Last updated: October 30, 2024
We explain what AncestryDNA’s ancestral journeys and ancestral regions are, and how they can help you understand your ancestral heritage.
Editor’s note: This blog post was originally published on February 1, 2021, and has been regularly updated. This blog post was significantly updated in October 2024 to reflect changes in some of the terms AncestryDNA uses to describe your results. “Genetic communities” or “communities,” are now referred to as “ancestral journeys,” and “ethnicity estimate” is now known as “ancestral regions.”
Your AncestryDNA test results include a component called your DNA Story, which in itself has two parts:
- Your ancestral regions are based on comparisons of your DNA with AncestryDNA’s standard set of values for a particular location. (These values are called reference panels and they group together DNA testers “who have long-standing, documented roots in a specific geographic area.”). Ancestral regions show where your ancestors likely lived within the past 1,000 years.
- Your ancestral journeys are based on how genetically connected you are to actual individuals in the AncestryDNA database whose ancestors lived in a particular area or traveled a particular path. Compared to your ancestral regions, your ancestral journeys often connect you to much more recent and specific populations and places within the past 300 years.
World map showing AncestryDNA’s ancestral regions as of late 2024.
Below, I focus on AncestryDNA ancestral journeys, which continue to become more numerous and detailed as AncestryDNA regularly refines and updates its data. Also, I think it’s important to remind everyone how these ancestral journeys might help your genealogy research. Keep reading!
AncestryDNA ancestral journeys
Ancestral journeys are “clusters of living individuals [who] share large amounts of DNA due to specific, recent shared history,” explains an AncestryDNA white paper on the topic. “For example, we identify groups of customers that likely descend from immigrants participating in a particular wave of migration (e.g. Irish fleeing the Great Famine), or customers that descend from ancestral populations that have remained in the same geographic location for many generations (e.g. the early settlers of the Appalachian Mountains).”
The company uses the DNA you have in common with others to assign you to various ancestral journeys. Then they assign places to each of those clusters by drawing on both the ethnicity data and family trees of everyone assigned to that cluster. Once they get enough data on a particular journey, they can confidently say something like, “What these testers all have in common is that they descend from Irish immigrants who came to the United States during the famine of the mid-1800s.”
As AncestryDNA gradually amasses more data, they periodically add new ancestral journeys.
Asia and Oceania ancestral journeys
You can now explore over 100 journeys within different parts of Asia:
- Western Asia: 77 journeys, including Anatolian Turks and Mizrahi Jews of Iraq & Iran
- Southern Asia: 13 journeys, including Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
- Southeast Asia: 26 journeys, including Central & Southern Luzon and Western Indonesia & Peninsular Malaysia
- Eastern Asia: 9 journeys, including Japan and South Korea
- Northern Asia: one journey, Central Asia & Russia
The area of Oceania is divided into 32 journeys that include New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa and others.
Americas ancestral journeys
The Americas have the most ancestral journeys. North America alone has just over 1,700! Let’s break them down a bit more by North, Central, and South America:
- North America: 1702 journeys, including Afro-Bermudians and Indigenous Americas-North
- Central America: 11 journeys, including Costa Rica and Guatemala
- South America: 28 journeys, including Venezuela and Argentina & Paraguay
Europe ancestral journeys
Europe has the next highest number of ancestral journeys, with almost 1,200.
- Northern Europe: 201 journeys, including Iceland and Central & Sothern Finland
- Western Europe: 684 journeys, including Belgium and Isle of Man
- Southern Europe: 145 journeys, including Azores and Romania
- Central Europe: 96 journeys, including Central Poland and Slovakia & Hungary
- Eastern Europe: 69 journeys, including Ashkenazi Jews in Central & Eastern Europe and Volga Germans
Just take a moment and let that sink in. Many of the areas of the ancestral journeys in both Europe and North America are not very large, and yet they have been divided into many journeys, sometimes even into smaller and more specific sub journeys. This much better represents the diverse groups who have inhabited these areas over the past few hundred years.
Africa ancestral journeys
To date, Ancestry has identified six ancestral journeys in Africa. While this may not not be as robust as other continents, Ancestry continues to improve and further define ancestral regions and journeys in Africa. The October 2024 update added eight new regions and 64 new African ethnic groups and eight new regions, particularly in western and central Africa.
- Southern Africa: two journeys, Asians in South Africa and South Africa, European Settlers
- Eastern Africa: one journey, Eastern Africa
- Northern Africa: six journeys, including Eastern Mediterranean & Egypt and Morocco & Algeria
Haven’t tested with AncestryDNA yet? Learn more about AncestryDNA and find links to order DNA testing kits.
These are just some highlights and recent additions. Between ancestral regions and journeys, AncestryDNA now spotlights more than 3,000 regions associated with your ancestry. Use them to make educated guesses about the geographic origins of a partly-known group of ancestors. Or explore them to discover something about unknown branches of your tree.
How ancestral journeys can help with your family history
To help you see how AncestryDNA’s ancestral journeys can help your research, I’ve pulled the following from my book, Your DNA Guide—the Book. (Just in case you don’t have a copy yet.)
“These are extremely accurate groupings that are based on both genetics and genealogy and reflect locations that absolutely (and I am not using that word lightly here) should be represented in your family history in the last 200 years. So before you even begin this search for your missing ancestor(s), take a look at your [ancestral journeys] if you tested at AncestryDNA. If you are a member of any [ancestral journey] that is currently not in your family tree, it’s time to take notes. It is very likely that one of your missing branches was standing on that very soil in the not-too-distant past.
Here’s a good example: One of our clients here at Your DNA Guide was looking for a great-grandfather: one of those men who seems to show up in Pennsylvania long enough to get married and have a couple kids, but doesn’t seem to exist before or after. However, our client was showing a connection to a New Jersey [ancestral journey], and didn’t have any other ties to that location in her family tree. As we worked through her Plan, we began to see matches with common connections to–you guessed it–New Jersey! So these maps and percentages are no longer just a coffee table piece, they may be THE piece that puts you on the path to discovering your missing ancestor.”
Isn’t that an inspiring example? I just love DNA.
Learn more: How DNA tells your family story
If you’ve already taken a DNA test with Ancestry, we have just the thing you need to learn more about your DNA and ethnicity results. Our AncestryDNA Tour is an interactive, online learning experience that walks you through each part of your AncestryDNA test results. It comes with more than a dozen video modules and a printable workbook so you can apply what you’re learning to your own tree. The best part is, you’ll have lifetime access to this content, so you can go back and revisit it as often as you need.
