hello everybody i am joe ross a genie vlogger and welcome back to another professional genealogist reacts on today's video i will be reacting to i took five dna tests and compared them which one is best by useful charts but before we jump into the video let's hear a word from the sponsor of today's video the genealogy show whether you're an avid family history researcher or just getting started tune in to the genealogy show 2021 virtual event from the 25th to the 26th of june the genealogy show has created an immersive platform for you to enjoy over 48 hours straight of talks from industry leaders all of which will be available for 30 days in the on-demand section there's also a wide variety of globally recognized exhibitors experts to help you in your research and so much more pick up your tickets today and be sure to use code genievlogger to get a discount on your tickets you can get more information at www.thegenealogyshowlive.com or go down into the details for the links and more information i am super excited for this video because for one i am friendly with matt baker who runs useful charts we've collaborated a few times i collaborated with him on his uh videos about can you trace your royal family we also collaborated with a genealogy collaboration where matt actually went into his family tree so i actually kind of know what to expect for him because he did have a video where he goes into the majority of his family tree he basically broke it down that his family tree came from three different lines um one was a french canadian line one was a german jewish line that moved to canada that i i think after a few generations ended up kind of the family mostly became um not jewish i don't know exact i want to say christian but i don't know if that's the proper terminology technically um and then i can't remember what the third line was for him it's been a while since i've seen that video i think maybe the third line form was actually like german or maybe it was a different kind of french canadian i can't remember but anyway from what i knew in the film in his family tree um he talks about a jewish line i don't know if that's gonna show up in his dna though because that line his most recent fully jewish ancestor as far as i know was a fairly distant like you know great great great great grandparent of some sort so if he does get jewish i would expect it to be like a trace result just a couple of percentages but being that he does five dna tests we're probably gonna see a few of them i think pick it up especially a lot of people say with myheritage it almost always reads jewish with the french canadian probably get like french german um i wouldn't be surprised it was some sort of british isles so basically i think he's gonna get just a lot of a lot of different european maybe a little bit of jewish um i don't think he would get any sort of asian ancestry i don't think he's gonna get any sort of african ancestry or native american ancestry um but i guess you know we'll never know we'll have to see now with that said be sure to like also be sure to subscribe and hit that bell for notifications on future videos but with all of that fun stuff said let's go ahead and watch this video hi this is matt baker and today i'm going to talk about dna tests i know that a lot of people who watch this channel are interested in genealogy and in building their own family trees well nowadays one of the things that can help you build your family tree is doing a dna test but there are a lot of different dna tests out there you see i took five different dna tests i have not done circles so i'm really excited for those results and in this video i'm going to compare them and show you what the results look like for each one the five kits i'm going to review are circle dna family tree dna ancestry.com 23andme and my heritage and i'm going to talk about them in order of price from the most expensive to the least expensive so up first is circle dna their basic service costs 189 dollars note that i'll be using us dollars throughout their premium service costs 629 so yeah that's pretty expensive but keep in mind that you get what you pay for circle dna is primarily focused on health related information and in that regard it definitely gives you the most detailed health information of any dna kit that i've tried now i actually don't know a whole lot about circle i have heard of it um but just from my standpoint i am curious what kind of testing they're doing if that if what they're doing is just what's known as autosomal snip testing so that's what you'll get if you do ancestry dna 23andme myheritage and then family finder at family tree dna those are all autosomal snip tests but some companies like family tree dna they have mitochondrial and why dna testing and then why dna testing there's other options for that so you can do str testing where they're testing certain short tandem repeats um or you can do the more advanced testing which requires to basically do the the str testing anyway uh snip testing so that's single uh nucleotide polymorphism so it's basically a lot of fancy words for the way that they can tell specific uh stuff about the dna um the the specific mutations the other thing is that other than autosomal snip testing there's also whole genome sequencing and i am curious i wonder if circle does some form of whole genome sequencing but i wonder that because it's 629 dollars that makes me think that maybe what one of the things they offer is whole genome but i guess we'll have to see let's see what he says in fact they market themselves as the world's most comprehensive dna test also keep in mind