We had a viewer ask us, is male DNA better than female DNA to
find ancestors? Knowing that there's some differences
between male DNA and female DNA. You would expect that hey,
one might actually be better than the other. Howdy, welcome
to Family History Fanatics where we love helping you climb
your family tree and have fun along the way. So, let's walk
through what those differences are and whether or not that is
going to affect how well you can find matches and build your
with that DNA. So to start with, we have DNA that only
males have which is Y DNA and that is passed on then from
father to son and so Y DNA can be useful in identifying that
patrilineal line. The great thing about many cultures is
that the surname is passed down from father to children as well
and so that Y DNA is attached to a surname in a lot of cases.
So, with an unknown patrilineal line, testing your Y DNA might
give you knowledge about what that surname is. So, there is
some usefulness from a genealogical standpoint. On the
other hand, it's always important to remember what
genealogical significance it is. Y DNA is only useful for
following this patrilineal line. In other words, if you
are ever going off of that to one of the mothers, then, that
YDNA is not going to be helpful at all. So, once you get back
to where you have 32 ancestors, Y DNA is only coming from one
of those. When you're back at 120 ancestors. That YDNA still
is only from one of those. So, with each generation, there's
really diminishing returns as far as what YDNA can actually
tell you and knowing that it's only on one side, you have to
have that specific question that needs to be answered in
order to use YDNA for that. On the flip side there are a
couple of bits of DNA that females have or actually have
more of than males first off is mitochondrial DNA now everybody
has mitochondrial DNA but since it is passed from mothers to
their children now like YDNA it traces a matrilineal line
unfortunately there's a couple of things that go against its
usefulness first off it's much smaller than YDNA so there's
much less variability in mitochondrial DNA than there is
in YDNA. That decreases its usefulness. Also, because most
cultures don't pass down a surname from mother to
children, there's usually not some surname that's attached to
that mitochondrial DNA and so once again, you have to have a
specific question that you need answered that can only be
answered with mitochondrial DNA and usually it's going to be
answered with several other things and mitochondrial DNA is
just one other piece of evidence just like YDNA. So,
both and women have mitochondrial DNA but it's
usefulness is negligible because most of the time the
question that you need answered isn't the question that
mitochondrial DNA or YDNA is going to answer. So, the next
one then is XDNA. Now, both men and women have XDNA but women
have twice as much XDNA as men do because women receive an X
chromosome from both their mother and their father whereas
Men only receive an X chromosome from their mother.
So then knowing that women have twice as much XDNA as men you
might automatically start thinking well oh so it sounds
like actually female's DNA is better than male's DNA in order
to find matches and stuff. Yeah except that most of your
matches aren't going to come through the XDNA. They're going
to be coming through the rest of the DNA which I'll talk
about here in a second. The usefulness of the XDNA is that
it is a elimination tool because women have two X
chromosomes and men have one X chromosome you can look at your
family tree and see that that XDNA is passed down in certain
ways and I have a video about that XDNA inheritance so if men
it eliminates or right off the bat half of their family tree
if you have an X match with somebody they couldn't be
related to your father's side if you're a man because you
didn't receive an XDNA from your father but even if you're
a woman well they can't have received that from their
paternal grandfather because he didn't pass down an to your
father. So, XDNA is great for eliminating large chunks of
where that match could be related because it is just one
chromosome and because of the randomness of DNA, it doesn't
tell you much about how far back that match is or anything
else in that regards and so there's really then a limit as
far as the usefulness of that. Now, one thing that we have
seen is that women have much more X matches than men do.
Which is really obvious because they have twice as much XDNA as
men do. So that brings us then to the bulk of the DNA.
Chromosomes number one through 22. Now to give you an idea as
far as size wise XDNA I think is around 140 million
centimorgans long. Um pretty long but it's not the longest.
Y DNA is only about 40 million centimeters long. So, it's you
know, about a third the size of XDNA mitochondrial is 16, 000.
It's it's almost non existent compared just to the Y in the X
but the rest of your autosomal DNA is just over 7, 000
centimeters long. So, you know, women have basically 280
centimorgans of XDNA and men have and 40 centimorgans of
XDNA and another 40 centimorgans of YDNA, they both
have 7, 000 centimorgans of autosomal DNA. So, autosomal
DNA dwarfs all of the rest of your DNA and because of
recombination and how much of it there is, that is where you
get the vast majority of your matches by orders of magnitude.
So, whereas you might have 100 XD DNA matches, you will have
20 or 30 or 40, 000 autosomal DNA matches. Now, between men
and women, there's no difference in the autosomal DNA
because they both get half of that from their mother and half
of that from their father and so that even the differences
between recombination in men and women since you have DNA
from both your mother and father, you have that same
amounts recombination variability between it. So,
this big chunk of DNA, the autosomal DNA. There's no
difference between males and females as far as being able to
find matches. XDNA, there's a tiny bit that females have a
little advantage of simply because they have more of that
and males have a littler bit of an advantage with the YDNA and
being able to go up that petroleum line. Both of them
have mitochondrial DNA and so, if I had to put a absolute I
would actually say that you know if you had a brother and
sister and they only had money for one DNA test and there
wasn't a question about the patrilinial line I would say
have the sister tested if there was a question about the
patriolinal line I would say have the brother tested and to
put it in perspective between the the brother and sister
because the the sister has twice as much XDNA there's a
little bit more matches that you might be able to find with
that I would say that it's probably weighed maybe 51%
towards the sister and 49% towards the brother as far as
which is better but in essence these are really close and so
it really doesn't matter from a practical standpoint whether
you test a male or a female in your family for that DNA if you
have the funds test both of them because that's going to
give you even better results than just having one of them
tested. Now, if you'd like to learn about that XDNA
inheritance, there's this video up here but if you want to
learn about something else DNA related, then watch this video
down below. However,