DNA at My Heritage

Based on a recommendation over at Your Genetic Genealogist, I uploaded DNA test results to My Heritage.  This is (currently) a free service.

The site offers its own DNA testing.  They do not have a pool of customers comparable to the big three (23andMe, Family Tree DNA, and Ancestry.com/DNA), so you will not have as many matches.  There have also been questions concerning how My Heritage computes matches.

Because My Heritage has its own testing service, some people may have tested only at that particular site.  If you are looking for a recent non-parental even (which is my situation), then it's worth checking out this other database.

You never know where the missing link tested his/her DNA.  (And didn't transfer the results to any other site.)

So far, only my results are computed.  I have 45 matches at My Heritage.  For comparison, I have thousands of matches at the other sites.

My top match is probably a good one.  I like the information displayed:
-shared percentage
-total centimorgans
-longest segment
-possible range of relationship
-age of match
-direct link to match in the family tree

I don't see a chromosome browser.  Without seeing the actual shared segments, there is nothing else I can do with this match if we don't see commonality in our family trees.

When my parent's results are in, this match should appear near the top of either my mother's or my father's matches, providing more direction.

I still do not like the family tree display at My Heritage.  It explodes into siblings and spouses instead of direct ancestors and drops where you were in the tree.  The default setting displays women by the surnames of their husbands.  You can change this, but most people don't.  I don't need to see a woman's husband's name twice.  I need to see her name.

Further displeasure arrived in an email, encouraging me to add an entire branch to my tree with just a few clicks.  Folks, this is not how genealogical research is done.

Interactive Family Tree: Places of Birth

This article follows up a previous discussion of a family tree tool by Bradford F Lyon, available (free) at his site.

Places of birth is a new display option.  You can display flags of countries (for a screen shot see my blog post about ethnic calculations based on DNA) or more specific locations, such as states of the United States.

The idea is similar to My Colorful Ancestry created in an Excel spreadsheet.  The bonus of the Lyons tool is that the result is interactive.  You can choose to highlight a specific place, which then blinks to draw your attention to ancestors from that location.

Interactive places of birth family tree
Courtesy of Bradford F Lyon

Ancestors of David Lutter
Highlighting those born in Connecticut.
His ancestors were concentrated in New Jersey and New York.

Zeroing in on a place of birth can help visualize migration paths.  If you are planning a research trip, you can see at a glance which branches were in your intended destination so you can look for their records.

And for the DNA pursuits, you can quickly find an ancestor or branch that was in a specific geographic location.  Surnames, matching or not, is not enough.  You need an intersection of geography and time.

Another new feature is selecting an ancestor and then displaying the direct line of descent to the home person.

Interactive family tree to display direct line of descent
Courtesy of Bradford F Lyon

In the above screenshots, I chose my father's eighth great grandmother, Mary Chittenden (1645-1712), from Connecticut.  From there, you can display these eleven generations all the way to today, ending with the home person, my father.  The information includes their lifespan.

Genetic Communities by AncestryDNA

Genetic Communities is Ancestry.com's newest feature for DNA testers.

This is not the same as an ethnicity estimate.  Please see The DNA Geek's more elaborate explanation and discussion of Genetic Communities.

Ancestry.com's DNA test estimates my ethnicity as 56% Irish with no further breakdown.  [Living DNA provided a regional breakdown within England, but not Ireland.]

The Genetic Communities tool detects a heavy link among my DNA matches to people with roots in northern Ireland, or Ulster Irish.  The Irish is from my mother's side.  I have not determined a place of origin for most of her ancestors, but her great grandfather, Patrick Francis ODonnell (1856-1931) was from County Donegal, which is part of the region encompassed by Ulster on Ancestry's map.

The other Genetic Community was a pleasant surprise because we are out of Europe and exactly where most of my father's ancestors were in the 1700s:  New York and New Jersey.  Early Settlers of New York tended to hail from certain areas of Europe, which is reflected in my father's ethnicity estimates.  Until the Genetic Community tool, there was no DNA-based connection to New York.

When trying to find the most recent common ancestor of a DNA match, you need a geographic connection.  In the match's family tree, the focus falls on branches who lived in the the New York area.  This New York Genetic Community provides support for this approach.