DNA Musings No. 23: What’s New at Ancestry?

What is SideView™ and what can it do for you?

Ethnicity

Under “Your DNA Story” at Ancestry you can scroll down to SideView™ and see the ethnicities you received from each of your parents, even if they have not taken a DNA test!  If you and at least one of your parents has tested at Ancestry, your two sides will be labeled Maternal and Paternal. Otherwise, they will be labeled Parent 1 and Parent 2 and you need to do some work to figure out which side is which.

For me, it was easy to tell that Parent 1 was my Maternal side because I know my mother is half Swedish and only Parent 1 was identified as having Swedish ethnicity.  Part of my father’s ancestry is unknown and SideView™ has given me insight as to what ethnicities to look for as I work on building his tree. My ethnicity estimates have consistently shown a small amount of Native American ancestry. Ancestry has assigned that segment to my Paternal side which gives me additional information to work with.

Remember SideView™ only shows the ethnicities that you inherited from your parents. It does not show their entire ethnicity.

Chromosome Painter

The Chromosome Painter, located just under SideView™, gives a visual presentation showing the locations on each of your chromosomes that have been identified belonging to a particular ethnicity. If it shows, for instance, many small segments of a particular ethnicity, they are more likely to be from multiple more distant ancestors. Larger segments might be from fewer more recent ancestors. My results show that my Native American ethnicity is found near the end of my 12^th paternal chromosome.  In the future this might be a clue to figuring out this heritage.

DNA Matches

You might have noticed that your DNA Match list has changed. Because of the new SideView™ technology you can now choose to view your DNA matches by each of your parents. This can be extremely useful when you are trying to figure out how you are related to an unknown match. If you haven’t yet assigned Parent 1 and Parent 2, you can probably figure out which is which by viewing these DNA matches.

I’m really looking forward to learning how these new tools can contribute to integrating my DNA results into my genealogy!