We update both your ancestral regions and journeys several times a year.

But updates to journeys don’t usually happen at the same time or in the same way as region updates. Also, each update to journeys only affects AncestryDNA members who are part of that journey.

Journeys are large groups of AncestryDNA members who share lots of DNA matches with each other and likely descended from a common group or movement of people. We usually update journeys in large batches, based on geography (“Southern United States” or “Sweden,” for example) or population (“African Americans” or “Jews in Eastern Europe”). 
 

What prompts an update?

We update a batch of journeys when we have a lot more test results and family trees in our database than we did when we first identified those journeys. More people taking tests and filling out trees means more DNA matches, which helps us detect even more journeys than we could before. 

Here's an example. In 2017, we released a single Philippines & Guam journey. When we first identified this journey, we had about 1 million test results in our AncestryDNA database. Three years later, we retired our old Philippines & Guam journey and replaced it with 16 new journeys we’d identified in the Philippines and a separate journey in Guam. We could do this because we had about 15,000,000 results in our database. 

Journeys may be replaced

When we update journeys in a certain area, we retire the old journeys and replace them with new journeys that get even more specific. One journey often becomes multiple, more-specific journeys. 

Sometimes, a few people will lose a journey and not get a replacement in an update. But most people will get an even better view of the places and people who made up part of their past.