When different tools come out from
different companies, it's always good to compare them and see what is the best one. and
we've been asked that question about MyHeritage and Ancestry's Genetic Communities. Howdy, welcome
to Family History Fanatics, where we love helping you to climb your family tree and have fun
along the way. so today, we're going to have a little battle between MyHeritage and Ancestry.
now they call their tools slightly different things. one is called Genetic Communities or
Communities. the other is called Genetic Groups. but in essence, they're approximately the same
thing. now there are some differences as we'll be seeing between them. but this is a battle
head-to-head to see which one is going to win. let's begin now, MyHeritage. if you
are looking at your ethnicity results, then you will find their Genetic Groups right
down here on the left-hand side. those are the ones that you fall into. and there's also a
link there if you want to see what all of them are. on the other hand, if you're an Ancestry,
you'll see the Genetic Groups right here on the right-hand side- there's two places. they have
them under each one of your ethnicity results, as well as additional communities that aren't
necessarily tied to a specific ethnicity. so let's go through a number of different categories
and see who the overall winner is. first off, the number of divisions. if you took all
of your DNA sample and you just said, "Hey, this is all one group." It's not going to be very
helpful because you can't start dividing it out and seeing where these different groups line up.
MyHeritage has taken their database- there's about five million people or so0, and they've divided
that up into 2,114 different Genetic Groups. that is a lot of groups to choose from! I think
when I look at mine, I have 12, uh, total assigned to me. I've. I've seen people that have had more
than that. I've seen people that had less than that assigned. on the other hand, Ancestry has
1,400 plus Genetic Groups. so it's about 50% less than what MyHeritage has. and because of that,
I'm going to give the win for this category to MyHeritage. now the next category is the timeline.
and there's actually a few timeline categories. this is the who part of the timeline.
in other words, where can we find people that we're related to or that are in our tree
within these different Genetic Groups, and how does that relate together. so let's start and look
at the MyHeritage page. and there's really three things here that I want to point out. first off,
with the red arrow, there is a button that you can press that you can actually show all of the events
in your family tree on the map. that might be helpful as you're looking at some of your Genetic
Groups to see which people or which events might be part of that group if you didn't know already.
the other thing is the blue arrow there. that is, if you click on any one of those pins, it's going
to pull up the different people in your tree- the dates and places of the events for that. and
it could be a long list. it could be a short list depending on how many people you have on
that pin. the other thing that I really like is the common names or the common surnames and
the common given names over on the left-hand side. and so what MyHeritage has done is in this
genetic group they have found what the most common names are. this also might be helpful, not just if
you know your heritage but if you don't know your heritage of some names. that you might be looking
on other people's family trees to see if they are potentials for where your unknown ancestors
are. now MyHeritage also has something similar. they show specifically the people
within those groups as opposed to just all of the people in your tree. so those pins
are not just representing everything because you can see there's only a few pins there. yet
the tree on both Ancestry and MyHeritage for me is the same tree. but these are just the pins that
Ancestry has put into that group and then on their timeline over on the right-hand side. what you can
see is they actually identify through the years which people they are specifically putting in that
group because of the characteristics they have. this, to me, is extremely helpful for identifying
the common ancestors I may have with my DNA matches as well as what time periods. I
should be looking at certain things. now, these are not necessarily always a hundred percent
accurate. I've seen a couple of these where, hey, they probably did not belong to that group.But
just because of location and near mixing, they have similarities between those people that
belong to that group. so these two tools look pretty similar, but I'm actually going to give the
win to Ancestry. mainly because of the specificity of the who that they provide. you're not just
seeing a list of common surnames in that group, but you're actually seeing the people that
are in your tree that belong to that group. the next timeline category is where. genealogy
involves people. it involves time. it involves places. and so we want to look at the places that
these groups are. now MyHeritage uses a heat map to show where things are. so as you see, the more
darker outline that is going to indicate more people from that group that have Ancestry there.
but also, they have a timeline at the bottom that, as you move through that, you can see how that
heat map changes. so, for instance, here we're looking at the Mormons Utah and Idaho, which
happens to be a group that is similar between MyHeritage and Ancestry. and back at the earliest
time in the 16 to 1700s, you can see the majority of the people that end up being part of this
group are in the British Isles, the Netherlands, um, Scandinavia. although there are some that have
already started in the United States at that time. it was still part of the British Empire up in
the New England Area. as we move forward on that timeline, what we'll actually see is we'll see
this heat map change to where more migration is happening and spreading across the United States.
and you can see that with any one of these groups, it's great for visualizing some of these
migrations that happened over hundreds of years as opposed to just a single-family migration.
