Two types of regions

Your ethnicity estimate has two types of regions: ethnicities and communities.

• Solid circles represent your ethnicities. They come from comparing your DNA to the DNA of people in our reference panel. 
• Circles with dotted lines are your communities. These are groups of people who share a significant number of matches with each other. Community members likely descend from a group of people who traveled to (or are from) the same place around the same time.

 

Finding your communities

 

In your ethnicity estimate, if you have communities related to an ethnicity region, you'll see them nested beneath that region.

In the example below, the community Denmark is nested beneath the region Sweden & Denmark. And other communities (Jutland, Zealand, Funen, Lolland & Falster and East Jutland) are nested beneath the Denmark community.
 

If you have communities, you'll also see them listed beneath your ethnicity estimate in the DNA Communities section. Scroll down to find them.

To learn about a community, select it. You'll see the community history, your DNA matches who belong to the same community, and more.

 

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 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?”

 

Don't have a community yet?

You'll only connect to communities you have a strong DNA relationship with. The more generations there are between you and the historical people who connect a community, the less likely you’ll connect to that community. Also, it’s more likely that you’ll connect to a population that both of your parents descended from than to a population that only one of your grandparents comes from.

As our database grows, we'll be able to add more communities.