Ancestry Updates Ethnicity Estimates with Increased Accuracy

Ancestry is the toast of the internet right now with its updated ethnicity estimates. This is just what the DNA company needed as its market shares were sliding in competition with others who were offering higher resolution and increased accuracy as far as “ethnicity estimates” are concerned. For one, Ancestry’s ‘DNA Story’ has eliminated some of those pesky, amorphous terms like “Western European” or “Eastern European” and reanalyzed them into more meaningful units for its consumers: terms like ‘Baltic Nations’ or ‘England and Wales’ or ‘Ireland and Scotland.’

I’m pleased as punch as my ethnicity estimates on Ancestry are much more aligned to my own genealogical reality. When you log in for the first time, Ancestry will ask you to take a short survey, I would highly encourage you to TAKE THE SURVEY and not bypass it in a fit of hasty excitement; any bit of feedback Ancestry can get will only benefit you, the user, in the end. I took the survey, in fact, I took two!

The reason all of these upgrades have been possible is directly linked to another article I wrote on the subject, Size Does Matter When Comparing DNA Testing Companies, where I exposed the fact that DNA accuracy is directly proportionate to a company’s sample size. The larger the sample size, the more accurate and at the time Ancestry had the smallest sample size of all DNA testing companies. Ancestry is claiming that they “now have 13,000 additional reference samples” bringing their grand total to 16,000 – or, more accurately 16,638!

No matter what shortcomings Ancestry has been chided for, I’ve always praised them for their transparency. To me they have always been forthcoming about their methodology and how they go about their business of treating our DNA and, more to the point, obtaining our ethnicity estimates. In addition to these super cool updates, Ancestry has also rewritten its FAQs – everyone should read them.

These new FAQs do explain WHY and HOW your new results might look different from your old ones. In essence, your results are technically still the same (as your DNA does not change), it’s just that the labels which Ancestry is applying to those results are much more accurate and clearly defined. By that I mean that Ancestry is now breaking down those broad-brushed regions such as “Scandinavia” into more accurate and relevant ones such as “Norway” and “Sweden.”

One of the primary reasons that Ancestry has gone to such lengths to update its ethnicity estimates is because people, like me, were confused or discouraged by their previous results. This is especially true when it came to those annoying trace results, those strange <1% regions that connected your ancient DNA to some far-flung region across the globe. Maybe that made sense 20,000 years ago in terms of prehistoric migrations, but not today!

The 2 primary changes one might expect to encounter are: (1) regions disappearing; or, (2) regions redrawn. When regions, especially trace results or low-confidence regions, have been eliminated that’s kind of a good thing. Ancestry terms it as regions that “drop off” your estimate. Those minuscule results are nothing but detritus or background noise, echoes of a distant, even Neanderthal, past.

The second change that you might expect are regions redrawn. Ancestry explains this as the incongruity between historical regions and modern political boundaries. This is absolutely essential for anyone interpreting their DNA, as you cannot be ignorant of history itself while trying to explain your own family history. ‘History’ is necessarily a part of ‘family history’ is what I’m saying.

As we know, political boundaries have changed radically over time and Ancestry’s new inclusion of 380 regions offers us a level of specificity that we did not enjoy with its previous algorithms. A great example is the ‘Scandinavian’ DNA that so many users seemed to have had tacked onto their ethnicity results. For some, they actually were either Norwegian or Swedish; for the rest of us, myself included, those markers were probably indicative of some Viking invasion that happened during between the 9th and 14th centuries somewhere across Europe. Or the fact that Sweden was a major player in European imperial politics during the 19th century.

Fear not, you can still view your old updates simply by clicking a few links. Go to your new ethnicity estimates results box and go to the upper right-hand corner where it says “Updates” with the ‘info’ sign next to it. Click on that and then go to the very bottom of that dialogue box and hit “show previous estimate.” Easy, but you won’t want to look at that too long as your new results are probably much prettier to look at now.

All told, Ancestry.com has added an additional 13,000 reference samples across 380 new regions added against which our DNA is now being tested. This is an incredible breakthrough as initially Ancestry only had a reference panel of 3,000 people, the lowest in the industry. With this additional 13,000 reference samples, Ancestry now has a total of 16,638 which would now make them the industry leader!