My parents had such similar ethnicity results that I really had a hard time figuring out which side was which, but once I did correctly assign parentage, the Match Separator confirmed many, many matches that I was uncertain of (so many people do not have trees), so it was a big help to me. Even though checking a match manually to see if it matched others usually works pretty well, the Separator saves a lot of time. I found it to be accurate when compared to my known relatives.

Thanks for this. FYI, I just found a match that Ancestry has labeled as Paternal, but then Ancestry's Thrulines for that same match shows the Common Ancestor being on the Maternal side. It's a distant match (only 9 cM-1 segment), but still it shows that two of their tools are not communicating, or that DNA matching is overriding thrulines when there is a discrepancy. I'm surprised this match is not labeled as unassigned. I see you had a similar situation.

This feature was a great help to me. Since I don’t have DNA tests for my parents, it helped me confirm the maternal & paternal side, based on the side it placed known cousins that had taken the DNA test.

Catching the replay. Very interesting.

I discovered that some of my cousins, both paternal and maternal sides, have taken Ancestry DNA test. It was fun to see them listed on the correct sides.

A very interesting talk on Ancestry Parental Matches, thanks Andy. A prediction for a person who's DNA I manage, leaves much to be desired! - Born in Guyana, his paternal line beyond his father is unknown. He has a number of DNA 1st-3rd cousins who are obviously related to him paternally, (347-67 cm) and allare equally puzzled by their same ancestral connection. They are all shown as 'Unassigned' . Therefore, I believe that rather than using DNA , Ancestry may rely upon tree entries of others to decide Parent 1/Parent 2. However, those cousins are all identified as having very high African ethnicity, which is not applicable to the maternal line, yet all shown as 'Unassigned'. It is very strange that such a marked difference in ethnicity seems to have no bearing on the parental prediction by Ancestry!

Gold! Thanks for this video! I see a note for the 164 unassigned "Update in Progress". Since my other post one more person was added to Parent2. Now on the same page its showing the ethnic breakdown so I figured I should look into that. Parent1 is 1% Southern Japanese, Parent2 is 6% Southern Japanese. So I looked at the matches for Parent 1 and 2. I found them to be mixed. I suspect the mothers side is where the 6% Southern Japanese is from, but this must be wrong??? I sent messages to the matches asking questions and only received one replied. I think at this point I need to wait for more updates.

New follower here! What a surprise to see Devon and Cornwall come up on the screen,I live in Cornwall lol. The parental lines have been very accurate for me I just wish it would show me what side I am on for the other person! I have resorted to messaging some people to ask and it has been super helpful.

Combining DNA cousin matches from other websites using clustering and DNA painter tools. These tools are frustratingly not available on ancestry. I had worked out the four major lines for my parents. Ancestry placed all four lines on my mother's side and nothing on my father's side! I am not impressed.

Thank you for this video. I was so confused by the "both sides." I have only one "2nd cousin" listed so far in that category. I don't know this person. They haven't been active for years and I haven't yet figured out where our branches join. It's a very small tree with about four generations. Almost all the maybe twenty people are private with no dates. Only one person is identified by name and I don't have anyone with the sir name in my tree. Not even close. It has to be on my father's side. He carried a lot of secrets and he and all his siblings have long past away. My father has seven KNOWN children with four women. One who was adopted out at birth. I thank God for Ancestry for bringing her into my life just a few years ago! I'm curious about this unknown "both sides" relative.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with this new tool. My experience is that it is still experimental. My four grandparents are very different, but then their families were endogamous. So, for me, it is very easy to make family clusters. I have come across clusters were 95% are one parent but 2 or 3 matches allocated to the other parent. My guess was that they may be related both sides, or wrong. I have also had matches with a common ancestor where everyone were paternal but one match was labelled as "maternal". When Ancestry asked for feedback, I let them know about this case of all matches from my grandfather with a common ancestor, except one "maternal match" from the same ancestor. Not sure how this match could be related to my grandmom, but I conceded that such match could be at least both sides. My suggestion is to check in your common ancestors matches, and you may see an "odd" one related to the other parent.

