As first reported on Monday (May 20) on this blog, Ancestry has been tinkering around with a new search tool for their autosomal DNA customers. CeCe Moore has posted up on her blog the rest of the story about why this function has been popping in and out of our DNA results.
"I asked Stephen Baloglu, Ancestry.com's Director of Product Marketing, for clarification in regard to exactly what has been going on with this feature the last couple of days, as well as the time frame for a full roll-out. He explained, "We had been doing some isolated early release testing of the new ability to search matches by surname and birth location. It's very exciting, but the development is not complete. We put it in the wild for a small, random portion of AncestryDNA customers to get a sense of how it is working. We expect to roll out the feature in late June/early July to all DNA customers along with a few modifications to what has already been seen."
You can read her full account of this story on the Your Genetic Genealogist blog at
http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/2013/05/sneak-preview-of-ancestrydnas-new.html
On a somewhat related note we still have NOT seen or heard any additional word from FTDNA re: upload of the AncestryDNA raw results to their site. To many of us this is not a surprise. The only entity in this world that moves slower is the U.S. Government (oh hell, bet I will get audited for that comment).
As soon as I hear something more definitive, I will pass it along here on the FRB blog.
