A Tale of Four DNA Tests - Wed, 21 Mar 2018

This morning, I received my DNA test results from AncestryDNA. It completes my quadfecta and now gives me results with the big four: Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage DNA and now Ancestry DNA.

Living DNA has been working recently to turn the big four into a big five, but to date I haven’t tested there mainly because they do not yet provide you with your DNA matches. I did however upload my raw data last Fall as part of their One Family One World project which currently has an estimated completion date of August 6, 2018.

Processing TImes

With regards to the 4 actual tests I’ve personally done, let’s do a summary:

I took the MyHeritage DNA test right at the MyHeritage booth at RootsTech in Salt Lake City in 2017, and they kept it and delivered it to the lab for me, i.e. I didn’t have to mail it in myself.

The AncestryDNA test I took the first time ended with an email sent from the lab to me stating that they were unable to use the sample. They allowed me to order a replacement sample for free, which I did the same day and I call that “Try 2”.

Overall, it took between 29 and 53 days from the date of my mailing the test to getting the results. Leah Larkin maintains interesting statistics about the different testing companies including processing times. Leah notes that time mailing to results average 20 to 40 days. I suspect my results may be a bit higher because I’m in Canada and most of tests were over the Christmas period.

Ethnicity Percentages

For fun, let’s compare the ethnicities that the different tests assign to me. Now as far as I know from my own ancestry research, I am 100% Ashkenazi, and my 4 grandparents and their ancestors as far back as I can trace come from an area within a couple of hundred mile radius that is restricted to northeastern Romania and southwestern Ukraine. Yes. This research is tough slogging since records only go back to the mid 1800’s with the originals all being in languages that I do not read. Compound that by a people that only took their surnames in the early to mid 1800’s, so you have brothers who have different surnames. Before that, it was Joseph son of Hirsch. Do you know how many Joseph son of Hirsch’s there were? But I digress.

Back to the ethnicities. I did compare my Family Tree DNA results with my MyHeritage DNA results a year ago when they first came in. This time I’ll compare all 4 companies I tested with, as well as a two others that I uploaded my data to. This should be a good test because unlike most people, I have an expectation of 100% of one ethnicity. Let’s see how well the companies agree:

The two companies that accept free uploads that give ethnicity reports that I uploaded to and list on the right are DNA Land and Gencove. I only uploaded there because each site also provide a list of DNA relatives you match to, but neither site said they were able to find me any matches.

As far as results go, 23andMe and DNA Land had what I’d call the best ethnicity estimates for me, getting me at 98% to 99.9% which is pretty close to 100%. MyHeritage DNA and AncestryDNA are surprisingly off target with over 11% spurious matches that are including me as Spanish, African, South Asian and even Inuit/Eskimo. The latter I jokingly attribute to my genes mutating after a full life of frigid winters here in central Canada.

What this tells me is that estimate of Ashkenazi ethnicity by the various companies are reasonably good, as long as you don’t take any of those percentages under 10% seriously. I am, of course, most impressed by 23andMe’s 99.2%.

I should also make mention of my 23andMe Neanderthal assessment:

They say, however, that this accounts for less than 4% of my DNA. The highest anyone has at 23andMe is 397 variants.
  

DNA Relatives

Now this is the part I’m interested in, and the part you should be as well. After all, we want to use DNA to help us with our genealogy research and find DNA relatives and in so doing, determine common ancestors and the lines that connect us. As I mentioned above, my own research is hampered by 1850 documentation, surname and language limitations. Conversely, with respect to DNA relatives, the Ashkenazi population has an oddly different problem: We have too many of them.

That’s because the Ashkenazi have what’s called endogamy, which is the practice of marrying within the community. Thus everyone is related to everyone else and it becomes more difficult to identify DNA connections because any relative can be DNA related many ways.