In my case, or at least, my dad's case (Polish side), I'm not sure if this tool is really useful. My dad has ~5,600 matches, 331 of which are on his maternal side (all 5th to 8th cousins, save for 1 4th-6th cousin), and only 46 paternal matches (all 5th-8th cousins). He has maybe 10-15 maternal 1st and 2nd cousins that have tested on Ancestry, and they all show up as unassigned. He has less than 5 paternal 1st and 2nd cousins, which show up on paternal. None of the surnames in the trees are familiar. To quote a post I saw on the reddit, "I think my grandfather came from an egg!". My mom (German and Italian) gets roughly 4,300 total (half and half on each side). 2,844 on the German (maternal) and only 667 on the Paternal (Italian), with 739 unassigned. Only 1 surname on the Italian side is my great-grandmother's. At least my mom's side is assigning the 1st-4th cousins. Common communities are irrelevant on both sides, as the vast majority of my ancestors came to the US between 1906 and 1914, with one or two around 1880. For example, not really sure "Early Pennsylvania Settlers" is accurate when my maternal great-grandparents immigrated in 1914. Seems to be picking up the 5th-8th cousins.

Why can't we have chromosome matching on Ancestry???? I would be happy to pay more for the option to use it.

For the matches which are assigned, I find it very accurate based on shared DNA matches, but like you I was perplexed about how some matches which are labelled as ‘unassigned’ when it appears obvious from the match lists which side they should be assigned too. It would be really interesting to know what kind of algorithm Ancestry are using. I don’t understand their reluctance to release a chromosome browser; it would definitely help me to solve the mystery of my great grandmother’s heritage, which is proving tricky to fully piece together, even with many DNA matches from her side of the family. Does your mother have family from Australia Andy? ‘Victoria, European and British settlers’ is one of my communities as well but I am Victorian so no surprise in my case, haha.

Mine has been spot on.

My Maternal matches which were chosen by Ancestry's algorithm are mostly incorrect! Over 4,000! To be sure, I chose Maternal Parent, then Common Ancestors and viewed 68 matches on my maternal line with Common Ancestors. ALL except one ( 1) Common Ancestor was on my Paternal line! Is this usual? Is there a problem with the algorithm? When I edited the " Edit Relationship" and changed the Maternal to Paternal, they still show up on my Maternal Matches. Is there a fix?

I was able to resolve the errors in the assignments to paternal and maternal lines by clicking on "edit parent". Now they are assigned to the proper lines.

I am having some challenges with the new feature. I have one match (of over 30,000) that is "both," my mother. My parents were born on different continents, yet both share European ancestry, from different parts of Europe. I suppose there could have been some crossover, at some point in the far distant past, but if so, how can she be the only "both"? I have some unassigned people still, fewer than 2,000, but the vast majority are already assigned to one parent or the other, not "both," even as my mother is listed as "both." I know that it's possible that they will be assigned to "both" during an update. But shouldn't *all* my relatives be listed as "both" if my own mother is indeed both maternal and paternal? My "shared matches" with my mother have always been quite limited on Ancestry, but now they make even less sense. Ancestry says I have 28 shared chromosomes with my mother. Yet other sites with advanced chromosome browsing features say we share 22 chromosomes. We need far better "chromosome browsing" and comparison tools on Ancestry to rule out possible errors while interpreting data on endogamous relationships/ancestors/family.

I don't know if you will mention this later on... but do you think that it says Both, because for one the siblings it said parent 1, and the other two said parent 2 (at least that's what I think I saw before you changed parent 1/2 to colors), so they might be saying oh.... there is parent 1 and parent 2, so must be from both sides, even though in this case parent 1 and parent 2 are the same person?

