Thursday, February 17, 2022

DNA Communities

 According to AncestryDNA, a DNA community is a "group of people who share DNA because their relatives recently lived in the same place at the same time."  Whereas ethnicity regions (shown in previous post) go back 500 years or more, DNA communities are more recent - 50-300 years.  MyHeritageDNA also offers something similar called "Additional Genetic Groups".  Both AncestryDNA Communities and MyHeritageDNA Genetic Groups align with my known ancestral locations.

AncestryDNA Communities


MyHeritageDNA Additional Genetic Groups 


Since most of my ancestors have been in this country for 200-300 years, these Communities/Genetic Groups represent places my ancestors lived once they were in America.  In 2017, I compiled a list of my known immigrant ancestors and where they were from.  My ancestors who came over in the 1600s came mainly from England and settled in New England.  By the early 1700s, they were also immigrating from Ireland. A lot of those ancestors settled in Pennsylvania.  Then all of those early New England ancestors started moving south and west during the later part of the 1700s.  During the 1700s, a second wave of immigrant ancestors started arriving in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  This last group then moved into Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi.  

The following pedigree is of the birth places for four generations of my ancestors.  Most of my ancestors in the fourth generation back (excluding my German lines) were born in the southern states during the first half of the 1800s.  One generation farther back (not shown on the pedigree), most of the ancestors were from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. 

4 Generations of Birth Locations of Ancestors


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