discover specific groups of people that a user is genetically connected to, the places that those ancestors called home and the migration paths they followed. These communities use rich data from the past 300 years, and in the UK, offers detailed county level results, from Staffordshire to Somerset.

Communities are particularly valuable for family historians as they can be cross referenced with Ancestry’s historical records to provide even more detail such as ancestral home addresses, schools their ancestors attended and even their place of work – helping to paint a full picture of the connection a user may have to that specific county and community.

The 55 new UK communities will automatically be added to the results of existing AncestryDNA customers. These will not change the ethnicity results of users.

The advancements have been made possible by the combination of Ancestry’s industry-leading 15 million DNA users, new analysis techniques developed by Ancestry’s DNA team and the world’s largest online collection of family history records and trees at www.ancestry.co.uk.

Russell James,family historian and DNA expert at Ancestry, commented,“Communities are an incredibly valuable tool for those wanting to discover more about their DNA and family history. The new communities launching today will allow people whose lineage stems from Great Britain to see the county where their family lived and discover evidence and detail of this in historical records. Blending DNA with traditional records in this way is an important step forward for genealogists and we will continue working to offer more detailed results and helping our customers make meaningful discoveries about the people that came before them and the places they lived.”