Great video, and I don't think this is a bad tool, it's actually really interesting, but I do think we with every algorithm there will always be some errors so don't take any reading as 100% the truth (though I think assigning close match cousins to Both Sides is more than this, it's a mistake, and I'd go further than saying it's just a labelling error as it doesn't happen consistently on all your accounts, if I understood you correctly). What you presented is amazing, as most of us don't have access to do many relatives' results, but I wish you'd also give and looked at some more distant matches. I've recently finished going through all my grandpa's matches, doing a kind of experiment assigning all of them to one of his 4 grandparent clusters (and a few other groups that I'd previously created from making a Leeds Chat, rightly or wrongly (and I know there will be some errors in assigning shared matches of matches, even shared matches of shared matches to groups), but I just wanted to see where this went. This parental assignment came out whilst I've been doing this and it made me wonder if this can be used to identify some distant false matches, or at least potential false matches. For the vast majority of matches all shared matches fall into one parent or unassigned, which for the most part match up with the cluster groups I've assigned them to, but in some cases they have both material and paternal shared matches. Whilst this isn't impossible I think it's unlikely, mainly due to the fact that my grandpa was born in Ireland and most of his matches are from those that emigrated (it's possible two distant cousins from the two sides of the family married having emigrated to the same place, but it's not that likely, there are other reasons for it to be unlikely as well that I won't go into here, and my family tree is quite extensive and I've not found any occurrence of this happening). I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

Just an update and question. My daughter in law results now show 9 matches parent 1 and 19 parent 2. Still the top match is only 12CM. I really need the top matches to be checked. So does anyone else only see lower matches? Or just random bad luck again?

My father have one 4-6 particular cousin on maternal side, and my mom have the same 4-6 particular cousin unasigned, what is that means??? Why my father have that cousin asigned and my mother don't

I found someone that was a close cousin on paternal, and they were labeled as both, and I started digging on her other side, and there was a branch going back 8 generations on her other side, that matched my other side, and I would have never realized it if it had not been labeled both. I feel like if it says both, and they only have 1 DNA segment, then it would be a bigger problem, unless parents are so closely related that they share the exact same segment in the exact same spot on the chromosome.

My 6 kits are equivalent to yours for accuracy. You mentioned the benefit of a chromosome browser here.... I don't quite understand why Ancestry resist doing this. They clearly have the data as they are using it to match and for side view, so why not let us see it? I'd be happy to pay a small fee (like MH or FTDNA) to get access to advanced matching

I need to find out if my older sister by eighteen years older may actually be my mother instead. Her husband is passed, and she is the only one living. So what do I do to prove she might be my real mother by using Ansestry DNA kits and which kit should I use?

In this feature 2 of my 3 kids and I are listed as my mother's paternal matches only which I believe to be genetically impossible. My youngest son is listed as both sides which is correct. My husband has also tested and he is not one of my mother's matches on any of the DNA sites so there is no endogamy. Many of her maternal first cousins are listed as both and many paternal matches are listed as maternal even though I have tested several of these on Gedmatch and they do not match any of the paternal matches. So for now I am just ignoring the maternal & paternal match feature until they fix it.

For me, this tool was actually fairly accurate. My maternal side has 42k matches, my paternal side has 21k matches, and I only have 2.3k unassigned and 1 match on both sides. Everyone I’ve looked at specifically is on the correct side. The irony is that I know from research that one sibling of one of my paternal ancestors took a sharp turn when entering the US, went to the Deep South, and their descendants ended up marrying into many families related to my mother. So I actually have quite a few people who should show as related on both sides and don’t. 😂

At first I was delighted to see this tool but when checking it out I found many errors. For example, it shows my mother's niece on my Paternal side and several 2nd or 3rd cousins have also been assigned to the wrong parent side. So obviously there is a big glitch in their system. How can I notify Ancestry of these errors?

This is fairly relevant to what I am looking at, at the moment. It is telling me that my father's side has some Welsh, and my mother's doesn't, but I have known Welsh in my mother's side. Also, I have 2nd cousins in my father's paternal side, and both my mother's paternal and maternal, which seems to be extremely handy, for quickly dividing up all of my matches into one of each of my 4 grandparents. I am having an issue, with some people that I have no shared matches with, with these close known cousins, so I assume that they must fit into my father's maternal side, but it has come up that they are apparently from my mother's side, but don't have any shared connections. It seems strange. Although, at one stage, when I was trying to match parent 1 and parent 2 with my mum and dad, it may have put this group of people with the wrong side. It's a bit difficult to work out. I should say, I am expecting some unknowns in my dad's maternal side, because working out by paper, there seems to be unknown father's for a great grandfather, and for a great great grandfather, in this side of my family. I'm trying to find who these two missing great (& great great) grandfathers are. I'm hoping that Ancestry may imrpove, to showing us which segments each person matches on. If we could compare which segments match, we might be able to identify where in the tree people are matched, a little better.

