Help with Ancestry DNA Communities

[littlebrownduck01]

Hi there

Can someone help me understand Ancestry's DNA Communities?

I've recently been added to the Northwest Poland community. Apparently, myself and 206k other members are all linked through shared ancestors from this region. They've also given me one cousin (30cm match with no mutual shared cousins) who links with this group. This person has a tree with 10 people.

All this was a complete surprise as I have no known paper trail to Poland.

Two questions then

1 - how can I be in the Northwest Poland community when my regional DNA breakdown doesn't cover this region (I'm UK, Ireland, Norway and Northwest Europe)? Surely I should have a region that matches Poland if I'm in a Polish community?

2 - how does being in this community help? If I have unknown Polish ancestry then that's potentially really exciting but there seems no way to find out who these potential ancestors were. If Ancestry has figured out that we all relate to someone who comes from there, then why isn't that info accessible? My tree doesn't extend back to Poland, and neither does anyone else I can find researching the same names. Nor does the one shared match they gave me in this community. Am I missing something obvious?

Hence, I'm left excited at a potentially new line of investigation, but confused what I can do, if anything, to find out more.

Can anyone help?
Thanks

[Gadget]

This paper covers Ancestry's communities.

https://www.ancestry.com/cs/dna-help/communities/whitepaper

I had a similar reaction as you when I found that one of my 'communities' was Ohio, Indiana & Eastern Kentucky Settlers. However, on further examination, I found that they found that I had matches with others who may have had ancestors way back who settled there
.

You, and all the members of this community, are linked through shared ancestors. You probably have family who lived in this area for years—and maybe still do.

Gadget

[Gadget]

One way it might help is to check the people examples underneath the detailed explanation. I had a small group to  whom I couldn't find a definite link.Luckily I'd colour coded them. When I checked one of the matches that was listed,  he was in this group. I then re-examined this group and found that, in the few of those that had 'decent' trees, they had ancestors born in Wales but had died in that community area.

[littlebrownduck01]

Thanks for the white paper link, that is helpful.
It’s all very technical and difficult for the non expert to follow but I get some of it.

I think I understand now about descending from a small population in a local area. I can follow the stuff about clustering etc. But I’m still not sure about why Poland doesn’t show as one of my regions.

Unfortunately in my case they’ve only given me a single match in this community group, who doesn’t link with anyone else and who has a tiny tree. So I’m not sure what I can do to match either them, or myself to this community. It’s quite frustrating.

But the link to the paper was appreciated. I probably need to go and re-read it 20 times and try and get my head round it a bit more.

[Lanc81]

My father has exactly the same problem. None of his communities show in his ethnicity breakdown except Lancashire.
His known ancestry from the past 200 years is mainly from Lancashire with a bit of Irish and Scottish and Romany Gypsy.
 My father's communities are Lancashire and Isle of Man, Hungary and Slovakia (specifically Kosice and North Hungary), South Eastern Poland and now he's got South Western Italy as well!! The time frames the communities have is between 1700- 1975.We have no known Hungarian or Italian ancestry. Ancestry must be making mistakes with these Communities.
 I posted a similar message a few months ago.I'm still very confused 😕 😐

[Gadget]

Lanc, have you read the paper that I referred to in Reply #1.   It may help.

[littlebrownduck01]

I guess I’m not the only one struggling with this. Has anyone else actually found the communities feature useful?

[Lanc81]

Just read it, thank you for posting  .
I think I get the jist some of it... I need a dummies guide  .
Basically I want to know if it's saying you have Italian or Hungarian ancestry from these regions or you just have lots of dna matches who have ancestry in these places. If that makes sense I'm confusing myself now. Most of my fathers matches who share these Communities don't have trees and don't have shared matches.

[Gadget]

With the communities that have been allocated to me, 4 have ancestors born in the places mentioned.  The US one that I mentioned earlier was where  some of my ancestors' kin had been born in UK but went to the States. They settled  there, had offspring  and died there. I have identified some of their descendants.