What is the Best DNA Testing Company for Genetic Genealogy Research? 2021

it's 2021 which means time for our annual update of the best genetic genealogy company out there each year i go through the major genetic genealogy websites and rate them to determine which is the best company now before i start with the process let me go through what i think makes a good genetic genealogy company first off it is the matches in other words if a company does not have the ability to match with other people then it's not really going to be helpful for genetic genealogy so that's the number one thing that i look for in a company whether or not they provide matches next is the tools that they provide now these tools can be everything from a chromosome browser to some of the different things that you might see on jet match as far as grouping matches together but tools help us to analyze all of those matches and finally the last thing is with anything genealogy we need to be able to have a way to collaborate with other people now this can take many forms again it could be as simple as providing an email address of your matches or it might be certain tools that allow you to put your dna into a tree or other things like that that you can be able to share this information with others so with that let me go over what updates i have done since 2020 well really this is a year ago in january of 2020. this year there was not too many changes really the first thing i did was i changed the weighting of the different categories and that's again a evolving thing as i look at how i use different websites and what i think is the most important what should have the most weight to it the next thing is i updated the website ratings and that is just going through each one of the websites and changing the numbers based on the new numbers so that overall we can get a final score and rate these companies from right now it's really just one through six uh because there's six major companies so let me start with collaboration because this is probably one of the most important things with genealogy is talking with other people sharing information with other people and gathering that information from others now how collaboration works on each website is going to be different that's because the websites are organized in different ways but really loosely you could say that collaboration is based on tree activity whether or not or how many people actually put a tree on the website and how much information sharing between that but you will notice that all the websites that i state here not all of them have a tree so that's why i say it's loosely based on tree activity now overall once i go through everything the scores for each one of the different websites was between 0.25 and 0.62 so there's just this ratio that is going to end up being a multiplier for database size and what's i'll describe as the qm score in other words just because you have a giant database doesn't mean that it's going to be the best if you have a giant database but hardly anybody's doing any genealogy work on it then you're going to actually have a really low effective database score so let's start with effective database this is 25 of your overall score and what i do to calculate the effective database size is i put in the number of millions of kits so for instance ancestry reports 19 million kits so you have 19 million or 19 and then you multiply that by the collaboration ratio that i just talked about and that gives you an effective database size so in other words the more collaboration the more genealogy activity that is going on the more of your database size will count towards the overall score now one of the things that i did do last year is i limited this size to about 13 million because one of the things that i saw in my own research is as the ancestry database was growing i was able to gather some more matches and and match those up with other people but somewhere around 13 million or so the the number of new matches that were really worthwhile for me was decreasing quite a bit and so and i think this is because of of a couple of reasons first is the population where i am from is you know basically a descendant of europeans in the united states that is where dna testing really started and that is where the focus has been for the first several years of dna testing now since that time some of these companies have started to look outward to other places and focus their advertising dollars there to try to get more of those people to test but then the other thing is the actual outreach that some of these companies are doing to different populations so for instance they're looking at their database and seeing that we don't have a lot of samples from africa and so we're going to actually send out groups of people and test five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand a hundred thousand people from africa and so that database size may increase by you know a hundred thousand five hundred thousand or a million but because a lot of this increases in targeted areas it's not necessarily going to be helpful to me and so that's why i just put a limit there on 13 million if you wanted to do this yourself you may find that your numbers are different and the winner is ancestry not only does ancestry have the largest database they exceed that 13 million threshold but because of their tree integration because of the fact that they've been doing um genet or genealogy with records and other things for decades now they also have a lot of genealogy activity on their website and so their overall score from this is 5.2 and that is quite a bit larger than the next closest competitor so if you want to be able to overtake ancestry in this you're going to have to have a lot of tests done and you're going to have to have a lot of collaboration on your website now the second criteria that i'm looking at is the effective quality match now the quality match is a score that i've come up with where basically what i'm looking at is the number of matches between 35 centimorgans and 600 centimorgans and then i divide that by the millions of kids and then i multiply that by that collaboration ratio so in other words i'm not just looking at all of the matches and i'm not just looking at the size of the database but i'm looking at the actual matches that share a significant amount of dna with me that i'll probably be able to figure out how we are commonly related those are the matches that are really quality matches and again it's no use having this quality match if you aren't able to collaborate with other people that's why we're adding that collaboration in there one thing with this needs to be mentioned and that is if you're using family tree dna you have to correct it by removing small segments on the basic match list family tree dna reports the amount of centimorgans which include segments that are smaller than seven centimorgans sometimes all the way down to one centimorgan most of these segments are not real matches they're not real segments they're false segments false matches and so to compare them with these other companies you need to make sure that you remove those and i do have a video that explains how you can do that but in the end the winner in this category still ends up being family tree dna they have a significantly