Ancestry also has a timeline. And they go through something similar. they don't use the heat map
but what you can infer is the number of tracks going to a different place. so, for instance,
right here, we can see that there's a couple of tracks from Denmark going over. but we're also
seeing a bunch of tracks from England that are going over to the Northeast part of the United
States as well as to the intermountain west. whenever we are looking at our Genetic Groups or
the Genetic Communities, we should be looking at the timeline and at different stages in it to
help identify what wave of that migration maybe our ancestors were a part of. for instance, we can
see here that, hey, there was some migration from England over to the northeast the United States
in around the 1850s. but also at the same time, there was some migration from England
all the way to the intermountain west. and in actuality, many of those people from the
northeast that were part of this genetic group end up migrating to the west later on. so with
this tool, I'm going to actually give it a tie. both sets of the where on our timeline provide
some really useful information. so the score right now is MyHeritage 2 and Ancestry 2. and
we'll go to our next category, which is the why. and this is really more for, uh, storytelling.
when you think about our ancestors moved places. moved from a specific place to a
specific place at a specific time, and there was a reason why they did this. now
some of those reasons may just be mundane. some of them may be rather important. some of
them may have been life-changing. so learning a little bit about why some of these migrations
happening is important. if we look at MyHeritage when we read about that group, it provides a
rather simple explanation. so, for instance, this one is Mormon Settlers from England
and Denmark in the United States, Utah, and some Idaho. it really just tells us
about the name of the group. what their name in the group and where they are from/ where they are
going. on the other hand, Ancestry, at each stage of their timeline, provides a little paragraph
about what was happening. What was the pull of that migration? and so it might be that this
migration happened again over a couple of hundred years. But at each stage of it, it was something
different that was affecting that migration. and so this is really helpful as you are trying
to understand why certain people maybe were moving certain places. going in and reading about the
migration that happened over this time period. you may have ancestors who weren't part of the earlier
waves of this migration but were part of the later waves or vice versa. and so understanding what the
causes for that migration was at that time period can be helpful in understanding your ancestor's
story. so with this, I'm definitely going to give Ancestry the win for that category. the score now
is three to two, with Ancestry in the lead. before we continue, if you are enjoying this content,
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now the next category is the confidence level. on MyHeritage, you have these Genetic Groups, and
there's three different confidence levels- high, medium, and low. and what I have found is that
at my high confidence level, I have two Genetic Groups. which is the same number of communities
that I have really in Ancestry. I think I have three communities in Ancestry but two versus three
very similar. well, as I go down, I can see that, at the moderate and then at the low, I get
progressively more and more to the point that I have 12 groups. I believe it is when I'm at the
low. now a lot of these groups, if you're taking a look at this map, they overlap right there on the
eastern United States. I like this because instead of just looking at the most definite groups, I can
also look at some other groups that I share enough genetic information that it looks like I might be
a part of it. and based on my own research, I can see whether or not, hey, yeah, that makes sense
with this or not. for those who maybe were adopted and don't know their heritage, then this tool
might be really valuable with the moderate and the low Genetic Groups as well. because it gives
you more clues as to where your Ancestry is from. now Ancestry, unfortunately, doesn't have
anything like this at all. they provide you with the Genetic Groups that you're a part of, and
that's all that you get to see. and like I said, just looking at what Ancestry has, what MyHeritage
has, Ancestry really correlates well with the high confidence level of MyHeritage. so you can
probably guess I'm giving MyHeritage the win in this category. and we're tied back up at
three to three. so our last category is learning education. understanding what these Genetic
Groups and Genetic Communities are. in MyHeritage, if you go over to their knowledge base, they
have a page all about their Genetic Groups. and it goes through in detail how the groups were
formed, what makes up them, what you can use them for. different information like that to learn
about their Genetic Groups/ and I would encourage everybody who wants to read more is go to the
MyHeritage knowledge base. just type in genetic group. and you'll be able to find this page. On
Ancestry, if you go to the little question mark right at the top of the page, there on the
ethnicity results, it's going to take you to the Ancestry DNA ethnicity regions and communities
tips. now they have conveniently broken out all this information, looks like into
17 different articles, and so each one of these articles is very targeted as
far as the answer that you want to get. I actually like this approach better than
what MyHeritage has done. While MyHeritage has put everything all in one place, if there's
just something I want to know specifically, I can actually target an article towards this and
just read about that. rather than trying to search through the MyHeritage page for that specific
information. it's not that they don't have the same types of information. It's just I think
Ancestry has organized their information better. and because of that, I'm gonna give Ancestry the
win on the learning category. so with a score of four to three, Ancestry is going to be our winner.
now the one thing I would like to say with this is MyHeritage just came out with this tool about a
month ago. while Ancestry has had this tool for at least two years, I believe, maybe even
longer than that. so MyHeritage is still in the development phase, and I expect them to add some
more features to this tool as people are using it. as time goes on. it was a really close battle, but
in the future, if Ancestry doesn't up their game, I would expect MyHeritage to overtake them
pretty quickly in regards to this. now, if you would like to learn about which company
I think the best DNA testing company is, you can watch this video up here. or if you want
to learn something else about DNA, then why don't you try this video right down here. there are
many ways you can help us out in the links
