Hello Genealogy Gems listeners!  This is Diahan Southard, your DNA Guide, with a genetic gem to keep you up to date in the world of genetic genealogy.

We talked a couple of weeks ago about some changes taking place over at AncestryDNA. You will recall that they were planning to slash your match list to allow only “invited guests” to your personal DNA party.

Yesterday Ancestry officially announced the launch of this update and reports that on average users will see an 80% reduction in the number of matches shown.

I had a chance to look at the new site before it launched and one of my favorite features is the question mark that appears next to your match. Clicking on the question mark on your match page will bring up a menu of references to help you better understand the inner workings of matching at Ancestry, including those confidence levels that are a part of every relationship prediction. Ancestry has tried to give you some fairly solid guidelines by which to assess the quality of your matches. You will want to focus on those matches with a confidence score of “High” or above to have the best chance of genealogical success.

But an update to the matching feature is only the beginning of the new features at AncestryDNA.

Today Ancestry announced “DNA Circles,” a tool that helps you identify others who share common ancestors with you.  The new “DNA Circles” feature has the potential to impact the way you do genetic genealogy at Ancestry.com.  Here’s why.

Autosomal DNA (the kind that Ancestry is testing) has a spotty inheritance pattern. On average we only have half of the DNA of each of our parents, only 25% of our grandparents, only 12.5% of our great grandparents and so on.  This means that AncestryDNA and its competitors (Family Tree DNA and 23andMe) are only able to genetically identify 50% of your genetic 4th cousins. This means that there could be 50% MORE people in these databases that you are actually related to, people that should have been invited to your DNA party, but didn’t have a ticket.

Now with DNA Circles, there is an after-party.

At this after-party you can meet some of these long lost cousins that, while related to you, lost their ticket to your DNA party.

After parties are “hosted” by one of your relatives. Ancestry searches your pedigree and that of your matches back 7 generations looking for suitable hosts.  An ancestor qualifies as a host if they have two or more descendants who hold an invitation.

After-party invitations are provided to those who meet three very important qualifications:

They have their DNA attached to their PUBLIC family tree.

AND that PUBLIC family tree has the name of the hosting ancestor on it.

AND this person shares DNA with at least one other person who also meets the above two criteria.

(For example)  I am a part of two DNA Circles (some of you will be much more popular and invited to several after-parties, for me, just the two for now).  Let’s take a closer look at my DNA Circle hosted by my paternal 5th great grandfather Minus Griggs (who knew the guy liked parties?!).

Clicking on the DNA circle brings up a new page where there are three things I want (you to know about) to show you.

One is your relationship to the host.

One is a list of the individuals who have passed the three criteria listed above and have been invited to this after-party.

And this is the innovative part. There is a column with space to display two different icons, a green “Tree Match” icon, or an orange “DNA Match” icon. My first two matches have only “Tree Match” in this column. This means that these two people, both descendants of our host, Minus Griggs, didn’t ever appear on my DNA match list. We do not share enough DNA to be considered genetic relatives.

However, the third member of the circle has the “DNA Match” designation, meaning that this match DOES appear on my match page. In fact, this is my ONLY DNA match in the circle (there seven of us total).  That means that this DNA circle has connected me to FIVE other cousins.  All because I share DNA and genealogy with the third member of this circle, and he shares DNA and genealogy with everyone else.

I can click on each circle member to see exactly how Ancestry THINKS we are related.  This is my first opportunity to DOUBLE CHECK this relationship that Ancestry has handed me, to be sure that both my match and I really did receive tickets to the same after party.

This is really the first time a DNA testing company has so fully integrated genetics and genealogy.  We can now find cousins in the database who do not share our particular genetics, but who do share some of the genetics of our common ancestor.  This is huge.

There is one catch, and it is going to be a big one for some of you.  In order to see your DNA Circles, you have to be an Ancestry.com subscriber.

Even though I am excited about these changes, I can’t help but hope for just one step more.  In order to identify these DNA Circles, Ancestry has identified pieces of DNA that can be fairly reliably assigned to a particular ancestor.  There are likely others in the Ancestry database who have these pieces of DNA, we can call them partial tickets to the after-party, but who are lacking the second requirement- a pedigree documenting a relationship to that ancestor, the host.  I hope in the future the folks at Ancestry will honor those partial ticket holders, and allow them to the after-party, so we can sit around with our peanuts and pretzels and figure out how we are all related.

Until then, I am going to enjoy the two after parties hosted by my two generous ancestors.

There’s more to learn at AncestryDNA!

Ancestry’s genetic genealogy tools have come a long way since we first published this in 2014; it now offers a plethora of great genetic genealogy tools you can use to track down more information about your family history. Learn about all the features available at Ancestry and how you can make the most of them with our AncestryDNA Tour. The AncestryDNA Tour includes over 90 minutes of video instruction divided into 16 different segments, and comes with a printable, interactive workbook, so you can apply what you learn to your very own tree. With the Tour, you’ll be an AncestryDNA pro in no time!

Tell me more about the AncestryDNA Tour!

Originally Posted to www.genealogygems.com