Ancestry decision to remove matches below 8 cM will harm African American and Native American descendants

Sometime in August, Ancestry intends to remove matches in the 6 to 7.9 cM range from DNA match lists. This will cause problems for African American genealogists since using those matches, even if 50% are false matches, is often the only way for African American genealogists to find possible connections that predate the end of slavery and the 1870 census.  You can preserve these matches by saving a note or adding them to a dot group or by messaging them. Doing so will take time but it is possible. One way is to search by custom centimorgan size and then to search for common ancestors and add a dot group for each. I have been doing this as group CA67.

The same argument can be made for people with documented genealogical ancestry from Native Americans which predates 1870. This range of matches needs to be preserved and continue to be available to anyone who wants to see them.

See this blog post from Roberta Estes, for a more in-depth analysis of this proposed change: Plea to Ancestry – Rethink Match Purge Due to Deleterious Effect on African American Genealogists

Genetic mixture in the USA

An interesting post at the 23andMe blog:

March 4, 2014
DNA USA*
Published by ScottH under 23andMe Research, Ancestry

Scientists have long used DNA to inform our understanding of big epochs of human change and migration. But what about the smaller changes, can DNA tell us something about recent human history? diversity photo

23andMe researcher Katarzyna “Kasia” Bryc, who is also a postdoctoral research fellow in David Reich’s lab at Harvard Medical School, gathered anonymous aggregated data from our customers to look at the mix of African, European and Native American ancestry in the United States. What she discovered was an illuminating genetic portrait of the U.S. that both confirms some of what we know about America’s social history but also other things that are surprising and new.

“Perhaps one of the greatest discoveries stemming from recent advancements in genetic genealogy is that previously held assumptions about race and identity are being brought into question,” Harvard Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. wrote recently. “It was always known throughout American history that there was at least some intermixing of races, but only now, through DNA testing, can we see the extent to which this actually occurred.”

Continued here.