Anyone else get a response 1 out of every 100 tries, or is my family really that rude?

I've been thinking about taking a DNA test to learn more about my biological family. I was adopted as a baby and although I have the names of my biological parents to go on, I don't know a lot about their families or whether I have any other biological siblings. I'm hoping I will be able to find some matches that can tell me a little bit more about my relatives, but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

Has anyone here used DNA testing to find biological relatives? How useful were the results? Did you manage to connect with family members, or did it take a lot of extra research to figure out the matches?

Hi! My great-grandmother Gladys was adopted, and so I am trying to track down her birth mother for my research. This is what I know.

Her daughter was born on Oct 27th, 1900, in Eastbourne, Sussex.

She was adopted by William and Maud Whitmore, who took in another nurse child, "William Button," around the same time. Gladys remained with them throughout her childhood, but William Button was gone before 1911. According to a letter from Gladys's future husband, her adopted family didn't want anything to do with her.

Her name was Emma Laxton (as per Gladys's birth certificate and baptism record)

Emma was listed as "Mother's helper." on Gladys's birth certificate. She was listed as "single woman" on her baptism record.

She gave birth at the address 27 Winter Road, which was a private residence where a plumber named David Jeffrey and his wife were likely living.

Emma's address was "19 Grand Parade," which was a lodging home. The newspaper listed the guests at the address the day before Gladys's birth and six days afterwards. Emma was not listed, but these names were on both lists: Mr and Mrs Coke, Mr and Mrs Desborough, Miss A. Desborough, Miss Foster.

My current theory is that Emma may have been a governess (aka Mothers helper) for one of the families listed. I've checked the 1901 and 1891 censuses, and there's no Emma Laxton living with families by those names. Is there any other way to research servants and the families they lived for in England at this time? Does anyone have any advice for me and my research?

I noticed a TikTok content creator (Brodie Falgoust / @brodieshredz) from South Louisiana with the last name Falgoust. I know Louisiana family history is a blend of different French-speaking groups. Did the Falgoust family arrive via the Acadian expulsion (making it a classic Cajun surname), or was it a direct immigration from France to French colonial Louisiana?

This morning I saved two hints to my ancestor's granddaughter's profile - both were school yearbook hints with photos. The last time I used Ancestry regularly (some 6-9 months ago), if you saved multiple instances of school yearbook photos, they were all in that profile's gallery and you could choose which one to use as the profile's main photo. No longer. Only the first one I saved was available.

Much the same thing happened with another person in my tree. I saved a number of photo hints for this lady which had been submitted by another of her descendants. None of them are available in her gallery on my tree, though one does show as her profile photo (but does not show in the gallery).

I've been off and on with Ancestry, but I've used the platform for over a decade. I've saved photos, stories and articles ~countless~ times successfully over the years, following the same steps I did this morning. This has never happened before today. Does anyone know if Ancestry changed anything recently, or if there's another step I now need to add? Thank you all!

Mehmed* ćosić my mistake

Chekc it out.

My family left Europe, arrived at a mid-sized city in a Northeastern state and stayed. We’re at seven generations in and around this city now.

I often open Ancestry on my phone when I have a few minutes free and search for clues for one of these sedentary ancestors. The first results are pages and pages of City Directory listings, every year for the same person on the same street for decades.

I can’t see any way to filter out City Directory listings only. I’d like to see all the rest — BMD, photos, other family trees, etc. — rather than specify one category at a time. But I cannot scroll through dozens of pages of the same City Directory listings for every person before getting to any other records.

Is there a solution? Thank you for any ideas!

Ancestry only prints the part of the tree you can see on screen, so I'm building something for that.

You export your tree as a GEDCOM (click the tree name, then Tree Settings, then Export tree) and load it in your browser, and it'll lay out everyone in it as one poster PDF you can take to a print shop. The plan is that your file never leaves your computer.

If you want something free right now, Gramps can draw everyone with its Graph View addon, and Complete Family Tree Viewer and Topola work in the browser. Most of them start from one person though, or get hard to read once the tree is big. Family Tree Builder has an all-in-one chart but it's on the paid plan.