Oh it’s accurate and I did do 23 and Me and ancestry DNA 🧬 they both came back as the same thing

My mother and I and my son have tested on Ancestry. I have only 23 Maternal matches, 180 Paternal matches, and 4,919 Unassigned. This is not helpful. My parents were born in Germany, so this is possibly a result of not many Germans testing with Ancestry. What confuses me is that there are Unassigned matches that I have in my tree as maternal cousins.

After looking through my DNA matches, I noticed that people who were definitely Maternal matches listed as Paternal. So it's not a perfect science yet.

Hi, can you please go over why dna matches might have no shared ethnicity with each other. I have multiple matches from around the North Sea and I’m south Asian. We share no ethnicity when compared.

Mine is very accurate, my father is Croatian and German and my mother is British/Scottish and French/Swiss. Even though the Swiss and German would have been easily confused, it appears that everyone was assigned to the correct side. I also have about 5000 people(accurately identified before added) in my public family tree, so that probably helped as well.

Andy, my son appears as both sides for my kit.

Since Ancestry doesn't show shared matches below 20 cM, it would be interesting to me how accurate these assignments are?

It was completely wrong on one of my wife's relatives. It assigned a 6% ethnicity to one parent, but other relatives (one of whom should have had the same %) of that parent had 0% in their own tests.

I had gone through all my (& the people I manage) DNA matches over the last few years. Have spent hours & hours, days, weeks, etc doing this. In one update from Ancestry that was completely wiped out with how they thought my DNA was split. Maybe half were correct but the greater amount were put in the Unassigned group. I messaged Ancestry and they can't undo this. So not happy at all with this.

YES! Thank you! I posted a question on the Ancestry forum asking if anyone thought it was accurate. I received 5 or 6 replies it was accurate. What I see is confusing, there is only one 3rd cousin match which we believe is on the fathers side and they are not selected. She has 4 matches on Parent1 and 10 matches on Parent2, the best match is 12cM. It also seems to indicate one parent is European, when they are both Japanese.

I had already identified which parent was parent 1 and which was parent 2 based on the ethnicity split (I knew most if not all of the Welsh ethnicity was on my maternal side). So Ancestry used that info with this new feature. The degree of accuracy seems quite high. The vast majority of those matches that I'd placed on my tree were correctly identified. Those which were "misidentified" were almost entirely those where I'd found a distant common ancestor. I think it's possible at least that in these cases we are actually related on both maternal and paternal sides and I happen to have discovered one of the connections, but the shared DNA is on the alternate side. I have 9667 matches identified as paternal, 9703 as maternal, and only 1 identified as both. So a pretty even split 🤓

I find the 2 categories very accurate. I'd researched 10-15 generations of my 100% German ancestry before getting the DNA test.

I don’t have this feature on my ancestry, do you know why?

Tons of errors for me. My cousins (moms brother children) both tested and have the same biological parents and one is showing maternal and the other is showing paternal. Knowing that you won’t get exactly 50% from each parent, I started digging into their mom’s family history. I have not been able to connect where we could meet, but her mothers surname is a common name on my paternal grandmothers lines and they had very few families that came here and lots of endogamy, so I’m confident we connect somewhere. But oddly, she is not a match for me.

I have 18,011 matches on my paternal, 19,671 maternal matches, and 7,910 matches that are unassigned. I have no one that is assigned by ancestry as both.

