MyHeritage. Is it good? Is it bad? Well, as with most things
in life, there are some of each.
Howdy, I'm Andy Lee with Family History Fanatics and this is a
segment of DNA. I'm continuing on in my reviews of different
testing companies and today, I want to talk about MyHeritage
and what I like about MyHeritage and what I don't
like about MyHeritage when it comes to DNA testing. Now, let
me start by prefacing and saying, I haven't actually
taken the MyHeritage DNA test. What I have done is I have
transferred over my 23andMe DNA test results to MyHeritage
and I actually did this when MyHeritage and 23andMe had a
partnership together. So with that introduction, let's get
into the things I like about MyHeritage. Number one, free
uploading of your DNA kits from other companies. This is
fantastic. Now, MyHeritage is doing this to help build up
their database but it also allows you to try out their
tools before you've even bought their kit. So, I think it's a
wonderful thing that they're doing there. Number two, is the
ability to manage multiple kits and I pointed this out as a
positive on 23andMe and I pointed out as a negative on
Ancestry so what I like about being able to manage multiple
kits is then I don't have to log in to multiple different
accounts to be able to get all of the matching information. I
can just switch between which kit that I'm looking at to see
the different matches for that and that is what I like about
managing multiple kits. And MyHeritage has that. So, good job
on that, MyHeritage. Number three, the ability to link your
DNA to your tree. This is a really powerful tool because it
allows the computer to find matches for you on your DNA but
then, search through both of your trees to see if there is a
common Ancestor that you both have. Now, this doesn't always
mean that that Ancestor is who you inherited that DNA from but
it is a great tool to help you get started in your matching
and finding other people and how you might be related to
them. So, those are three things that I really like about
the MyHeritage DNA database but as with everything, there's
some things I don't like about it and what are those? Number
one, it is a small database. MyHeritage came to the game
late. Originally, they were partnered with 23andMe and
you had a genetic genealogy company and you had a, I guess
you could say a tree in a record genealogy company
combined together which I thought was an awesome
partnership. However, MyHeritage wanted to get into
the genetic genealogy themselves and so that
partnership with Severed and they've been in the process of
building their own database and so it's really small and you
can tell that just by the number of matches that you
have. Most people that I've talked to have on the order of
50 to maybe 200 matches total on MyHeritage whereas if you go
to 23andMe or Family Tree DNA, you're going to have a
thousand or two 000 matches and if you go to Ancestry, you're
going to have several thousand matches and that's just because
of the size of the database. The small database, it makes
finding matches very difficult. That's one thing though that
MyHeritage is doing their best to try to increase by allowing
people to upload and also by having sales of their different
kits. So, I expect their database to grow in the future
but right now, from a genealogical standpoint, it's
not as useful just because it's so small. Number two of the
things that I don't like is they don't have a browser. I've
mentioned before that this is a really important tool for
evaluating your matches. You want to actually see what
segments you share in common not just with one person but
with multiple people in order to do triangulation. So, the
fact that they don't have a chromosome browser is a big
negative. They do tell you some information about how much DNA
you share and how many segments but they don't tell you
information about that and so if you're using MyHeritage DNA
for that, you're going to need to download that and take that
over to Jed Match. com in order to see that segment information
for your different matches and number three, because they're
the newest company on the block, they really have a
limited tool set. Other than telling you that you have
matches, there's not much else that they're going to be able
to tell you that you can do with your DNA on MyHeritage
this maybe something that as they develop it further they
add more tools but right now it's a big negative because
there's several different things that you may want to do
with your information in order to evaluate your different
matches and MyHeritage just does not have the tools to be
able to do that with so if you do test through MyHeritage DNA
make sure you're uploading your results over to Jed Match. com
so that you can take advantage of the tools that they have to
properly evaluate the DNA information that get. Like I've
mentioned a couple times, MyHeritage is the newest of the
genealogical companies that is getting into DNA testing. Some
of these negatives might be going away over the next year
or two as they increase the size of their database as they
increase their tool set as they invest in this technology. So,
I have a lot of hope for the future potential of what
MyHeritage DNA has. I hope this review of MyHeritage DNA was
helpful to you. Please put any comments down below you like
MyHeritage and what it is that you like about them and if
there's things that you don't like about them, make sure you
put those in the comments as well. If you like this video,
be sure to give it a thumbs up so that it can reach more
viewers. Connect with us on Twitter at FH Fanatics or on
Facebook, Family History Fanatics where we can interact
with you and respond to your comments.