As the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, Ancestry® continuously develops new ways for you to learn about yourself through DNA and empowers you to unlock more discoveries about your family history. With evolving DNA science, Ancestry updates its AncestryDNA communities to connect people through their DNA to places their ancestors likely lived and paths they might have followed to get there over the past 75-300 years. Today, we are proud to unveil another significant update to AncestryDNA communities for members with ties to Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia.

Updated Communities in Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia

As our DNA network grows and science advances, we can deliver even more value to our members, including more granular insights about their heritage and compelling new paths to learn about themselves using genetics. With updated communities, we can better pinpoint where in the world your ancestors were most likely from—and this means there may be some changes to your results.

Expanding our reach is important to Ancestry as is understanding your family history and through our communities updates we are able to do both. Our updated communities now include 87 in Italy, from Lombardy to Sicily, and 9 in Croatia and Slovenia. In case you missed our last community update at the end of last year, we’ve also added new communities that include 10 in Czechia, 61 in Poland, 15 in Slovakia & Hungary, 8 in Ukraine, 1 in Latvia & Estonia, 4 in Lithuania, 4 Russian communities, and 1 in the Transdanubia region.

Director of Scientific Communications Barry Starr explains the importance of community updates saying, “Communities updates can tell an even more granular story of where your ancestors were from and/or how they made their way from one place to another. For example, we went from 11 to 87 communities in Italy alone, providing more detailed understanding for our users with Italian heritage.”

Whether it’s discovering an even more detailed Italian heritage or uncovering your roots among communities across Eastern Europe, your next big discovery could be waiting in our latest communities update.

​With the largest consumer DNA network, AncestryDNA continues to add communities around the world

What are communities?

A community is a group of AncestryDNA members who are likely to have relatives from a population of common ancestors, people who lived in the same place around the same time or traveled from the same place around the same time.

Our Genetic Communities™ technology detects groups of AncestryDNA members who are most likely connected because they have relatives who came from the same place (such as Munster, Ireland) or culture (such as Sephardic Jews or Basque). Using our Genetic Communities™ technology, we analyze genetic connections to identify groups of AncestryDNA members. We then use public family trees, ethnicity data, and historical records to determine past peoples and places members of this group likely have in common. 

Ethnicity regions in your ethnicity estimate connect you to world populations your DNA looks most like. Communities typically show recent people and more specific places your DNA connects you to.

The strength behind our communities is our unparalleled DNA network of over 20 million people and the largest network of family trees, with over 100 million. You can discover your origins from over 1,500 regions worldwide.

Revisiting Your Results

We encourage you to look at your DNA Story to see if you have a new community waiting to be explored and shared with your family and loved ones. 

As new people continue to join our AncestryDNA network and science and technology continue to evolve, we will continue to provide updates for our members. It’s just one of the many ways Ancestry helps you learn more about your family, your past, and yourself.