DNA communities by parent

 

AncestryDNA.

While catching up on DNA sessions from Rootstech that I missed in early March, I was reminded of an updated AncestryDNA feature. If you're on your ethnicity results page, on the right hand side, scroll toward the bottom of the page. Below Ethnicity Inheritance is a tile called "Community Inheritance". If you click into that page, it shows a map like the one above from my Dad's results. This map will display communities associated with a maternal side, paternal, both, or "unassigned".

On my Dad's results for his maternal side of the tree, are two communities for Central Ireland, which I wrote about previously in March in posts related to new AI tools and on my Irish roots. Looking again at the page above, if you scroll down, you'll see a section titled "Meet your Matches", showing the closest matches in each community. For my Dad's results on my grandmother's O'Brien side of the tree, this gives some interesting close connections I had not seen before.

AncestryDNA Communities matches.

When I dig a little further into the match "HD", I see in his tree he has an ancestor named Edward Gannon, born in Roscommon, Ireland in 1849. A quick search on Ancestry pulls up several Gannons in Termonbarry, Roscommon, which is the same neighborhood the Dooner family was living in before they departed for the United States in the 1840s. This is a stretch, and I have not confirmed this yet, but there are a few Bridget Gannons who were baptized in Roscommon in 1825. There is also a Bridget Hanley, daughter of Bernard Hanley and Anna Gannon, who was born around the same time.

There's more digging to do here to potentially connect "HD" to my Dad's Irish side of the tree, but this seems to be a very promising addition to the toolset on AncestryDNA. This match and my Dad share 44 cM.