But let’s see what the different companies give me as far as relatives go. At Family Tree DNA, MyHeritage DNA and 23andMe, you can download your match list. At AncestryDNA, you need a 3rd party tool to get your DNA matches downloaded. I used the the DNAGedcom client tool. It took 12 hours for that tool to download my AncestryDNA matches for me. I then re-downloaded my match lists from the other 3 companies so that they’d all be up to date and comparable.

I’m excluding my uncle from the above, who I had done the testing for. Excluding my uncle, not a single match denoted to be closer than a 2nd cousin was found by any company.

Over at Family Tree DNA, I have 15187 DNA relatives. From what I understand, that makes up about 75% of all the Ashkenazi people who have tested there. The number is quite large because they include people who match down to 17 cM and include the totals of small segments, which is also why they classify many of the people as 5th Cousin to Remote. The other companies stop at 4th Cousin to remote. The numbers include a 3rd cousin that I knew prior to getting my test results who had been sharing family information with me for over 10 years. At the time, I was pleasantly surprised to find he had DNA tested. But he is still the only person I know how I’m related to of the over 15 thousand in the list.

MyHeritage DNA shows me at 4713 DNA relatives. Apparently they make an adjustment for the endogamy of people who have declared themselves Ashkenazi or I might have had 5 times that number. I don’t know exactly how I’m related to any of these people.

23andMe only includes 1125 DNA relatives. And only 652 of them (58%) opted in for sharing information. But there I found 8 actual cousins who I already had in my family tree who I know are between 2nd Cousins and 3rd Cousins once removed. I’ve since communicated with them and we’ll be sharing information. My Family Tree DNA cousin, and these 8 cousins and my uncle are all on my father’s side, which is from northeast Romania. I’m still looking for someone who is on my mother’s side who has DNA tested from southwest Ukraine.

AncestryDNA gave me 98805 (yes, that’s almost one hundred thousand) DNA matches. They are displayed at ancestry.com on 2016 pages of 48, 49 or 50 people each (the first has 50 and I’ll assume the rest average 49) plus an additional page with 20 more people = 98805. The closest match is 355 cM which is a much closer match than at any of the other companies. That should be a real 2nd cousin. But I don’t recognize the person’s name. I did send her a message and hopefully she’ll respond and maybe we can see if we can figure out what the connection might be. Since AncestryDNA does not give you its own way to download your match list, I used DNAGedcom Client to download the matches. I started it running at 9 a.m. and it completed at 9 p.m., so it took 12 hours. It created a csv (comma delimited file) 47 MB in size which contained 98869 matches. Ancestry’s list includes every person who matches on even one segment of 6 cM or more, which is why I have so many in my list. If AncestryDNA has tested 7 million people so far, then my match list contains 1.5% of their test population.

GEDmatch only gives you your 2000 closest matches (less 1 for my uncle). Those take me down to matches of 57 cM. My cousin who tested at Family Tree DNA is among the other 1999. My matches are made up of 882 people from AncestryDNA, 743 from Family Tree DNA, 285 from 23andMe, 67 from MyHeritage DNA and 22 from other testing companies, which you can tell from the prefix of their kit number (A, T, M, H, Z).

They also have a beta test area at GEDmatch called GEDmatch Genesis. That is for the companies that use the new chip which includes 23andMe and Living DNA, but can take other company’s data as well. I had uploaded my 23andMe results there. They provide all matches down to 7 cM resulting in lots of matches. Interestingly, they state that a total match of 7 cM corresponds to a common ancestor averaging 7.4 generations back. My 11700 matches there include 6917 from 23andMe, 1923 from Ancestry DNA, 967 from Family Tree DNA, 490 from Living DNA, 170 from MyHeritage DNA, 132 from Genes for Good and 1100 were from other companies or unspecified.

Also, DNA Land and Gencove, who say they provide matches, both said they had zero matches for me.

Given all those matches from the 4 testing companies and GEDmatch, I’ve so far only found 9 people related to me. And for all 9, I knew beforehand that they were related to me. You’d think I’d find a match who is a new person whose relationship we can determine so that I can add them and their family to my tree. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Lots to do. Stay tuned.

