Gender Breakdown of my Ancestry Matches

Up to now, I hadn’t paid much attention to Ancestry match gender. This post is a deep dive into how it breaks down. When I first took a snapshot of my Ancestry match data, I didn’t bother taking every piece of information available. For example, I didn’t think that the kit administrator info was useful … Read more

The Top 10 Ancestral Surnames across my Ancestry DNA Matches Surprised Me

In May 2018 I downloaded the direct line ancestral surnames of all my DNA matches at Ancestry. I discussed some statistical analysis on the numbers in a previous post. I then conducted some exploratory data mining of the distribution of surnames across my matches. My paternal line is African (not African-American), and I have very … Read more

Ten Months of Growth on AncestryDNA

In July 2017 I reviewed all my DNA matches on AncestryDNA by recording  the shared CM number of every match. I repeated the exercise in February 2018 and again in early May 2018. I was particularly interested in: (1) the rate of growth of matches over this 10 month period of heavy marketing by the … Read more

Ancestry Opt-Outs are in low numbers

Ancestry introduced a new privacy policy in November 2017 that allowed customers to opt out of DNA matching. Customers who opt out receive their heritage breakdown, but do not see their DNA matches. They also are not shown on the match lists of all other customers. Prior to this change, customers who wished to disengage … Read more