Ancestry Communities

[Lanc81]

Has anyone found matches where they share a community with you  (like Yorkshire, Midlands etc) but don't share an ancestor with the shared community?

[pughcd]

Hi @Lanc81,

Can you explain further? Surely the whole point behind a shared community is that you have shared matches who have their roots in a particular area.

I have a community of Coastal Northwest Germany, with Osnabrueck being the more specific place that my family was from. This fits as I have grandparents from North Rhine-Westphalia. I also have a few DNA matches who share the same community. On My Heritage the Genetic Groups are also pretty accurate with Germany (Detmold) being highlighted.

pughcd

[Biggles50]

Has anyone found matches where they share a community with you  (like Yorkshire, Midlands etc) but don't share an ancestor with the shared community?

Yes, I am a member of a Valley specific Family History Group and a member there is a distant Cousin to one of my Distant Cousins but they are not related to me.

[Gadget]

Has anyone found matches where they share a community with you  (like Yorkshire, Midlands etc) but don't share an ancestor with the shared community?

Yes, I am a member of a Valley specific Family History Group and a member there is a distant Cousin to one of my Distant Cousins but they are not related to me.

Are you referring to the Tay Valley FH Group,Biggles?

I think Lanc81 is referring to the Ancestry Shared  Communities  category that is part of the Ethnicity section.

I've been allocated to the Ohio, Indiana and Eastern Kentucky Settlers.  I do share ancestors with others in this group and in the other communities that Ancestry have allocated me to!

Gadget

[Gadget]

Info about them here:

https://support.ancestry.co.uk/s/article/AncestryDNA-Communities

[Lanc81]

Apologies I didn't explain that very well. Basically I have a few matches that share my ancestry community (North West, Lancs,Greater Manchester) but looking at there trees the connection isn't from that community.

[Gadget]

Hi again Lanc81

If you read the article that I linked to in the last post, you'll see that it's not necessary to share ancestors from that area. It's that you and the others that you share that community with also had ancestors from there and might have intermixed.

In the example that I gave, I don't have any direct ancestors from that 'community'  but I know that some of my ancestors had kin who went there. Similarly, those in the same community that isreferred to  may also have ancestors who had kin from there.

Gadget

[Gadget]

This is the paragraph from the ref that I gave:

How we identify communities

People in a community are connected through DNA, most likely because they descend from a population of common ancestors. Once we identify a community, we look for patterns. These patterns help us learn about the original group that still connects people through DNA today.

First, we find out where the ancestors of people in a community lived. We do this by comparing birth locations in their trees, using only trees that are linked to DNA tests.

Then, we find common journeys and migration routes using birthdates and birthplaces. When a parent was born in a different place than their child was, we know the parent moved. Once we know where these people lived and when and where they moved to, we match these facts with the history that explains it. This should answer the question, “what story binds the members of this community together?”

 

[Gadget]

My line seems to be dropping  a lot tonight!

This should have been before the previous quote:

Two types of regions

There are two kinds of regions in your ethnicity estimate.

    The regions with solid circles solid dot are your ethnicities. They come from comparing your DNA to the DNA of people in our reference panel.
    The regions with circles and dotted lines dotted dot are your communities. These are people who share a significant number of matches with each other. Members of a community likely descend from a group of people who traveled to the same place around the same time or from the same place around the same time.

Add - to be honest, I don't take much notice of them!