Updates on Ancestry to your Origins

Oct17

Ancestry just did its yearly update to how it categorizes your biological ancestry by adding over 150 new regions.  Many areas like Ireland, Scotland, Central Europe, indigenous America, Asia, and Africa have more detailed subgroups than before and I noticed two new countries in Europe: Belgium and Switzerland.

Ancestry uses both its reference panels and the many family trees it has to make those determinations. Plus for some of us, they have added a break-out by grandparent, that will be discussed in my next blog. My post on last year’s updates (click here) summarized much of the information in their white papers about how they do this. Notice that they include places that have been settled by Europeans, for example Madeira and Arcadia, where people have been there long enough to become a distinct group genetically.

Sample Tennessean with deep colonial roots

Since I have helped many people with their results, I can see how their predictions have changed over time. Any regions that are newly being reported have a big green NEW label next to them. I highly recommend scrolling to the bottom of the list of regions and clicking on “View previous results and FAQs” in order to see what has changed for you.

Many people have seen a simplification of their results where some of the unusual 1% and 2% categories have disappeared. This is particularly evident in those who are European Jewish who now show only one or two totally jewish groups and no longer the oddball 1% this or that. My own results now correctly show 50% Norwegian from my Dad who was 100% Norwegian American. I knew I could not have 1% Irish which showed up in 2025, but I was confident of my 1% Finnish because other companies find that as well. Perhaps I am suffering from confirmation bias.

Here are my current results which have added some interesting new areas from my Bavarian grandmother:

I have a second cousin who was 100% Scandinavian in the first Ancestry Origins so I called her my “perfect” cousin and featured her in many past posts on this subject. She is now 98% Norwegian and 2% Swedish having lost her 1% Finnish, like me, plus her swedish is now smaller.

There are many new areas in Africa, Asia, and Indigenous America. The full list of 126 regions can be seen in the white paper (click here) on pages 7 and 8. If you click on an region name in your list, you will be taken to a description of that locale and its peoples’ history plus there will usually be three matches listed which share that region. If you have a lot of close family who have tested, those matches will not be useful. It would be great if you could filter your main match list by these ancestry composition areas.

Let’s look at some of the more interesting results:

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Visiting Auschwitz

Sep10

​The name Auschwitz has always epitomized the horror of the holocaust to me but I actually knew very little about the place. Recently I found myself with a few spare days in Katowice, Poland, so since it was nearby, with much trepidation. I signed up for a tour. One thing I had not known was that there was more than one camp at Auschwitz. The one with the famous sign shown below, “work sets you free,” was the first camp, the parent camp while Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau, was about 8.5 times larger and was designed to be a factory for murder.

Entrance to Auschwitz I

The original Auschwitz was a mere 49 acres and at first held German and Polish prisoners who had to rebuild the dilapidated camp which had been previously used as an army barracks among other things. It included the infamous torture building (block 11), the killing wall, and a “hospital” building. We toured the gas chambers and crematorium as well as living spaces and museum displays.

The selection point by the tracks at Birkenau

At Birkenau, the trains came directly into the camp where they were unloaded and people were selected. About 90% went directly to their deaths. They were sent to the “showers” where they undressed and then went in. The doors were then locked and the gas came in …

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A ceremony in Munich

Jul24

I never thought of my Jewish great grandmother Lotte (Charlotte) Thannhauser as a holocaust victim. I thought she had just died, long widowed, of old age at 70 (which now seems young to me!). It turns out that she probably lost interest in living after her beloved only child, son Siegfried, was put on leave from his professorship because he was Jewish in April 1933, and so succumbed to her illness.

I have just returned from a trip to Munich where she was honored with a plaque on the current building at the address where she once lived, along with her sister and niece Josie. Many of my American and Israeli cousins were there too. Click here for the story about this on the Münchner Wohnen website. Lotte and her sister Lina’s descendants could be found because I keep a web site with our family history which I have been researching for many many years.