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Update: March 22, 2018 – Added info about my GEDmatch Genesis matches.

Update: March 25, 2018 – Added my 23andMe Neanderthal assessment and moved Family Tree DNA’s 7% West/Central Europe from “Regionally Correct” to “Spurious”.

Update: April 1, 2018 – Discovered that AncestryDNA can give 48, 49 or 50 matches per page, generally averaging 49. I’ve updated my AncestryDNA counts to reflect that.

Update: May 25, 2018 – Ancestry DNA updated my Ethnicity Estimate. It is much better now at 98% European Jewish and 2% Germanic Europe. That’s up from the 86% European Jewish they had me at when I wrote this article. The Germanic 2% is still wrong but that’s better than are the spurious bits they had for me before that totalled > 11%.

Update 4 hours later - False alarm. Ancestry DNA’s estimates went back to what they were before. So disappointed. I thought they were finally getting it right.

Update, June 5, 2018 – Ancestry DNA now officially has updated my results with a little survey about what I was expecting and then it asked me if I wanted to update to these new results, to which I said yes. So they are now the 98% / 2% that I had for less than 4 hours on May 25.

Update, July 1, 2018 – Did you know that Ancestry DNA tests your ethnicity on 40 random samples of your DNA and then averages the results? If you click on your Ancestry DNA percentage, it will give you your range. For me, my range is 93%-100% European Jewish, and 0% to 4% Germanic Europe.  I wish they would only show people these ranges and not their average and there would be far less confusion as to the accuracy of these estimates. I wish I would have known about this non-obvious feature earlier, so that I could have seen what the ranges were on the estimates before the update.

Update: Aug 18, 2018 – Logging into 23andMe I had a notice saying: “Your Ancestry Composition results have been calculated with an update that includes new populations in Africa and East Asia. After viewing your results, please consider providing feedback below.”  Here’s my new results:

They had my Ashkenazi Jewish go down from 99.2% to 98.9% and broke up the rest on 0.1% to 0.3% bits of various stuff that really aren’t meaningful to me. And I don’t see how 0.3% can be significant when it only equals 11 centimorgans.

Update, Oct 21, 2019 – Ancestry DNA did another major revision to their ethnicity tests. Calling it their Aug 2019 revision, they added a lot of regional detail to some people’s breakdown. For me, they simply gave me 100% European Jewish. Congratulations Ancestry! You’ve finally got it right!

Update, Mar 3, 2020 – 23andMe sneakily made another update on me without me noticing. At the bottom it says: Updated October 15, 2019. They increased my Ashkenazi 0.1% to 99.0% and they got rid of my 0.1% African percentage:

Update: Sep 23, 2020 – Ancestry update: I remain 100% European Jewish. Family Tree DNA update: They increased my Ashkenazi Jewish from 92% to 96%. Central Europe went down from 7% to 3%; I lost my <2% Rest of Africa, and I gained a <1% Irish.

So my Jewish portion is now 100% at Ancestry, 99.2% at 23andMe, 96% at Family Tree DNA, and just 83.8% at MyHeritage.

Update, Oct 22, 2020 – Yet another 23andMe update (dated Oct 8, 2020). Ashkenazi Jewish 98.8% (down 0.2%), Eastern European 0.8% (up 0.6%), Northwestern European 0.1% (down 0.2%), Broadly European 0.3% (down 0.1%), Unassigned 0% (down 0.1%).

Update: Dec 13, 2020 – MyHeritage update: This is the first update MyHeritage has made since I first wrote this article over 2 1/2 years ago. My Ashkenazi went up from 83.8% to 85.5% and that’s good, but not enough. They gave me 4.5% Balkan which is the correct region (was zero before, but 3.3% in Eastern European instead). North and West Europe (5.2%), Middle Eastern (3.3%) and Irish Scottish and Welsh (1.5%) are all wrong. They did get rid of the 1.0% Inuit that they had for me before. In my case, they are still the poorest ethnicity estimate of all the companies.