How to Use ancestry in a Sentence

ancestry

noun
  • She claims to be able to trace her ancestry all the way back to the earliest settlers.
  • They claim to be of noble ancestry.
  • Why and how this has come to be has an ancestry of its own.
    — Maya Jasanoff, The New Yorker, 2 May 2022
  • The mother of two, who has ancestry from three area tribes, fell through the cracks both in life and in death.
    — Gillian Flaccus, ajc, 29 Apr. 2022
  • The school’s first pupils in the 1870s were white, often of German ancestry.
    — Jacques Kelly, Baltimore Sun, 2 July 2022
  • Some breeds of dogs in East Asia appear to have retained this ancestry to the present day.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 29 June 2022
  • These tests can teach users more about their ancestry or health.
    — Clare Duffy, CNN, 25 Mar. 2025
  • And everything — the beetles, the rice plant, and you and I — share a common ancestry.
    — David L. Coddon, San Diego Union-Tribune, 17 Mar. 2022
  • The group goes beyond the first daughters whose ancestry is traced to a village or town.
    — Nnamdi Madichie, Quartz, 29 Apr. 2021
  • In 2000, following the results of an ancestry test, Adams took a trip to Africa.
    — Shacamree Gowdy, Chron, 16 June 2021
  • Wali has no Ukrainian ancestry and doesn’t speak the language.
    — Shafi Musaddique, The Christian Science Monitor, 22 Mar. 2022
  • None of us, or our dogs, have a more ancient ancestry than any other.
    — New York Times, 4 Oct. 2021
  • This link is one of the most puzzling ancestry findings of recent years.
    — Jennifer Raff, Scientific American, 1 May 2021
  • Most are Black and can trace their ancestry to parts of the world spanning sub-Saharan Africa through the Mediterranean.
    — Alexander Tin, CBS News, 31 Oct. 2023
  • Freeman’s ancestry traces back to the Mormon pioneers who sank roots in Mesa in the late 1870s.
    — Maritza Dominguez, The Arizona Republic, 30 Oct. 2024
  • Pisces is your fourth house of home, family, ancestry, and land.
    — Kirah Tabourn, Condé Nast Traveler, 25 Feb. 2023
  • That’s good news for the roughly one in ten U.S. citizens who claim Irish ancestry.
    — Larry Olmsted, Forbes.com, 8 Apr. 2025
  • The tool is available to anyone who wants to find a DNA match or discover their ancestry.
    — María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2022
  • Customers send vials of their saliva to 23andMe for results on ancestry and health.
    — Ella Gonzales, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 7 Apr. 2025
  • Number one on the list is Germany, where 20.2% of people claim ancestry.
    — Zachary Smith, cleveland, 29 Dec. 2022
  • For them, herbalism is a way of reclaiming their body and ancestry.
    — Celeste Polanco, refinery29.com, 7 Sep. 2021
  • Genes do not stay in the lanes of common ancestry but can move much more unpredictably, like zigzagging pieces on a Plinko board.
    — Ben Crair, The New Yorker, 15 July 2022
  • The researchers made no mention of people of African ancestry.
    — Melba Newsome, Scientific American, 12 Nov. 2021
  • Researchers studied the skulls and determined most of them were of African ancestry.
    — CBS News, 11 Apr. 2022
  • If the police hacked into one of these ancestry databases, that would be a problem.
    — Stuart Miller, Los Angeles Times, 22 Nov. 2022
  • Three of the group’s members are targeted by the Nazis owing to their Jewish ancestry.
    — Vulture, 13 Nov. 2023
  • The family goes to South Carolina to learn about their ancestry, but the trek gets tense when Winter brings Jah.
    — Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2021
  • In his narrative, Montour was a woman of French ancestry who was born in the 1680s in Canada.
    — Katrina Gulliver, JSTOR Daily, 1 Feb. 2025
  • And realizing that these women, this culture, this practice is actually a part of my ancestry, too.
    — Demicia Inman, VIBE.com, 17 Apr. 2025
  • There are many ways to live overseas, from golden visa programs (which give residency by investment) to citizenship by ancestry.
    — Laura Begley Bloom, Forbes.com, 26 Apr. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ancestry.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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