Charlotte Langermann Thannhauser, perhaps her brother Max, and Lina Langermann Thannhauser playing cards

I received an email this past January from a German historian, Dr. Christiane Fritsche, who was researching the residents of the building my great grandmother Lotte lived in. She found me online. The Munich housing authority (Münchner Wohnen) was planning on adding plaques to the buildings there. They provided Dr. Fritsche with a group of interns who were assigned to do the research. I forwarded her email to my double third cousin Nava in Israel because her great grandmother Lina, the sister of Lotte, was truly a holocaust victim. She did not want to leave Germany until it was too late.

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Happy 250th to the country my ancestors came to

Jul4

Twelve years ago I wrote a post here thanking this country for taking my mother and her parents in (click here to read it). Today on the 250th, I want to honor my hard-working Norwegian ancestors, who came in the late 1800s.

My father, Larry Munson, with his Dad, Lawrence J. Munson in about 1940

Below are some excerpts from letters my Norwegian grandfather, born in Christiansand, wrote many years later to his son. He describes his emigration at the age of 6 with his family and their arrival in Brooklyn, N.Y., where there was an enclave of Norwegian immigrants. (click here for all the letters.)

What America was I did not know, but I had imbibed enough of family talk to realize it was a land of plenty and an interesting place to go to.
[…]
My first impression was naturally that of wonder at everything new and strange. It was a great adventure into new and different conditions. My second reaction was one I shared with my mother – that of disappointment at the dirt and filth in Brooklyn in the summer of 1884. Goats were walking the streets eating the paper that littered the street.
[…]

Munson family in 1909 celebrating 25 years in America

My mother […] pictured the U.S. as wealthy and prosperous, and here was poverty and unrestrained drinking.
[…]
In our little Norsetown the streets were clean and in almost every house you would see potted geraniums or other flowers in the front windows. There were many poor people but they were clean and orderly, and there was no public display of poverty.
[…]
My mother with her family of eight children felt she was too busy to learn a new language, and the children did all the shopping. It was only later on as she would hear the children glibly jabber on in this new tongue, that she wanted to know more of this new language. Her children used English among ourselves – especially when we did not want mother to know of our exploits.

My grandfather would later marry a piano student of his, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants (who totally approved!). He wrote about their courtship in his diary.

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The Reinvented 23andme

Jun20

My cousin Corinne tantalized me by showing me some of the interesting new features at 23andme, so I bought the currently discounted upgrade and soon sent in a new vial of spit. As the email I got pointed out, my test used an older chip and more information is available on the newer one. Father’s Day is the last day for the current special.

Next I opted into the subscription for Premium Plus membership which provides clustering,  historical matches, reconstructed ancestors, and many more matches as well as updated haplogroup information. One of the main things I wanted was the ability to get the exact segments where my relatives match me in a chromosome browser; a feature that had been turned off after the break-ins a while back. You cannot download all your segment data but you can view up to 5 relatives compared to yourself or someone else you match. You can get to that comparison by clicking on the blue “Compare with more relatives” at the bottom of the panel which shows your DNA chromosomes with shared DNA. Then at the bottom of the comparison page you can get the exact numbers.

The top of an example comparison page, my dad to multiple relatives. Notice that it indicates that he shares one fully identical segment with his nephew PG (on the X as shown below)

I have written many blog posts about using segment data (click here). I maintain a spreadsheet for all my dad’s segment matches and note where my brother or I have the same match, as well as other known relatives. Often I can tell what ancestral line a new match is on from their matching segment information. I have alot of updating to do now that this feature is back!

At the bottom of the images of chromosomes and segments there is the numerical data, which can be cut and pasted into a spreadsheet

You can also get to the attractive new clustering page from the relatives in common section of the match page as shown below. I have many blog posts about clustering (click here). An advantage of the 23andme implementation is that you can adjust the parameters. Probably I will need to play with it more and give it its own blog post.

Example of relatives in common buttons to cousin Elizabeth

One of the other new features that I was interested in was the comparison to ancient DNA, in other words to ancient bodies whose DNA has been sequenced.  I was rewarded by discovering that I share a piece of DNA with Otzi the Iceman! Small but exciting.

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