Sunday 15 April 2018

MyHeritage DNA is Showing Promise

In past posts I have been somewhat critical of MyHeritage DNA, but by the end of 2018 they could well become the supplier of choice for autosomal DNA tests.

My Heritage was a late entrant into the world of autosomal DNA testing, and their initial offering was very basic - they did not identify which segments of DNA were shared by matches, there were no tools to filter or analyse your DNA matches, and being new, the database of testers was very small.  Their big draw card was that you could upload a DNA test result from other testing companies to My Heritage for free.

Over the past 12 months MyHeritage has greatly increased the size of their database (their database is already larger than the FamilyTreeDNA autosomal database), they have added a chromosome browser, improved their matching algorithm, and generally made the process of reviewing DNA matches a more user-friendly experience.  So what is next?

I watched a presentation by MyHeritage CEO Gilad Japhet, given at Roots Tech 2018, describing new features they have planned for 2018, and a general outlook on the future of family history and DNA testing, and I was left with the impression that this guy really get it.

Later in 2018, MyHeritage plans to release the first tool utilizing their Big Tree.  The Big Tree is a huge graph with billions of data points taken from family trees, historical records and DNA results on MyHeritage.  The first feature, which is referred to as The Theory of Family Relativity, will analyze your DNA matches, and within milliseconds will create a theoretical paper trail between two DNA testers, to explain how they are related - assuming of course that there are datapoints in the Big Tree to explain the connection.

All I can say is Wow! 

My only question is whether this tool will be available to those of us who took advantage of the free upload of our DNA result from another testing company, or will it be limited to those who have tested with MyHeritage directly, or perhaps limited to only those who have a paid subscription to MyHeritage?

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