Triangulation is one of my favorite techniques in genetic genealogy and
today we're gonna have a head-to-head matchup between 23andme and my heritage
to see which one has the better triangulation tool.
Howdy, I'm Andy Lee with Family History FAnatics where we help you understand
your DNA, climb your family tree, and write your family stories along the way.
Triangulation is an excellent technique whereby you can identify groups of
people who probably share a common ancestor. In order to triangulate you
need at least three people and person a has to match person B person B has to
match person C and person C has to match person A all on the same segment. And
that's the really important part it's not just that they match you have to
match on the same segment. And that forms this little triangle where everybody
matches each other in that same spot, because of this it usually means that
that segment of DNA was passed on from a common ancestor.
Now several websites have different tools that you can help triangulate but
23andme and MyHeritage have some very particular tools in regards to
triangulation and I wanted to compare them head-to-head today. So I've selected
four things in regards to triangulation and we're going to look at how 23andme
does that and how MyHeritage does that let's get started. The first one is
whether or not the website notifies you about triangulation. So what do I mean by
this well if we go over to 23andme and we look at one of our matches that
would be me and this other person here then we're going to see this list of
shared matches. Now that list of shared matches is anybody that both of us share
some amount of DNA with and you can see that there is percentages in the other
two columns of how much each one of us shares, but what's important is this last
column because in this shared DNA column it tells us yes or no and
whenever it has a yes that means that we have a triangulated segment so 23andme
is telling us hey these three people together they triangulate. So let's look
at MyHeritage, do they notify us about triangulation?
Well first off when we go to a match when we click on that match page we get
to a page similar to this where we have the match and ourselves together and
then if we look down we'll find a shared match list of all the people that we
share DNA in common with. Now this has been the same as what we saw in 23andme
so let's see about notification if we look over all the way to the other side
we see yes they have a way that they actually identify triangulation. It's
like these chromosomes with a box around it indicating that there is a
triangulated segment. So both 23andme and MyHeritage notify their customers about
triangulation and they do it in a really good way that's easy to see so this is a
tie 23andme gets one point and MyHeritage gets one point good job to
both of you. Now that we've been notified about
triangulation by each one of the web sites what do we need to do next well
remember one of the things that I told you about triangulation that's important
is that we match each other on the same location so does the website tell us
what that location is. Well let's take a look to see if they identify the
triangulated segment. On 23andme whenever we click on one of those Yes's it's
going to go to this page and we can see that this has the triangulated group
there's the three people being compared and the next thing is as you look down
you might say hey these look like they're probably the triangulated
segments. And well you might be right but you also might not be because what's
being compared here by these two lines is two of the three comparisons that we
need. So we need person A compared to person B and that's being done
we need person C being compared to person a and that's being done, but what
we don't have here is we don't have person B being compared to person C. So I
put a question mark on these triangle eight segments because I don't know if
these are being triangulated yet so 23andme doesn't tell you the specific
segment that is triangulated. What about MyHeritage?
Well my heritage when we click on one of those little indications of a
triangulated segment it goes to this page and you can see that we have the
triangulated group here and as we look over they actually identify with that
box the triangulated segment in this case there's just one triangulated
segment on chromosome number one for these three people. So it's very easy to
see right off where that triangulated segment is I can hover over that
triangulated segment and get some more information but my heritage actually
tells you where that triangulated segment is. So my heritage they get to
win for this category and the score now is my heritage too and 23andme one. Now
one of the things I like to do is I like to do a lot of things manually myself
and actually see how things are working 23andme and my heritage have their own
algorithms how they match people up and how they do triangulation which the
triangulation part is very straightforward. So what I want to do is
I want to see, is there a way that I can verify that triangulated segment? Is
there a way that I can see for myself that this segment is triangulated? Well
let's take a look at 23andme. Now remember we started off with this page
where we have our three people in our triangulated group and 23andme told us
that this group is triangulated. We also had these two segments one on chromosome
seven and one on chromosome number ten that look like they may triangulate. Well
if we go to the next match and actually look at person B matching
persons C. We remember we've already done person a matching B and person C
matching a so this is the third step is person B matching person C I'm not one
of these two people these are the other two matches. If we look we can see that
YES on chromosome number seven right at the beginning and on chromosome are ten
right there in the middle they both match each other. So this is a
triangulated segment actually this is two triangulated segments between these
three people and I verified that by looking at all three of those matches A
to B, B to C, and C to A that's how you verify it. What about with My
Heritage? Well on MyHeritage we go back to the chromosome browser and we see
that hey you have to be one of the kits so unless you have kits from various
people that you're trying to triangulate that you control then you're not
actually going to be able to verify this triangulation you can't look at B versus
C like I'd said before though my heritage actually identifies that
triangulated segment for you and so you're going off of your trust in their
algorithm and their analysis of that which is probably perfectly fine I just
like to do that extra step to verify it myself so in this case I'm gonna give
23andme the win for being able to verify that triangulated segment and we have a
score of tied again two to two let's see on our fourth one which company is going
to come out on top remember at the beginning I said that triangulation you
need to have at least three people but you don't have to have just three people
you can actually triangulate with more than three people and we want to see if
either one of these companies allows us to triangulate more than three people in
order to do this we're using the chromosome browser and we're using the
advanced feature where you can select different
people now on 23andme this is what it looks like and you can
see that we can actually select up to six different people and what's cool
about this in conjunction with the last one is it doesn't have to be me or one
of the kids I manage it only has to be one of the kits of people that I've
shared DNA with so I can do triangulations for other groups of
people besides just myself and this can be up to six people now you're going to
have to go through and do lots of different matches to be able to confirm
all the way through but six people's quite a lot over at my heritage we see
that there is the capability to do eight people now one of these has to be
yourself but you can have seven other people that you can see whether or not
you triangulate with so in grading this how am I gonna decide the winner and
this was really tough but since I'm only doing whole points I'm honestly gonna
have to give this to 23andme for the win because I like the ability to
triangulate other people as well as those kits that I manage myself so even
though they only do six as opposed to eight the fact that they allow you to
triangulate other people and not just yourself I'm gonna give that as the
bonus for it but this doesn't mean that my heritage doesn't have a great
triangulation system so overall 23andme wins it in my book but it's a really
close second with my heritage now if you would like to know more about
triangulation then maybe you should look at one of these videos up here that I
talk in different ways about how you can triangulate your DNA if you have any
questions about triangulation put it in the comments below and be sure to
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