Crucianize

Tag: Caribbean ancestry

  • The Reasons why I prefer 23andme over Ancestry DNA

    So many times I’ve been asked if I prefer Ancestry or 23andme and which one would be the best to buy. In answer to the first, personally, I prefer 23andme. In answer to the second, it depends.

    Ancestry is always touted as being the best but for who?

    People with ancestry that is mainly from the United States. If you have ancestry from the Caribbean or Europe you might have more matches with 23andme, MyHeritage, Geneanet, or any of the other lesser-known DNA sites.

    To show you what I mean I’m going to show you my brother’s DNA map from Ancestry.

    *Not all Relatives opt into sharing their location so there could be some from the locations I’m talking about.

    As you can no doubt see there is 1 DNA relative from Canada, 17 from the Caribbean, and 3 from the UK. All our ancestry is from the Caribbean: US Virgin Islands, Dominica, and Saint-Barthélemy. We should have way more family in the Caribbean, the UK, and France but those testers are just not here at Ancestry. I can find some who moved from those areas to the United States but the ones who never moved are unaccounted for and quite frankly they are the ones that can probably help me break my brick walls.

    As a comparison, I’m going to show you my father and my 23andme DNA maps, what I love about 23andme’s map is that it tells you exactly how many relatives did opt into sharing their locations.

    463 out of 1500 DNA Relatives
    458 out of 1501 DNA Relatives

    First, we’ll look at my map.

    Do you see the difference already? 14 DNA relatives in Canada, 40 in the Caribbean, 1 in Mexico, 1 in Central America, 3 in South America, 34 in Europe, and 1 in Australia.

    So, here’s a closer look at my European relatives. 1 from Ireland, 1 from the Isle of Man, 4 from Scotland, 23 from England, 1 from Switzerland, 1 from the Netherlands, and 3 from France.

    Now let’s look at those from the Caribbean, 1 from the Bahamas, 1 from Bermuda, 1 from the Dominican Republic, 1 from Barbados, 4 from Dominica, 5 from Anguilla, 1 from Puerto Rico, 1 from the British Virgin Islands, and 25 from the US Virgin Islands.

    Now let’s take a look at my father’s map, 10 in Canada, 1 in Central America, 1 in South America, 40 in the Caribbean, 24 in Europe, 2 in Australia, and 1 in Japan.

    Let’s zoom in on his Caribbean relatives, 1 in the Bahamas, 1 in the Dominican Republic, 1 in Trinidad and Tobago, 1 in Martinique, 3 in St. Lucia, 1 in Guadeloupe, 2 in Saint-Barthélemy, 3 in Sint Maarten, 1 in Puerto Rico, and 26 in the US Virgin Islands.

    Another aspect of 23andme that makes it much better than Ancestry is the Advanced DNA Comparison to several other DNA relatives to see what DNA segments we have in common, Ancestry doesn’t have a similar feature.

    The only issue I have with 23andme is that it doesn’t have a good family tree, there is a family tree option but it is very limited, I can’t do much with it because of all the intermarrying within my family and there is no way to indicate that in 23’s current tree. So, I will usually look at relatives on 23 and then go to Ancestry to try to place them in my tree over there.

    In conclusion test with both if you can. With those two tests, you can upload to the other Genealogical sites and cover all your bases. You will no doubt run into some of the same matches but you might be surprised with some new ones who are not on the major sites.

  • New MyHeritage Genetic Groups

    This being the first day of the new year I thought it only fitting that I write about MyHeritage’s Genetic Groups update that dropped on December 24. They are free to anyone who has taken a test at MyHeritage or uploaded it there. I have three uploads, my 23andme which was uploaded in Sep 2018, my brother’s Ancestry which was uploaded in Mar 2018, and my father’s 23andme which was uploaded in Aug 2020. Since my brother and my uploads were done in 2018 we were grandfathered into having access to most of the DNA tools without having to pay. It’s interesting how both our uploads perform, my brother’s upload has 520 DNA relatives while I have 500. Our father on the other hand has 1,006 DNA matches!

    Here’s my Ethnicity on MyHeritage, I didn’t receive any Genetic Groups, unfortunately, these results don’t really make much sense to me and have never changed since I uploaded them.

    Here’s my brother’s Ethnicity, he has one Genetic Group in, the Netherlands, which makes sense since I knew we had relatives in the Netherlands.

    My father’s upload was stuck behind the paywall because it was uploaded after MyHeritage stopped allowing the free uploads but I never really thought about paying for it since I could see his ethnicities by comparing his account with mine or my brother’s, I have to admit though, seeing that he had 3 Genetic Groups and I had no way of seeing them unless I paid made me very curious. I ended up paying 34,80€ to unlock his DNA results.

    I’m not sure if being able to change the Confidence level of the Genetic Groups is part of the paid DNA account or if it’s due to the fact that there is more than one Group.

    Puerto Rico and USA Genetic Group make perfect sense as my father has a lot of families that moved to Puerto Rico and then their children later on moved to the USA.

    The other two Genetic Groups I wasn’t expecting if you read the About this Genetic Group section it’s mostly British and some Irish and German settlers, on my father’s paternal side we have a few Irish/British lines so this makes sense.

    In conclusion, the Genetic Groups have been a pleasant surprise just waiting on an update to the Ethnicity because I’m not really sure what could be contributing to the South Asian in both mine and my father’s composition.