Ancestry.com
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limited accuracy and regional blindness of its ethnicity estimates
While AncestryDNA offers a polished interface and a large user base, I feel that i have to express serious concerns about the limited accuracy and regional blindness of its ethnicity estimates — especially for individuals with deep, layered ancestry in the Mediterranean, Near East, and Asia Minor. Despite my well-documented family roots in areas such as Asia Minor, a specific island in Greece, and the broader Eastern Mediterranean, the results I received were overly generalized and failed to capture the complexity of my heritage. Rich and historically significant populations like Levantines, Iranians, Armenians, Sephardic,and North Africans were entirely absent or collapsed into vague labels like “Greece & Albania” or “Aegean.” In stark contrast, third-party tools such as GEDmatch — as well as ethnicity interpretation engines on other platforms — identified clear genetic signals from Lebanon, Iran, Armenia, the Caucasus, Italy/Sicily, Maghreb, and even trace elements from South America. These findings not only matched documented family history, but offered a multi-layered view that Ancestry failed to even approximate. Frankly, for a service of this scale and reach, such lack of resolution and regional sensitivity is not satisfied, to say the least. It risks erasing centuries of migration, diaspora, and cultural identity in favor of an oversimplified, Western-centric narrative. At this time, I cannot recommend AncestryDNA to individuals with Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, or Anatolian ancestry who are seeking serious genealogical insight.