DNA Update August 2024
MyHeritage
They have started to roll-out their ethnicity updates: look out for new categories eg Breton.
Some women provide their maiden names on this site and many people give their age – useful pointers to aid identification.
23&Me
If you have upgraded to their Premium+ subscription you will get 5k matches, instead of 1,500, and be offered further health reports. Under their Ancestry heading you will find a sub group Historical and, when you click on that, it shows you which matches you have with bodies discovered in archaeological excavations. The aDNA (ancient DNA) of the bodies have been tested and recorded. 
FTDNA
They have just updated their Big Y Match Time Tree (see next page) – this is only for those who have taken a Big Y test. The orange dot is my 2C1R Leslie Rocker – who I have had tested – and it compares his DNA to other men who have tested and these are his matches. The haplogroup (a genetic population of people who share a common ancestor on the patriline or matriline) changes over time – having mutated towards the present day. There are 5 other men who share with my cousin: one from Norway, one from Switzerland and 2 from USA. This chart is updated/refined on a weekly basis.
Debbie Kennett has a one-name study, Cruwys (and variants), and has tested her father at Big Y level. On her father’s Big Y Match Time Tree there is a Mr Isaac. He was asked to test for the Isaac name project – but he doesn’t show up in the Isaac chart, he shows up on the Cruwys chart!!
Similarly, FTDNA are working on producing a Mito Tree soon for female lines with revised reports and time frames. Both these reports are produced utilising aDNA from archaeological sites around the world.
Those of you with a sub to FTDNA will have had emails informing you about the tree changes that are going to occur next month. 9th September is the deadline for you to transfer/link your FTDNA family tree to MH. After this date you will no longer be able to update your FTDNA tree. To make yourself the home person on your tree, when you’re making the transfer, you will have to type your name into the list of tree names and click on it.
If you don’t have a subscription to MH and you have more than 250 names on your tree you will be given 3 months free and then asked to either subscribe or prune your tree …as they have an upper limit of 250 free names.
Ancestry
If you were an early bird and subscribed to Pro Tools when it was £4.99/m then I’m pleased to tell you that, if you haven’t cancelled, you are only being charged £4.99 – Peter checked! More features will be added in due course – especially DNA ones. As they are still rolling out the enhanced shared matches feature the coloured squares roll-out has taken a back seat.
Relationships are being added to – many of the ‘further back’ relationships eg 5C1R had gone missing but are being replaced. The roll out of 64 coloured squares will happen and the colours will be improved.
The enhanced shared matches feature is good as it includes ALL matches down to the 8cM limit – they don’t cut off at 20cM – and some of those might have good trees.
I am particularly pleased with the Tree Checker feature: it indicates where you have duplicates in your tree, if you’ve added an event that happened before or after they were born/died and where you haven’t actually entered any events (such as bmd dates) from their list of hints. Beware, though, I reckon this has been generated by AI and it does make some really stupid suggestions.
The Tree Mapper facility is very handy: you can look at places and see how many ‘events’ happened there (from your tree) and you can look at how many of a particular surname is worldwide, or in any country or town.
Their next ethnicity update should happen next month.
DONM : 16th September
Jenny Towey
jenny@towey.me.uk
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