a significantly higher number of quality matches per millions in the database than other places now they have a much smaller database than other places and so that hurts them in other places overall in the in the calculation but in this category family tree dna actually comes out on top they end up with a score of 1.28 now this was 50 of the overall score because those quality matches between 35 centimorgans and 600 centimorgans are going to be the ones that you're working most with whether it is initially figuring out how they are related other people or using them as a baseline with your smaller matches to figure out what lines those smaller matches may be in and so having as many quality matches as possible is important the third category i look at is triangulation now triangulation is when you match two other people and they also match each other all on the same segment it's not just that you all match each other but you all match each other on the same segment and this is a very good indication that you are related through a common ancestor now there's various ways that you can do triangulation and each of the websites handles it differently but basically if there is some way that you can triangulate on the website then i'm going to give you some credit for this it's 10 of the overall score and i grade it on a scale of 0 to 3. and the winner for this is jed match and jet match really comes out on top because they have multiple different ways that you can triangulate you can use their tier 1 tool to triangulate you can actually do manual triangulation just off of the different segment lists you can look at your one-to-many match list and then from those do one-to-one comparisons and also be able to find matches that way so there's multiple different ways that you can triangulate with jet match most importantly they allow you to see all that information that you need to some of the websites don't allow you to see everything that you need so you can basically do let's say the first couple steps of triangulation but you can't complete that last step so you basically have a half triangulation or two-thirds triangulation but ged match allows you to do full triangulation so they are the winner next is the transfer ability so can you transfer kits from other companies into this company now different companies have different policies on this some allow unlimited some you have to pay for others don't allow anything now where the advantage of being able to transfer is being able to do i guess you could say one-to-one comparisons on a single platform if everybody transferred to gedmatch then this wouldn't be necessary but just based on the size of the databases we know that not everybody transfers to gedmatch in fact a minority of people transfer to gedmatch so the ability to upload kits to different websites i think is also important for this and this is just on a scale of zero to two and there's actually a tie in this category and that is between jed match and living dna both of these companies allow uploads from every other company and those uploads are free so if you have dna kits from someplace else you can actually transfer these onto jet match or onto living dna and be able to use their tools for that as well now the final category i have is the x factor and this is 10 of the grade and this really is a wide variety of things it's whatever extra functionality and tools a website may have to help you in your genetic genealogy research and this is sort of difficult to compare because the the variety of different things that websites offer are not apples and apples you're you're really comparing apples and iguanas so this is really fuzzy but overall i put a scale of zero to three on this and the winner in this category again is jed match for the win and that is just because of the suite of tools that gedmatch offers there are independent developers that develop tools for them within the company they are developing tools and so you get not just not even just a single tool that does something but in a lot of cases there's two or three different tools that do the same thing in different ways and reporting it slightly different outputs for you different people look at those outputs and find certain ones helpful and so that's really i think why jet match has won and they've they've won in this category every single year that i've done this just because they keep on adding faster than anybody else can add the total functionality for this before we continue if you want to support our work there's many ways that you can do that in the description below you will find links to show notes to free guides as well as our website the most important thing you can do though is to share this video with your friends and be sure to like and subscribe to our channel it's because of viewers like you that we continue to grow and with that we are ready to start looking at the overall who has won now when i go through each one of those categories you might be thinking oh i know who's going to come out on top but you know there's some caveats for instance there's a couple of companies that you may not have seen at all actually there's just one company no two companies um that you didn't see at all but they don't show up where you necessarily would think they would now number six is living dna in past years when i looked at living dna i just did not even have enough information to really get a good grasp on where they were at and so i had to make guesses and in some cases those were really conservative guesses well this year i think living dna finally has enough going for them that i have real numbers so they have matches i can look at the different matches to figure out a qm score they have you know the different things as far as transfer and all that so i actually have a real score that i'm confident on living dna unfortunately for them they're still at the bottom of the list but i think you should always remember that living dna is also the newest one of the companies that is coming up so i expect their score to rise over the next few years as they start to add more and more functionality to their website next is family tree dna now family tree dna was the first ones to offer any kind of commercial dna testing and they were i think second after uh 23andme for autosomal testing so they've been doing this for 15 20 years um the major the major thing that hurts family tree dna is their database size they're only about one 1.5 million in their database size they haven't reported it recently so it's kind of hard to gauge what that actually is and they haven't been growing that very quickly at all and so that hampers them so even though they they scored really high in the quality match when we look at the effective database size that is so small that that's going to drag down the score overall number four is 23andme now 23andme was the company that i first tested with and they've been my they were my favorite for several years um although they've had i guess you could say some missteps in 2020 as far as their genealogy offerings they you know did some beta tools which i thought were good but they never actually released those for the the full test they've removed some functionality in certain things and late in the year they were actually going to or they were removing matches