Ancestry.com vs. MyHeritage DNA

     My Brother, Christopher, submitted his DNA to Ancestry .com (Ancestry DNA also known as FTDNA) for evaluation in 2016.  I submitted mine to MyHeritage DNA in 2018.  This site was written to publish the results of these test.  Since our family share the same biological parents, you could conclude that we also share the same DNA.  But, the truth is full siblings share only half of their DNA with one another. Because of this, siblings’ ethnicities can vary.  All the genes passed on to children of the same family, come from the same gene pool, that is, the genes of both parents.  So the ethnicity passed on to children must be present in one, or both parents.  It is a fact that some siblings may inherit ethnicities from their parents that others don’t, and it’s likely that each sibling can inherit different amounts of ethnicities from one another. Children inherit 50 percent of their DNA from each parent, but unless they’re identical twins, they don’t inherit the same DNA as each other.

     With this in mind, even though these were two different companies, our results are similar, but not the same.  It is not because one test is more accurate than the other, but rather because the data used to compare DNA is different, as well as the software used to analyze them.  It is also explained above that same family siblings can have different inherit genes from their parents.  Remember when evaluating DNA each person has two sets of genetic markers, one from their father and one from their mother.

     Of course the main reason we submitted our DNA to these services was to grow our family tree as well as to validate our family tree.  Genetic matches can be used to discover and meet new ancestors.  These test can help in solving the mysteries that every family tree has and with all tools they are more than welcome in helping my research.

    As time goes on I imagine, as I have seen with the Ancestry's DNA results change due to more and more people taking DNA tests.  Chris' DNA results changed in 2018 and again in 2021.  Chris' current DNA result page contains these updates.