that all of these companies tend to offer discounts around holidays such as mother's day christmas etcetera so you can usually get 30 to 40 off if your time thinks right okay let's now take a look at the results that circle dna sent me i took the premium version so there's a lot to go through okay now i guess we'll have to find out but i'm wondering is circle dna offering any sort of genealogical information or is it just all health let's actually let's do a look so let's see circle dna our science nice lab okay so whole exome sequencing they're doing it at 50x all right so it's definitely more in-depth testing which usually for um health tests like if you go to an actual genetic uh genetic counselor geneticist or you know what you should do if you're trying to get true medical information by dna testing um usually those tests i think are at 100x reading so it's like how many times they go through and try to read the different stuff so it doesn't seem like they're really giving genealogical information now i understand probably why i haven't really looked much into it but let's keep let's continue with the video first of all the really serious stuff circle dna checked my health risk for 36 hereditary cancers as well as 79 other conditions this is just a partial report finally there was an ancestry report okay there is an admixture and from what i can see not very accurate like i said circle dna is primarily focused on extremely broad i mean european southern european northwestern european eastern european northern european i mean yeah i mean they basically say he's from all over europe health not genealogy okay however the rest of the kits we're going to look at are primarily focused on genealogy and next up is family tree dna they too use the swab method at first glance their price at eighty dollars for a basic test seems quite cheap but that's because they separate out their more detailed reports which cost extra and it's at this point that i should probably explain some important terms autosomal dna all right dna and y chromosome dna yeah he called it y chromosome dna i know there's a few genealogy there are genetic genealogists out there um who hate when people call it just y dna um and they're like it's the y chromosome it's not y dna and so like i know i i've heard that that um pet peeve from some so i i like that matt used it y chromosome dna here i try to say it but it is just easier to say why dna dna is the kind of dna that you're most likely familiar with it's the dna that is approximately 50 from your mother and 50 from your father so testing your autosomal dna gives you information about your entire family tree as a whole so for example unless you're a habsburg you probably have 16 great grandparents each of which contributed on average about six percent of your dna now the exact amount can actually be quite different which is why a dna test comes in handy for many people like myself their ancestors came from a variety of different places so an autosomal test can give you an approximate breakdown of where those ancestors came from so here's what my ancestry reports from family tree dna looks like you can see that it is more detailed than the one from the dna and once again the results seem a bit off way more eastern european than i would expect which just goes to show that these composition estimates are just that and his eastern europeans adding up to 21 which would be the equivalent if it's coming from one uh recent ancestor it'd be the equivalent of a grandparent just because with dna recombination it's not always exact you get 50 from your parents but then from that breakdown you might get 27 from one grandparent and 23 from another grandparent so it's not exactly even so getting 21 could just all be from a grandparent especially because that grandparent might be mostly eastern european with a little bit of western thrown in or something but then again this also might be a little off when it comes to reading this stuff it's not always exact but then again sometimes it may be right and there might be an npe a non-paternity event or non-paternal event there's a different few different ways to say it basically it's just there's someone in your ancestry that isn't actually your ancestor so going through the paper trail somebody's dad wasn't truly their biological dad or something like that um and so that that could be the case the other case is for a lot of people too um although i think matt's tree has traced out really well but for a lot of people their tree is only traced out to like great grandparents or second great grandparents and so there might be different ancestral things going on that they don't even know about just because they don't have the information on that one generation so yeah but let's let's continue they are estimates and each company comes up with their estimates in slightly different ways now i want to point out the other thing that an autosomal test can do which family tree dna provides but circle dna does not and that is matches yes matt you're the man love it okay sweet let's go back a little bit and that is to provide okay so looking at his genetic matches all right we have a first cousin aunt niece um 780 shared center morgan so looking at all of this so what what it is is is you know they're giving a relationship range an estimate of how closely is that person related based on how much dna they share so this woman shares 780 cents morgan's with matt 81 is the longest block so they have one big shared segment that's 81 centimorgans so x match that means that there's no shared dna through their x chromosome if they did link each other so