Ancestry Genetic Communities

[rsel]

Has anybody else now got access to the new Ancestry Genetic Communities feature ? What do people think about it ?

I have it on my 3 tests, and I would like to congratulate Ancestry on spending so much effort to develop a new feature that does nothing to improve my chances of linking my DNA matches, and instead tells me what I already knew (i.e. my family basically comes from Southern England)....LOL

Richard

[DevonCruwys]

I wrote a blog post about the new Genetic Communities feature here:

https://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/ancestrydnas-new-genetic-communities.html

[Seaton Smithy]

I have been placed the "Scots in Northeast and Central Scotland" sub-community.  This seems reasonable as my father was born in Angus and his father was born in Aberdeenshire.  I have been assessed as "Likely" (60%) to be a member of that community which seems a little conservative.

My father's half 1st cousin whose ancestry is entirely Aberdeenshire has been placed in the higher level "Scots" community and not the "Scots in Northeast and Central Scotland" sub-community.  He is, however, Very Likely (95%) to be in that broader community.

Something I found odd is I have three 4th cousins and one 4C1R DNA matches who all descend from the same sister of my great-great-grandmother.  Only one of the 4th cousins and the 4C1R are among my 29 community matches.  I would have thought they'd all be there.

A positive is that my mystery 118 cM match with no tree who won't answer emails is in my 29 community matches, suggesting she is - as I suspected - more likely to be on my father's side.

I don't have any communities for my mother's side, but that is no surprise as there is a broad mix from different parts of Ireland, England and 1 Scotsman that are all further back from the source (2x to 5x great-grandparents).

[jnu]

I completely agree with Richards comment 

[shellyesq]

The only one I got was Early Settlers of the Ohio River Valley, Indiana, Illinois & Iowa.  Since both sides for me come from Ohio/West Virginia going back to at least the mid-1800's, it's not terribly revealing for me.

My husband got Jews in the Russian Empire, Early Settlers of New York, and Early Settlers of the Northeast, all of which seem to fit the paper trail.  I've pretty much hit a brick wall on his branch that comes from Russia/Belarus and I don't expect it would be easy to get further information from there without a big investment of time/money, so I like that this allows me to narrow down his matches that are also in this group.  Maybe one of them knows something that would help.