We have launched a new ancestry feature called Reconstructed Ancestors that is available for 23andMe+ Premium and 23andMe+ Total Health members.
This innovative experience uses the DNA you may share with close and distant relatives to piece together the genetic profiles of your ancestors, revealing insights into their ancestry and what they may have passed down to you.
Getting Started
To find the feature, navigate to the ancestry tab and look for Reconstructed Ancestors. You will see the closest ancestor profiles already available to you as well as an overview page of all profiles you can access via ‘view all’ below.
Click through to explore the ancestry breakdown for each profile and see what you inherited.
Keep adding more relatives from your DNA Relative list into your Family Tree so their shared DNA can help reconstruct your ancestors. Click into a relative’s profile and scroll down.
Common Questions
Q: What is Reconstructed Ancestors?
A: Reconstructed Ancestors is a feature that uses segments you share with your relatives to help uncover and piece together the ancestry of your ancestors without needing direct DNA samples from them. By attributing DNA shared between members of your family tree to a common ancestor, we can reconstruct portions of their genome and from it, partial ancestry results. A complete profile typically includes around 7,500 centimorgans (cM) of DNA. Because your ancestors are reconstructed using DNA shared between individuals on your Family Tree, the more individuals who share DNA through a particular ancestor, the more complete the profile of the ancestor becomes.
Q: Does everyone have Reconstructed Ancestors?
A: Not everyone will have Reconstructed Ancestors without additional actions taken. You may not have reconstructed ancestors if your Family Tree has too few DNA relatives or if you have an insufficient number of relatives who have tested with 23andMe.
Q: Are Reconstructed Ancestors like DNA Relatives?
A: DNA Relatives is a feature that helps find people in our database to whom you may be related. Reconstructed Ancestors are profiles of ancestors created based on shared DNA. DNA is shared through generations. When two people share an inherited segment of DNA, they must have inherited it from a common ancestor, or one person must be the ancestor of the other. If we know who the common ancestor was, then we know that the segment must have existed in the ancestor. At 23andMe, we assign DNA segments to ancestors that appear in your Family Tree by finding shared DNA segments among their descendants.
Q: Why is my ancestor’s reconstruction only partially complete?
A: Each ancestor in your family tree passed along some of their DNA to their descendants. However, they didn’t pass along all of their DNA. We can only reconstruct the parts of their genome that they passed on to their genotyped descendants. Moreover, because reconstructed segments come from DNA that is shared between two genotyped people, a segment must have been transmitted to both people for us to detect it. As a result, we typically can reconstruct only a fraction of each ancestor’s DNA. That said, if an ancestor has a large number of close genotyped descendants and relatives, they have a high chance of transmitting or sharing a large portion of their genome with those relatives. For individuals with many genotyped close relatives, we can often reconstruct the majority of their genomes.
Q: How accurate are these reconstructed profiles?
A: The accuracy of a reconstructed ancestor depends on the placement of your DNA relatives in your Family Tree. If a relative is in the wrong location, the reconstruction may not fully reflect the right ancestor or relationship. You can improve accuracy by reviewing and updating your tree. Adjusting where relatives appear helps ensure that DNA segments are assigned to the correct branches of your family and that each reconstructed profile is as meaningful and precise as possible. Reconstructions are also less accurate in populations with high levels of endogamy and in families with marriages between close relatives.
Q: How can I contribute to or edit a reconstructed family profile?
A: As you build your Family Tree, we are able to help reconstruct more of each ancestor profile. You can make adjustments to the automatic Family Tree and / or add relatives from your DNA Relative list to your tree to make these reconstructions more complete. You can also get more relatives tested and added to the database to fill in gaps in your Family Tree. View Relatives FAQ to learn more about how to edit and add to your tree.
Q: What is a centimorgan?
A: A centimorgan (cM) is a unit scientists use to describe how much DNA is shared between people and how likely it is to be inherited together. It doesn’t measure physical length but reflects how often a segment of DNA stays intact as it’s passed down. Segments that are closer together on a chromosome tend to be inherited together, and the centimorgan captures that pattern.
In Reconstructed Ancestors, centimorgans help us estimate how much of an ancestor’s DNA has been rebuilt. A full profile includes about 7,500 cM for a female and 7,000 cM for a male since males do not have an X chromosome.
Q: Will I get more Reconstructed Ancestors?
A: As we continue developing this feature and as you build out your tree we will be able to reconstruct more ancestors on your Family Tree.
Q: Why don’t I see both parents in this feature?
A: If someone is genotyped they will not appear within this feature. If there are not enough DNA relatives on your Family Tree to reconstruct a profile, it also will not appear. You can add more relatives from your DNA relative list to your tree to reconstruct more nodes in your tree.
Q: Why do I see “Broadly” ancestry in my Reconstructed Ancestors results, but not in my Ancestry Composition?
A: Reconstructed Ancestors and Ancestry Composition results use different ways of displaying ancestry along your DNA.
The Ancestry Composition Chromosome Painting feature uses a default view that fills in every segment of DNA with the most likely ancestry. You can also select confidence threshold views like “50% Confidence” from the drop-down menu in the Chromosome Painting report. The confidence threshold-based paintings contain the “broadly” ancestries that you see in the Reconstructed Ancestors feature. The “most likely ancestry” view is shown by default in the Chromosome Painting report because it is easier to interpret than the confidence threshold-based paintings. However, because the “most likely ancestry” view must choose a single population at every position of the genome, even when there is uncertainty in the inferences, the resulting paintings are noisier than the confidence threshold-based ancestry painting views, which show a broader population painting when the estimate is noisy. The Reconstructed Ancestors feature uses the confidence threshold-based views in order to provide the most accurate ancestral reconstruction.
Both views use the same underlying science, they just present the information differently depending on whether you’re looking at your own DNA or a Reconstructed Ancestor’s DNA.
Q: Why did a Reconstructed Ancestor disappear?
A:There are a couple of reasons a reconstructed ancestor might no longer appear. Most often, it’s because your Family Tree changed in a way that affected how their DNA segments were connected. For example:
- A DNA relative was moved to a different spot in your tree
- A new genotyped relative was added who replaced the need for a reconstruction
- The structure of that branch changed in a way that no longer supports a clear reconstruction
Because reconstructions depend on your Family Tree and DNA Relatives, even small changes can impact which ancestors appear. As your tree evolves, profiles may disappear, reappear, or grow more complete over time.
Q: How is my data being used with this feature?
A: We are comparing the ancestries between you and your relatives to infer info about your common ancestors. We are not reconstructing any DNA sequences, we aren’t storing any information about specific locations of segments.