linked relationships if you're on family tree dna you can make a family tree on there and then link the people that you know how they're related and then what it will do is it will actually start technically it's called phasing but it will start to uh divvy up your matches based on if they're through your mom's side or your dad's side because so let's say it's his dad's sister he puts that in the family tree on family tree dna links her then when he comes back all the matches that he shares with her will also be indicating that they come from his paternal side because if he shares those matches with her presumably they would also be through the father's side now there are issues with endogamy which matt would actually experience because matt comes from french canadian ancestry french canadians practiced endogamy which is basically that everyone within that community kept marrying only other people within that community and what happens is then all of the people who descend from that one community will be related to everybody else from that community in multiple ways so it's it's actually not surprising looking at his matches a lot of people may be surprised that he has so many matches over a hundred whereas a lot of a lot of people out there may be getting matches where their best one is like 130 centimorgans and then everything else is like 80 and below well when you deal with an endogamous population and you come from that you're related in multiple ways so if you're a third cousin of someone and you're also a fourth cousin to someone that dna adds up to a higher total shared amount than you would have for a third cousin or fourth cousin and this would then guess that there may be a second cousin so like these second and third cousins that he has down here that i'm circling around they may actually be fourth cousins or fifth cousins to him in their closest relation but because they're related in multiple ways thus they are having a higher total amount of shared dna and then here for this second match you see how it says x match that means that he is sharing dna on his x chromosome with this uh stockman and that means that if he's trying to figure out how they're related and he does not know then he can know that he can rule out any lines where he's not going to get his x chromosome so he does not inherit an x men do not inherit an x chromosome from their father they get the y chromosome so that means that because she's a match with an x chromosome he knows that she's not from his dad's side so if you're an adoptee trying to find your family and you get an x match and you're a male um then then you may uh you're going to easily be able to know okay that match is going to be through my mom's side because men only get their x chromosome from their mother let's just continue watching i'm so excited he's showing matches matches so this report shows you other people and it ranks them according to the closeness of the relationship this is where things get interesting now i also want to point out if you come from an endogamous population you're trying to figure out how am i going to find the matches that are worth looking into because in dogmas matches means that you have a lot of matches that you're not going to really be able to find how you're related because it's more distant than it looks well to figure that out look at the longest shared dna like you notice how these two have 95 and 94 total but they only have 17 for their longest i would not focus on them and i would more focus on these two down here where they have a 33 and a 28 centimorgan longest segment because the further distant related that you are that you know every generation dna recombines so if you're related to someone in multiple ways you're going to share more total dna but all of those segments that you share are going to be smaller than you would expect for that amount when you look at all the segments it's going to look a lot smaller than if you look at like a true second cousin so yeah so excited he's showing this then reach out to each person and try to figure out how exactly you are related let me now explain the other two types of dna starting with our mitochondrial dna inside every cell in your body are cell parts called mitochondria and those mitochondria have dna that is totally different from your main dna which is stored in the nucleus it's different because 100 of your mitochondrial dna comes from your mother in other words your mitochondria is the same as your mother's mitochondria which is the same as her mother's mitochondria etc etc so a mitochondrial dna test can tell you information about only a very small section of your family tree your matrilineal line but unlike an autosomal test it can tell you information that goes back much farther in history like tens of thousands of years far this is because like i say mitochondrial dna basically never changes it only changes in the rare case of a mutation and major mutations only happen every few thousand years so this means that if person a has a certain mutation and person b has the exact same mutation we can know that they share the same matrilineal line these lines are called haplogroups and are labeled with alphabetic codes my haplogroup is called you and family tree dna provides me with a map that shows where my line broke off from the main branch i'm h1ai1 which there's another famous genealogist who's h1ai one and that's megan smolenyak although we come from very different matrilineal type lines i come from a jewish line that traces to ukraine or present-day ukraine poland she comes from a line that i believe traces to ireland so you know somewhere