When it comes to calculating 23andMe customers’ Ancestry Composition results, details are invariably what matter most: more specificity, more interactivity, more 
opportunities to draw meaning about how we are all genetically connected to people around the globe.
In service to this idea, 23andMe has added a trove of content-rich new pages called Ancestry Detail Reports, which offer a more granular view of your ancestry, snapshots of the places and people to which your DNA connects you, and more. This update comes in tandem with an array of improvements and new features to the Ancestry experience, including a new interactive map of your DNA Relatives and enhanced look and feel on mobile and desktop.
We are now offering more than 30 new population-specific pages called Ancestry Detail Reports, as well as evaluating each customer’s ancestry based on more than 1,000 specific regions.
Ancestry Detail Reports provide a closer look at each of the global populations currently included in our Ancestry Composition feature, enabling customers to explore their own genetic heritage while also learning about other populations included in Ancestry Composition. The creation of this additional layer of detail comes in direct response to requests from our customers for more granularity and additional content in Ancestry Composition.
Improvements to 23andMe’s Ancestry Experience
- 30+ new Ancestry Detail Reports with regional maps for our most refined view of your ancestry.
- 1000+ regions now included in Ancestry Composition.
- Interactive map of where your DNA Relatives call home.
- Ancestry Overview on desktop and mobile functions like a homepage for all your Ancestry reports, enabling exploration and discovery.
- More African and East Asian populations now available for all customers (first released in September 2018).
If you are a 23andMe customer, you can find your specific Ancestry Detail Reports (and explore all possible Ancestry Detail Reports) in a few ways.
- The easiest path is navigating to your Ancestry Overview and clicking on each featured population under your Ancestry Composition summary.
- You can also find these pages by clicking on the All Reports tab in your Ancestry Overview and looking under Ancestry Composition. There, you can easily view all of the more than 30 new reports and learn more about the diverse populations included in Ancestry Composition.
On the 23andMe Mobile Apps, you should see a list of featured populations under your Ancestry Composition results in the Ancestry tab.
A Deeper Dive
Let’s take a deeper dive into the Ancestry Detail Reports, and learn more about what you’ll discover when you view them.
If you’ve been assigned one or more “Recent Ancestor Locations” — these are indicated by the country and territory names you may see listed in your Ancestry Composition summary — you will also likely receive a more detailed map of your results on the associated Ancestry Detail Report. These maps may include the specific states or even counties where we have found evidence of your family’s recent ancestry. The stronger the evidence of a given ancestry, the higher ranking on the adjacent list and darker the shading is for that region. This new “live” map with specific regional breakdowns will continuously update over time to reflect the growing number of individuals from around the world in 23andMe’s database.
A number of the Ancestry Detail Reports contain immersive educational materials that provide further context around each population’s genetics, demographics, history, and more. Curated and written by 23andMe’s scientists, these materials aim to help customers learn important information about their genetic ancestry. These reports can also be used to learn about diverse populations with which you are not genetically connected, but may be curious about.
Snapshots
Another layer to the Ancestry Detail Reports are Snapshots — a handful of researched and reported stories that provide glimpses into the many nuances that make each ancestral population unique. Snapshot topics include: Talk the Talk (words and phrases unique to one of the languages spoken by each population), Ancestry Eats (traditional foods and beverages), Sights to See (off-the-beaten-path travel tips and important landmarks), Natural Wonders, Celebrations, Crafts & Traditions, and more. We encourage customers to contribute ideas for future Snapshots by clicking on the Customer Feedback bar located at the bottom of each Ancestry Detail Report.
Lastly, at the bottom of each Ancestry Detail Report, customers who have chosen to participate in the DNA Relatives tool can view their relatives who share ancestry from that particular population. For example, a customer with 20 percent Italian ancestry or 55 percent Vietnamese ancestry would see the profile names and profile images of some of their relatives connected to those populations. The content on each Ancestry Detail Report may provide inspiration for starting a conversation with those relatives about your genetic heritage.
This new paradigm for exploring Ancestry results on a deeper, more actionable level will set the standard for future updates to the Ancestry Composition experience. Since Ancestry Composition is truly a “living analysis” of your DNA that reflects our growing database, 23andMe will continue to update the Ancestry Detail Reports at a county and state-level to provide an ever-closer view of your ancestry. Though country and territory maps may not yet be available for every customer, our intent is that this will change as our database continues to expand and diversify.
23andMe customers can go to their Ancestry Overview to start exploring. Not yet a customer? Find out more about 23andMe’s Ancestry service here.
