RootsChat.Com

The Communities that you are looking at are derived from more recent locations of your ancestors and those of your DNA matches as found to be common between your and their family trees. As with Thrulines, they are only as relevant as the accuracy of those trees and subject to being skewed by situations such as the wholesale copying of trees or parts thereof without any checking by various users, unfortunately not uncommon on Ancestry and elsewhere.

If you have a fairly well developed tree, and a good number of DNA matches allocated to your paternal side by Sideview, I would have expected the paternal communities to at least show something.

In that respect, it does seem that it could be a glitch - not unknown - and may resolve itself in time.

Worth reading some of the previous posts on here.

Communities are nothing to do with ethnicity regions determined through laboratory examination of your DNA. They are derived in a similar way to Thrulines by Ancestry trawling through your tree and those of your DNA matches, looking for common areas of residence shown in the trees of autosomally related ancestors.

Ethnicity is derived from laboratory examination of your DNA. However it is important to recognise that the percentages shown are ESTIMATES and subject to constant reassessment and verification.

A particular percentage cannot be used to determine how many generations back a particular ethnicity is linked. That's not how it works. It is completely different to autosomal relative matching and less precise.

Ancestry say that ethnicity estimates are indicative of ethnicity derived between 500 to several thousand years ago, so generally well beyond the reach of autosomal matching and documentary research into ancestral lineage.

The "headline" ethnicity percentages shown are an overall estimate representing a range of probability for each region. If you drill down into each regional estimate in your results you will find that the actual range may vary widely from the headline percentage shown. For a 3% headline estimate and similar low figures for instance, it isn't at all unusual for the actual estimated range to include a probability of 0% - in other words the possibility that there may actually be no relationship to that region at all.

Yes, as I understand it, the situation is as ikas says.

The segments that your match has in common with you don't contain enough information for Sideview to make a determination based on what it currently knows about the segments of your DNA already assigned to one side or the other, as the information available from that match is not sufficiently in common with your existing assigned matches. If you are certain about the parental side of the match, you can manually assign it and that should help improve the Sideview algorithm for you going forward.

As he wasn't a full time policeman there may not be any records.   

There may not be even if he was full time. But you won't know unless you ask. Some of these force museums and historical societies can be very helpful, with retired officers who are keen to assist and go the extra mile to try and help. Others less so, and I'm not familiar with GMP, but it has to be worth an enquiry. Where else would you suggest looking?