in the past couple thousand years we were related only one genetic difference for those who know the in-depth stuff for mitochondrial we both tested full uh region only one genetic difference meaning one one um one variation in our reading was different finally there is why dna why dna is kind of the opposite of mitochondrial dna in that it only gives you information about your father and your father's father and so on and i should point out this test is only available to males in my case i belong to group rm 343 also known as r1b which happens to be by far the most common haplogroup in europe okay so remember that 80 i mentioned earlier that gives you autosomal results only if you want a mitochondrial test it's 160 extra and if you want y dna it's 120 extra so 360 dollars for all three and there's actually different levels of testing for mitochondrial and y i think for mitochondrial though they might have stopped doing uh the multiple test levels but for ydna tests there's ystr test which i believe it starts at y67 meaning they're going to read 67 str markers um and then it goes up from there there's like y one eleven y three hundred y six hundred or maybe it just goes to big y and then there's um you can get into snip testing for y dna y chromosome dna and you can either buy snip packages you can test single snips and basically that will tell you a more defined haplogroup for patrilineal so i did a whole genome sequence this is my most defined haplo group jby 55410 that's me my ancestry tracing to ukraine on my paternal line so me and this guy where his paternal line traces to lithuania we have a common ancestor up our purely paternal line so the the most recent common ancestor could be anywhere from like 350 years to 1 250 years and then that snip could actually have formed sometime in the past eleven hundred to twenty two hundred years this is going up the lines so if you notice how in his it traces back and it goes up the dots and it so basically when we're looking at this it's the same thing so this is going back another and all of these people we all share an ancestor where this is a mutation and it formed about 5300 years ago and then you can see all the countries so pretty much everyone here they come from a jewish family that you know hungary uh romanian ukrainian russian lithuanian ukrainian and then we can go back further and then we notice the next closest is qatar because jews came from the middle east and so our closest relatives also live in the middle east we take it back another and then all sudden we see saudi arabia we take it back another we get iraq then we get libya in north africa we have saudi arabia and then we take it back another and then we have all over the place libya iraq saudi arabia qatar all of ours then we have these where it's italian syrian armenian kuwait saudi arabia and then we get a ton of palestinian and so it's you can really tell the history so all of these people all of us if we trace up our paternal line somewhere 14 000 years ago about we will find a common ancestor up our purely paternal line but again you get what you pay for yeah you get a lot more tree dna apart is that it gives you way more information on the various mutations in your mitochondrial and y dna and your genetics is where it gets way over my head which leads me to the point i want to make about this test this is a test that i would recommend primarily for those at the expert level of genetic genealogy i'd say intermediate i i mean intermediate could definitely make use of it the the difficulty with it is just that it's a little bit harder to read it takes a little bit longer to kind of figure out and it's genealogical usage it's low because it's kind of it's kind of a game of luck of you know who's tested it's just like the autosomal test like if you're trying to find family and you're trying to find genetic matches it depends on who's tested and it's the same thing with the y and mitochondrial the only difference is a lot fewer people have done that kind of testing so you get a lot fewer results and there's a lot there's a higher chance that you're not going to really get anything out of it genealogically than with autosomal but it can be amazing and they've they even they've used it i think they used it to confirm the remains of king richard iii 23andme is unique in that it offers both genealogy and health reports if you want just the genealogy stuff it's a hundred bucks but if you want both it's 200 and be prepared to spit into a tube on the genealogy side it's pretty similar to family tree dna they offer an ethnicity estimate as well as a list of relative matches however one thing to note about 23andme is that they do give you your haplogroup results at no extra chart but the difference is it's not matching like family tree dna they're doing a much smaller reading and so you're also getting less of a defined haplogroup so for me on family tree dna they define me as jm172 which is also called j2 whereas testing through 23andme i haven't done it yet i need to actually do it um although i don't really technically need to i have a cover but anyway they would probably just call me j i would expect i would be doubtful that they would give me like a j2 or you know anything more specific than j i'm not going to go into any more detail about 23andme because i did an entire video on my results back in 2019 so i'll just leave a link to that in the description i actually don't remember seeing that so i am gonna have to go and watch that as well and do a reaction next up is ancestry.com their basic test also goes for 100 and uses the spit method and unlike 23andme it doesn't