23andMe Data Hack

Genealogy website 23andMe is one of the latest companies to suffer a data hack.  

Judy Russell at The Legal Genealogist has sent out a timely reminder about the importance of being security conscious after the breach was reported to users of the website.

So far, personal information about roughly a million users has been offered for sale on the so-called Dark Web. The data offered included full names, birth years, location information and more. As yet it is unknown exactly how many accounts were accessed or how much data was harvested, but currently there is no indication that any raw DNA data was hacked.  The incident is still under investigation.

The success of this breach highlights the danger of using the same password across multiple websites.  The story is that hackers collected passwords associated with specific email addresses that had already been hacked at other sites and then reused them at 23andMe to see if they worked.  For many, they did.

So if, like me, you are guilty of sometimes using a generic password on different websites, it is time to have a think about changing habits and updating your passwords.

Read Judy's full blog post,  Judy G. Russell, “Change your password!,” The Legal Genealogist

 

Ancestry DNA Update 2023

Recently, Ancestry again updated their DNA Ethnicity Estimates, so I have again been studying my new, updated results.  I have commented before that with every ethnicity estimate, my results seem to move further from my family tree as I know it.  This time actually moved a little back towards what my existing tree leads me to expect.

The table below shows my ethnicity estimates over the years since I first tested.  It is worth noting that in 2018 and 2019 the Irish ethnicity represented Ireland and Scotland combined.  According to my researched Family Tree, my father's family is 100% English back to the early 1700s and further and is primarily from the Essex/Suffolk area. My father's parents married in England before they came out to Australia.  My mother's family is at mostly English with some Irish (a Great-Grandmother), German (Great-Great-Grandfather) and Scottish (Great-Great-Grandmother) mixed in.  Most of her lines arrived in Australia in the 1840s and 1850s, and the various nationalities intermarried out here.  This is not reflected in my ethnicity estimate. 

	Sep 18	Sep 19	Sep 21	Apr 22	Sep 22	Sep 23
England	65	78	54	45	33	43
Ireland	22	10	2	2	1	0
Scotland	0	0	33	32	38	32
Germanic Europe	8	3	0	0	4	5
Ivory Coast/Ghana	2	1	1	2	2	2
Sweden/Denmark	2	5	0	2	19	15
Norway	1	2	9	14	0	0
Mali		1	1	0	0	0
Wales				3	3	3

The breakdown of my maternal DNA and paternal DNA also shows some unexpected results.  All the Sweden/Denmark DNA comes from my father’s side, as does a small amount from Scotland and Germany.  My Irish ancestry has disappeared completely from my mother’s ethnicity.  And I have never known where that 2% Ivory Coast/Ghana comes from.

Maternal	Paternal	Total
England 14%	England 29%	England 43%
Scotland 28%	Scotland 4%	Scotland 32%
Germanic Europe 3%	Germanic Europe 2%	Germanic Europe 5%
Ivory Coast/Ghana 2%	Ivory Coast/Ghana 0%	Ivory Coast/Ghana 2%
Sweden/Denmark 0%	Sweden/Denmark 15%	Sweden/Denmark 15%
Wales 3%	Wales 0%	Wales 3%

Ultimately, we need to remember that these numbers are estimates only and can still be quite inaccurate.  More important to most who are actively researching are their cousin matches, people whom the DNA tests show are being related. I have cousin matches on all the major branches of my tree intersecting at various grandparents, great grandparents and further back, so for several generations back I am reasonably confident my tree is accurate - or as accurate as it can be.