What is Ethnicity and Why Should You Care?
Understanding where your ancestors come from is a cornerstone of family history.
“Ethnicity” is the term that Ancestry uses to describe where your ancestors lived. The time frame used by Ancestry for their estimates ranges from several hundred years ago to as far back as a thousand years.
Because many people base their personal identity on where their ancestors came from, it is one of the most discussed topics in family history. To see this in action, you just have to look in an online genealogy group. You will almost certainly see a discussion about how much Scottish/Jewish/Italian/Irish/Nigerian/etc, ethnicity someone has. Some people are excited by what they see, some people are upset by what they see, and some are just confused.
Understanding how Ancestry defines the ethnic groups it uses is important to understanding your own ethnicity estimate.
How Does Ancestry Choose Ethnic Groups?
Ancestry uses published DNA information, as well as samples from its own DNA testers who have consented to research, to identify people who can define a particular ethnic group. It calls this group of people a “reference panel.” These people serve as a “reference,” or benchmark, for categorizing other people into the same ethnic group.
The people selected for an ethnic group’s reference panel are selected for two main reasons. First, they have family trees that show that all of their ancestors have deep roots from a specific region, (like France or Guatemala) or come from a non-regional ethnic group (like Ashkenazi or Cherokee). Second, they have DNA that looks very similar to the other people whose ancestors are also from that group.
This reference panel can then be used to identify new DNA testers who have similar DNA and to categorize them into the same ethnic group.
How And Ethnicity Group Reference Panel Is Used
How Many Ethnic Groups Are There at Ancestry?
As of October 2023, Ancestry has 88 different ethnic groups, and its reference panel uses over 70,000 people to define those groups.
However, you can tell from the chart below that Ancestry has invested heavily in ethnicity estimates over the past ten years. During this time period, it has increased the number of ethnic groups used to determine testers’ ethnicity from 22 to 88. It has also increased the number of people it uses in its reference panels from 3000 to over 70,000.
Ancestry Ethnic Group Growth Over time
Ethnic Groups Use Different Size Reference Panels
It’s also worth noting that ethnic groups in 2023 use different-sized reference panels to define them.
Reference Panel Size of Ancestry Ethnic Groups in Oct 2023
There are good statistical reasons for the reference panels for some ethnic groups to be larger than others. For example, some ethnic groups may be genetically similar to each other. It would take larger reference panels to distinguish two closely related ethnic groups, such as Austrian and Hungarian, than it would two more distantly related ethnic groups, such as Welsh and Greek.
There are also practical reasons for different-sized reference panels that are based on the number of people who have DNA tested from certain ethnic groups. This could happen for a variety of reasons, including:
- There aren’t many people from an ethnic group
- An ethnic group has a cultural aversion to DNA testing
- An ethnic group is in an area where DNA testing is not readily available or affordable
For example, these are the ethnic groups with the five largest and five smallest size reference panels in October of 2023.
Ethnic Groups With The Largest Reference Panels (2023)
Ethnic Groups With the Largest Reference Panel Size
Ethnic Groups With The Smallest Reference Panels (2023)
Ethnic Groups With the Smallest Reference Panel Size
Ethnicity Estimates Will Continue to Improve
There are a number of factors that suggest our ancestry estimates will continue to change, and that these changes will improve the accuracy of our estimates.
- The number of people who have taken a DNA test continues to grow. This means that the number of candidates for reference panels of people from new or underrepresented ethnic groups will also continue to grow.
- As more people work on their family trees, more people will be identified who have the family roots necessary to refine existing ethnic groups or to define new ones.
- The biology, statistics, and technology used to identify genetic groups gets better with each passing year.
What Ethnicity Improvements Would You Like To See?
Are there any ethnic groups that you would like to see included in future Ancestry updates? If so, please put them in the comments section below.
If you would like to see future posts about Ethnicity, and other DNA-related topics, please subscribe to the Making Family History newsletter.
For More Information About Ethnicity at Ancestry, see:
- Ancestry Ethnicity Whitepaper for 2023
- Ancestry Ethnicity Whitepaper for 2022
- Ancestry Ethnicity Whitepaper for 2021
- Ancestry Ethnicity Whitepaper for 2020
This is cool! I didn’t take the time to see which reference group has the most samples vs. not. I just blogged about the changing reference samples for my own group.
It’s very interesting looking into the details. It definitely challenged my assumptions about which ethnic groups I thought had the biggest reference populations.
I would love to see a separation of the England and North western Europe Ethnic group, it is very wide and would love to know what percentage is from Dutch, Flemish & English and not just a lumped together amount.
Thankfully, teasing larger ethnic groups apart into smaller ethinic groups appears to be one of their goals. Hopefully you get the detail you need for your research in a future update.
Great analysis in your post about the Polynesia-specific ethnicity updates. It’ll be interesting to see how our understanding of Polynesian DNA, and migration patterns, evolves as the reference panels get larger.
https://hawaiiandna.wordpress.com/author/kalanimondoy/
If possible I would like to see an ethnic break out for people around the area of Limburg Belgium and NL and Liege. Current ethnic group is very wide. Would love to see a communities group for German Bohemians who settled in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.
Joanne,
I hear ya! My eastern european line is essentially a continent wide, but some of my Irish lines are down to the county level. Not all ethnic groups are created equal!
Rusyn. Not just because I am half Rusyn but because it is one of many ethnic minority groups that differ from the dominant ethnic group in their country.
I have Eastern European: Pomeranian communities. As far as I can tell, they do not have the group Kashub or Kashubian from the Pomeranian area northwest of Danzig/Gdansk. I would love to know if I have any Kashubian!
Why is my ethnicity different with My Heritage?
Each DNA testing company use different reference panels, technology and methods for matching testers to their reference panels. Because of this, it is almost certain that the different testing companies will deliver different ethnicity estimates for us all. That being said, it is unusual to find significant differences at the continental level for ethnicity results from different testing companies.
I try not to look at this as a problem, but rather, as an opportunity. It’s hard for an individual to know which testing company has the “best” reference panel for a particular combinations of ethnicities. So, I compare my results across all of the companies (and across all of my close relatives) looking for ethnicity clues that I can use in my research.
Mark
This is a professionally written and accessible article. I deeply appreciate there is an inclusivity in your definitions.
Your somewhat distant cousin.
Julianna,
Thanks very much. I really appreciate the feedback. And thanks for noticing!
Mark.
Mark, great information, I think you’d like the presentation Miguel Vital did at ECCG on “Using Multi-Marker DNA Analyses to Recover Lost Parts of History”. It would be great to do another post on the other companies ethnicity estimates.
Bonnie,
Thanks very much for the feedback, as well as for the suggestion on Miguel’s presentation. I plan to do a whole series of posts on Ethnicity that includes the other companies. Any particular one that you’d like to see first?
Mark.