Ancestry 2026 update

[FoundAUserNameDownTheSofa]

Anyone else interested to see what it will be? I think I saw it will be released on 8 Oct. Lots of new regional/ ethnic splits apparently, but more so in African, Asian and indigenous American.

I’m hoping they change the southeast England and northeastern Europe region. They added that in last time and it doesn’t make sense to me - they manage to split out the Netherlands but can’t split southeastern England from northern France and Belgium!

I’ve seen a graphic that looks like they will be splitting out southern Scotland from Northern Ireland. My southwest Scotland ancestors were regularly marrying people from Northern Ireland so not sure how accurate that will be.

And I’m guessing i’ll lose the 1% Breton they added last time.

The other thing that’s changed is I originally only had one person in the dna match who was related on both my maternal and paternal sides. Now I have approximately 20 trillion.

The grandparent dna region split is only if you have one of the subscriptions by the way, I’m not sure which type (I couldn’t access my mum’s on her account as it was ‘locked’)

My changes

I have a lot more unassigned parts of my chromosome painter for one parent than before, which is a bit odd. Maybe they are too uncertain to classify? I have lost two low percentages for areas which don't seem to have been replaced. Anyone else have this? I wish I had taken a screen grab of the old chromosome painter graphic.

Has anyone else experienced a recent slump in new matches? Is this something to do with the update or just me? I have had two in a week I think, the last one three days ago.

Me too - see above. At least one of my newly unassigned segments was formerly a low percentage region. Even though there are these unassigned areas, Ancestry still puts the total dna by region to add up to 100% though. Obviously, it's all guestimates, as kassandra noted, and to be taken with a pinch of salt, so that's not surprising. 😀