Thanks for the video. So far, I'd say that *most* of Ancestry's chosen sides have matched reality, but a few seem questionable. Two that seem questionable are labeled by Ancestry as both, but I don't believe they are. However, I think there's a problem with how Ancestry sees "Both", or at least with how they present these matches. I re-labeled my two questionable "Both" matches to "Maternal", which they clearly are, even if they *might* also be paternal matches. This is what Ancestry now tells me about these matches if I click on the exclamation point next to my new label of "Maternal": "We think this match is on your Both side, but you labeled them Maternal. Do you want to keep your label or update it?" First of all, there is no such thing as a "Both" side. That would make three sides, and we only have two. But I find it a bit annoying that not only does Ancestry question my designation, even though "Both" means I'm right -- I'm just not also calling the match "Paternal" -- they print the word "Maternal" in red, just to be sure I don't miss how wrong I am. But here's the thing. With the first of these two matches, I have about 180 shared matches. ALL of them are on my mother's side. In fact, all of them are on my mother's father's side, and all but one of them are on my mother's paternal grandmother's side. The one exception happens to be the son of my grandfather's full brother, so a direct descendant of both of my grandfather's parents. The other questionable "Both" match doesn't have nearly as many shared matches with me -- only 27 -- but again they're on my Maternal side. In fact, they are on exactly the same side as the other match, even to including my grandfather's nephew as a shared match. I also have one Paternal match that Ancestry insists is a Maternal match instead. This one I could accept as *possibly* being a "Both" match, but not as Maternal rather than Paternal. (1) This match shows common ancestors on my father's side. They're my paternal grandfather's paternal grandparents, but my match is two generations further down. So they're my 2nd great grandparents and his 4th. (2) Out of 14 shared matches, 13 are on my father's side. Not only that, they are either descended from these same 2nd great grandparents of mine, or else someone slightly further up the tree (like my 3rd great grandparents, or in at least one case my 4th great grandparents). (3) Only a single match is on my mother's side, but the location of this match that Ancestry insists in Maternal (and *not* also Paternal) is what makes me think "Both" is actually possible here. My parents are from two different locations. My father was from Pennsylvania, and my mother was from Mississippi. They met when he was in the US Air Force. Anyway, my match lives in Mississippi, and his paternal side shows a long presence in Mississippi. However, my match's maternal grandfather was born in Pennsylvania but died in Georgia. That's apparently the generation on the maternal side that moved south. Anyway, I don't share a lot of DNA with this match -- just 12 cM in a single segment. But Ancestry should understand this: a match is not on a certain side because of shared DNA, but because of shared *ancestry*. Granted, shared DNA is *evidence* of shared ancestry, but the connection is just the way I said it. In other words, even if my single shared segment with this match turns out to have been handed down by one a shared maternal ancestor, it's still clear this match and I are related on my paternal side. Clearly, both of us do share DNA with matches on this side, and that is because we are indeed related on my Paternal side. (Just possibly on my Maternal side, too.)

Other than obviously the unassigned, I've found no errors in mine.

I was raised by a Mexican women and mixed African American father and it says the Hispanic side is my father and the African American side is my mother’s side…also I recognize some relatives from what they say is my (maternal side) as cousins from my fathers side but I only recognize one person from my (paternal side) that I know as my mothers family… I don’t know what to think with the fact that they have thousands of cousins split up in these categories… most of which I don’t know🤷🏽‍♀️🤨

So may mistakes with this very frustrating even when you correct it is highlighted in Red my parent are from very different ethnic groups

@Family History Fanatics, Mine isn't accurate at all. I've identified my German DNA on my Paternal Side, yet the Ancestry tool puts my Paternal Surnames on my Maternal side.

Ancestry identified my maternal side genes which conform to known family information. One, only one, potential female cousin on each of Ancestry and 23 and Me share the geographic locations with my unknown paternal side. (And they know each other.) Unfortunately, I am 82, and none of the possible 5 fathers (first generation in the US) are alive, nor have any of their other descendants done a DNA test.

For the most part I find ancestry to be very accurate with my matches, except the unassigned did not make a lot of sense as to why some didn't match up correctly because they are close matches. However Ancestry has said that they still are working on fine tuning the program. I never expected this new program to be accurate. Ancestry is assigning ethnicity to our children that neither I nor their father have. We are all tested on Ancestry. So even that program has some issues.

I have a question. I'm adopted, and have someone helping me. She's insisting that parent 1 is always maternal, no matter what, and parent 2 is always paternal. I disagree, and it seems according to you I am correct.