It's not out yet. There'll be a free preview with a watermark and the full-size file will be paid.

If you want to hear when it's ready, the waitlist is at https://wholetreepress.com

It makes no sense; most or all nobility that I can find in Western Europe are eurasian at the most. Mytrueancestry is listing Robert Dudley as a very-AsianO1a1a1b1b. Most other sources say that he is a more-logical R1b. Any ideas?

Is this an official forum?

It’s almost impossible to get actual customer service from Ancestry. Some semi-anonymous chatter (are they all bots) says it has raised a ticket and gives you a number, but denies that there’s any way of tracking the number and says they definitely won’t contact you.

Apparently you can just randomly check the site yourself to see if something gets fixed.

This is the most insane bug tracking I have every seen! Or is it all a joke?

Been doing Ancestry for nearly a decade and I love the new update they pushed out - my results are more accurate and labeled correctly thankfully now ( rather than putting my indigenous origins as Mexico / Mexican, yes - there's a difference) - I love the stickers and that you are able to download them. This is definitely one of their best updates yet. They've refined these so much over the years and they have improved on accuracy, as I have all the records to prove my origins, rather than their DNA estimations.

my region stickers - https://i.imgur.com/Ft9vBMR.png

Is anyone else having problems connecting to Ancestry.co.uk? Is there scheduled downtime I've missed the warning for? Photo is the result I get for any Ancestry pages I try to open.

I believe this is a Croatian marriage registry for a marriage on Nov 26, 1849. In the second column, with names of the two people marrying, there appear to be later dates next to the husband and wife. Would these have been put in at those later dates? What would they signify? Dates of death of each person added when they died? About half of the entries have them, though some of them only have a later date for one of the people.

Earlier this week, we hosted an AMA on the 2026 AncestryDNA Origins Update on r/AncestryDNA. This year’s update brought a lot of changes as we went from having 146 to 302 regions and updated our algorithm to provide more granularity to your results. ICYMI here are some of the topics we covered with Aaron, a population geneticist from Ancestry: 

How our AncestryDNA algorithm has changed: 

We upgraded how we look at your DNA. Our new algorithm directly compares your DNA against more than 295,000 reference panel samples from 302 regions for maximum accuracy.

How our Indigenous regions were created: 

Because many people living in the Americas today have mixed heritage with ancestral ties to multiple regions, we needed to take a specialized scientific approach. We isolate the specific DNA segments passed down from Indigenous ancestors to create 52 Indigenous American regions with pinpoint accuracy.

Why you may see unassigned chromosome segments: 

We evaluate your DNA across 1,001 windows.

To deliver clear, accurate results, we filter out very low-probability assignments, redistributing those tiny signals and labeling affected segments of DNA as Unassigned in your Chromosome Painter.

What will SideView 2.0 include: 

SideView 2.0 introduces three major scientific enhancements:

1. Regions by Grandparent: See which regions and what amount you inherited from each of your grandparents, without them needing to take a test.
2. Parental side labels for more matches: Uses "matches of matches" to group your DNA into clear maternal and paternal sides.
3. Clearer Close Matches: Labels close matches with their parental side using targeted match data.

We hope you find this year’s AncestryDNA Origins Update helpful! These updates should help you discover new stories or affirm your research that you have collected on Ancestry. What has this year’s update helped you find about your family history? Let us know!

Does anyone have any idea where the last name Rischak originates from? An ancestor of mine who lived in Germany had it but I’m pretty sure it’s of Eastern European origin. Does anyone know where in Eastern Europe it could be from?

I was super active on Ancestry for a few years a few years ago. Paid membership. Newspaper.com, Find a grave. Everything. Then I reached the end of the internet (aka my family tree in greece 1 generation...) and took a pause.

And now you won't let me do ANYTHING without buying a monthly subscription again? And shame on me for not doing PDFs because I cannot see anything that I linked (not uploaded) from partners or their own archives.

They expect people to pay monthly FOREVER to look at their stuff? And for $300 a year?!?!?

Rant Over. Tell me what I am missing as a workaround...