for a new subscription model that they had and that caused a lot of uproar in the community they eventually restored that although it's it's sort of in question whether they're going to continue to add to those or just basically have that as a snapshot now uh from the past and unless you test with them and do their new subscription model you're not going to get the the more matches for that so the thing that really hurts 23andme is is the lack of genealogy activity the collaboration that's going on on the website and i'll talk about that a little bit more here in in just a moment number three is jed match jet match is actually probably the site that i use the most just because of the wide variety of tools that are there but the interesting thing is as far as their database size they're actually only about as large as family tree dna maybe a little bit larger than them but because of this suite of tools that they have this other functionality that they have they actually rank much higher than what family tree dna does now last year i believe jet match and 23 and me were in a tie this year they are not in a tie anymore so jet match is clearly in the number three spot by itself now number two is really the surprise one my heritage when i was going through each of the factors the five different factors my heritage doesn't show up on them at all but this is a good example of you don't have to be the best to still come out on top now my heritage was not the best in any category as you can see however what i don't show you in going through each one of those categories my heritage is the second best or one category they're the third best so they are either number two or in one case number three in everything that gives them a really high score and what it does is it lands them in the number two spot overall and the one that you're not seeing here yet is the number one which is ancestry now ancestry has been on top i think um the last two years that i've been doing this now again each formula each year is slightly different although this year's formula and last year's formula are very similar so it's not a surprise because ancestry has capitalized on the fact that they had this large genealogy database of users that were using their records and building trees and started selling dna kits to them about 10 years ago and they have the largest database so not only do they have largest database they have some of the most active people of any of the websites and that combines to give them the highest score now one of the things that i have noticed is that the gap has been narrowing for several of these companies so i wanted to just briefly talk about what would change the rankings for everything well if we look at jed match if ged batch actually doubled their database size they would jump up to number two so just to move up to number two they need to double their size now it's not likely that ged match is going to double their size jet batch has really been sort of a niche website for specific genetic genealogists not everybody who tests puts their information on there and it suffers from the fact that the website is really clunky to use um and so a lot of people are turned off from that but as far as the tools and what you can do with it it i think is absolutely amazing so do i think that over the next year jet match is going to double their database size probably not they would have to go from 1.5 million to 3 million again they have not been growing that fast so i don't expect them to change that much now another thing that that could happen is 23andme if they actually increase their collaboration score which was the lowest one of all the websites from 0.25 to 0.35 it's not necessarily a large increase and that 0.35 is still below my heritage it's below ancestry it's below family tree dna i think it's even below jet match so they're they're not even having to become the best at the collaboration they just have to improve it you know significantly from where they're at they would actually be number one and this is because 23andme has a large database they're actually almost at that 13 million threshold that i was talking about and by increasing their collaboration score to 0.35 maybe allowing people to build their own tree um on there then they would eclipse ancestry they would eclipse my heritage they would eclipse jed match and that's just because everything else that 23andme offers they do have a good set of tools it's not as good like i said as what gedmatch has but i think it is pretty comprehensive and it's really their collaboration score which goes into the not only the effective database size but the qm matching so it goes into two of those factors they could make a significant jump from what number four to number one just by changing this one issue now i don't know how likely that is maybe the backlash that genealogists had with 23andme this year will spur them into doing something better maybe not and finally the thing that i think is most likely to happen is with my heritage now if my heritage increases their database by just one million they will be number one and it's interesting because as you look at it my heritage would need to go to about five and a half million ancestry would still be at 19 million and yet my heritage would be number one and there's a couple of things that are driving this one is that there is more activity on my heritage as far as genealogy i think that i've seen than there is on ancestry two myheritage offers a better set of dna tools than ancestry does and so they you know are better in that way and then three i actually see a higher quality match score from my heritage than i do from ancestry so my heritage has a lot going for them and increasing their database by a million i think is not an issue they've they've been increasing it by about 750 000 this last year so it would take a little bit more of a push to increase it by another million but by doing that they would put themselves into the number one position and they also still have quite a room to grow that database which is going to mean more matches that are are going to be found by everybody so if you like that then i have a link in the description below that has a copy of the google sheets that i calculate everything you can actually change up the numbers for yourself as you'll find there's each person's you know qm score and and what they think is most important maybe the weighting of different things is going to be different and so go ahead and change that up tell me what you think as far as what the best genetic genealogy website is now if you want to see my ratings from last year you can watch this video up here and if you want to see something else about dna then watch the video right down below

Channel: Family History Fanatics

Views: 28,425

Rating: 4.8936415 out of 5

Keywords: what is the best dna test, what is the best dna testing company, family tree dna review, family tree dna vs ancestry, myheritage dna review, ancestry dna reviews, family tree dna, myheritage dna vs ancestry, ancestry vs heritage, ancestry vs 23andme, 23andme vs ancestry results, dna test, dna, ancestry dna results, findmypast test, findmypast youtube, 23andme results, 23andme review, best dna test 2021

Id: ihT6EtU8Tl4

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021