Wonder if ancestry will ever add a maternal and paternal line

This tool was so inaccurate for me. I compared my beta results to my parents actual ancestry DNA results and they were way off. Even the last names it gave for one of my parents trees (in the beta) were completely wrong.

Coming from endogamy, I found that the numbers of Parent 1 and Parent 2 were quite few (~1K and ~3K). There were actually very few categorized as Both. The vast majority were Unassigned. I thought Ancestry was doing some magic I could not fathom...but really wanted to believe the matches were correctly assigned to the Parent. Now I am wondering whether I can trust Sideview at all. What a disappointment.

I think the son is showing as unassigned simply because he's a new match - my new matches appear to be unassigned all the time. So my "guess" is that the algorithm just hasn't processed them yet.

How do I know who is parent one and who is parent two? I can’t figure out my maternal side and paternal side

I think they are unassigned because they don't have the tool yet. it won't be officially released until february.

I have a cousin who I definitely know I am related by my mother (parent 1) but she shows up as parent 2. WTH?

My parents have completely different ancestry. My mothers family has been in North America since before it was America. My fathers family immigrated from Germany in the mid-late 1800’s. My paternal grandparents were 1st Gen Americans. For the most part the suggestions for maternal/paternal have been correct with one huge exception. My mother’s youngest brother and his children come up as paternal matches. They match with other maternal cousins and do not match with other paternal matches. I have no idea why ancestry has this particular group misattributed to my paternal line.

My results are fairly accurate, but Ancestry has some mixed up. I man, they labelled some as paternal, but their profile pic is under my maternal matches. I have nobody at all on both sides apart from my children.

I can see this going up from here. Separating from great-grandparents and so forth.

I have 4 thousand unassigned, but think considering my parents both descend from royalty, it's likely they are distantly related

I looked at Ancestry's explanation of how they assign matches to a side. They say: "If we can link at least 90% of the DNA segments you share with a match to one side of your family, we assign the match to that parent." Obviously, they don't really need this high a percentage to assign a match to a given parent -- they just need that high a percentage to rule out any assignment to the other parent, as well. Again, I think this shows an inability to really grasp that "Both" isn't a side at all. It would make more sense to use a lower threshold for determining whether a match is on Side1 or Side2 -- and they *must* do that with "Both" matches, since there's no way they could link 90% of shared DNA segments to *both* sides unless the parents were very closely related.

My parents are drastically different. My father is a Caucasian guy from Missouri and my mom is from Mexico. But it claims that my father is also from Mexico and ancestry doesn’t pull up any of my relatives from my dad’s side. Only my moms side…..

Ancestry wants to label Dad's sister as "Maternal"! Mom and Dad are 1C1R.

Wow, that did not work well for you at all, regarding the high number of unassigned, close matches. I am surprised to see that as it really works quite well for me, so this is very interesting. There does seem to be a delay in assigning matches, so that can be at least part of the explanation, if the matches are just recently added.

I was in an Orphanage and adopted...but now I know who my biological Father and half brother is ..doing my DNA has helped me so much ..my biological Mum is Irish...so this is useless as it says both my parents are Irish they are not...my Father and Brother have past ..my Grandparents and ancestors came from Austro Hungarian Empire/Easy Europe and Russia....So they have it totally incorrect...as many Irish have done their DNA ancestry have guessed!!

For highly endogamous populations, such as Ashkenazi Jews with recent eastern European ancestry, this "tool" is almost useless.

What I don't understand is you have paper trails with Ancestry. You have the proof that shows your Indigenous Ancestry and yet they don't show your Indigenous percentage. I took a 23xandme and yes they show a small percentage of my Indigenous DNA.

It's not completely accurate. It assigned 1% North Italian to my Mom which she was not. All my Italian was from my Dad. I have heard others having even more severe issues with this being incorrect for them.

It's not, and I told them so.

For me it has been very inaccurate. I have kept to my own parent labels because Ancestry has made a real mess of this new feature. Don't rely on it being accurate!

This is too much like Algebra to me. Can not following.

It doesn’t believe that my paternal half sister and two paternal cousins are paternal, it warns both although there is no connection between paternal and maternal in real life and my paternal matches mentioned don’t share maternal matches ie it doesn’t work at the simplest level 😂