The "hack" for your Ancestry DNA results

With the hack, my DNA results went from this:

To this!:

So what happened?

The ethnicity breakdown that you receive with your DNA results can give you a fascinating insight into which regions your ancestors came from. For family historians, this can confirm paper research you have done, or give you clues on where to look.

But how does Ancestry calculate your ethnicity breakdown? And did you know that the results you see may not show everything your raw results came back with?

How ethnicities are calculated

Ancestry will compare your DNA to the DNA of people with known origins, known as the reference panel. Their reference panel has over 68,174 DNA samples from people in over 1,800 global regions. All the regions that Ancestry test for can be found here. All persons included in the reference panel have deep regional roots with documented family trees.

When comparing your DNA to the reference panel, the laboratory will generate the most likely estimate for a certain ethnicity.

As part of the processing done by Ancestry, your ethnicity percentage breakdowns are rounded to the nearest whole number and ethnicities of less than 0.5% are removed.

What is the "hack"?

The "hack" is a method to look at your raw DNA results before the clean-up process occurs. This will show you the exact numbers (to two decimal places) for your ethnicities, as well as any low % ethnicities that were removed. You might be surprised by what you see!

Low percentage ethnicities can be misleading - sometimes they may be "noise" as ethnicity calculations aren't an exact science. For example, people with English heritage often find they come back with ethnicities for Norway, Sweden and/or Denmark. This is because the DNA of the English population has a lot in common with the DNA of Scandinavian peoples - this is the result of migration populations in the past (e.g. the Viking raids/Norse settlements in England).

However, the low percentage ethnicity may not be noise (particularly if it relates to a genetically distinct population) and may provide you with an intriguing clue as to some of your deep ancestry!

How do I do the hack?

• Go to your Ancestry home page

• Select "DNA" from the top menu, then go to "DNA story"

• Once you are on your DNA story page, copy your ID code. This will be a code that looks like: 99F68157-8F72-49BA-A3C8-837B3CA9C3E0

• In the URL bar, put in the following URL and paste in your copied ID code where indicated:

https://www.ancestry.co.uk/dna/origins/inheritance/api/v1/ethnicities/PASTE YOUR ID CODE HERE/chromosomes?version=2022

IMPORTANT: if you're in the UK, you'll need use: www.ancestry.co.uk (as in the above example). However, if you're in the US/Canada', you'll need to use: www.ancestry.com and if you're in Australia, you'll need to use: www.ancestry.com.au

• Hit Enter to go to the web page you've just entered

• You should then go to a page which shows your raw DNA data

• Highlight and copy all of this data

• Now go to the following website:

https://dnplay.github.io/ancestrydna

• Paste the raw data that you copied into the box at the top of the page

• Your raw ethnicity results should now show!

For a video demonstration of this process, visit the Genealogy By Chani Facebook or Instagram page.