02 February 2018

MyHeritage DNA Advances

I'm impressed. My Heritage is moving fast in the fast changing world of genetic genealogy.
Earlier this week FamilyTreeWebinars, now part of MyHeritage, aired a webinar on MyHeritage's DNA Matching Technology which explains everything you need to know about using the service, including that you can upload autosomal DNA test data from other companies to them for free.
Watch at https://familytreewebinars.com/download.php?webinar_id=801/.
The major new announcement in the webinar was the soon to be released chromosome browser enabling comparison of up to seven matches.

Since the webinar a feature in beta has been added giving a perspective on the MyHeritage DNA dataset.
Here's the list of the top five ethnicities, by per cent, in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the USA according to MyHeritage DNA users' data.
EthnicityAustCanGBIreNZUSA
English47.038.850.015.253.539.9
Scandinavian30.329.630.411.635.535.1
North and West European29.631.528.18.327.835.1
Irish, Scottish, and Welsh21.622.233.284.722.515.7
Iberian13.522.214.210.212.720.3

I've ordered these in the table by median across the set. You'll notice that the sum for any country is more than 100%; we all have a diverse ancestry. The dataset is not reflective of the ancestry for the country as a whole, just those with DNA data in the MyHeritage collection.
Also since the webinar it's announced that contacting DNA Matches is now free to all MyHeritage DNA users — both managers of MyHeritage DNA kits and uploaders of DNA data from other companies. With one million DNA clients on the site everyone who has taken a test should seriously consider transferring data. I found a new match to an identifiable cousin when I did.

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