give you haplogroup information either but of course it does give you a breakdown of where your ancestors came from and this is where ancestry really stands out because their ethnicity report is much more detailed so you can see here that for me they not only break down european ethnicities into finer categories they are also able to predict which north american settler communities my ancestors belong to and from what i know of my family tree they seem to have things spot on i know that most of my ancestors came from germany england and ireland and settled in nova scotia and this is indeed what the results show so because ancestry is basing their results on such a large database of people who like me live in north america i would lean towards saying that these particular ethnicity results are probably the most accurate for me anyway of the five tests that i've taken yeah the ancestry database is the largest and the majority of the database i would say come from english-speaking countries at least is from my experience because ancestry there's like four main ancestry sites there's ancestry us ancestry canada ancestry uk and then ancestry au australia new zealand i don't think there's an australian z specifically for new zealand i think it's just lumped in with uh ancestry australia i don't know if there's others but like for my heritage they have distribution centers uh elsewhere in the world so like my heritage they don't have as large a database as ancestry but i believe they have a larger amount of people from eastern europe who've tested and i believe they have a larger amount of people from like south and central america who have tested um whereas ancestry even though they are a larger database their database doesn't really represent those communities as well when it comes to relative matches once again ancestry really stands out because of their very large database but they recently changed the formatting of the the page and i hate it because like i said uh when it comes to endogamous populations which i come from an endogamous population it's easy to figure out the best matches to look into using the total amount of centimorgans and either the largest segment or the number of segments and they used to show the total amount of centimorgans which we see here right there and then where this 14 share dna is it used to be set total segments and now they've just changed it to the percentage view which i think is it doesn't make sense to me other than it's showing you know okay people who prefer percentage which i think is very few and far between i i wish they would bring it back to show that uh that number of segments because for people like me dealing with those endogamous populations it really streamlines being able to figure out which matches are the best the way they have it now i have to click on every single match to look and see whereas before i could just scroll and pass through you know all the you know people that were like you know 87 centimorgans across 10 segments like you know i could be like okay well those aren't really as important whereas if i find someone with like 80 centimorgans across five segments that's going to be a match i want to look into so if your main goal is to find relatives and you're from north america then ancestry is probably the best place to start yeah i would redefine that as if you come from any english-speaking countries uh so north america the u.s canada australia new zealand um and then england uh british isles you know ireland scotland um you're gonna have a lot of representation on this database because a lot of i mean a lot of those countries have a lot of uh have a lot of people who've tested at ancestry um but you do also get a lot of europeans and others too however i should point out that if you do any of these tests you should be prepared for the possibility of uncovering surprises finally the other great thing about ancestry is that their website is specifically designed for helping you build your family tree it has an amazing easy to use interface plus it offers you access to millions of online records if you have the membership access to all those records you do have to sign up for a monthly membership which costs around 25 per month okay the final test that i took was from my heritage which uses the swab method my heritage is a lot like ancestry however at eighty dollars they hold the distinction of being the least expensive test on the market and if you wait for one of their sales you can usually take the test for even less here is what my results from my heritage look like okay it shows that he didn't get any jewish reading all right i thought he i thought if any of them had picked up any of that jewish it probably would be my heritage although from all the reading i'm guessing he did not inherit any of that jewish ancestry um but like i said that was from what i could tell i think it was really distant like his most recent fully jewish ancestor would have been born in the 1700s i think it was maybe the 1600s so fourth fifth sixth great-grandparent and you know at that amount you it's very common not to inherit dna from that person even though they are an actual ancestor of yours my ancestors mostly came from germany england and ireland at this point i want to give you a bit of a conclusion i can't really say which of the five tests i tried is the best for you because that really depends on your situation and interests very true if you're primarily interested in health information and have money to spend then i'd say that circle dna is hands down your best option however if it's genealogy that you're most interested in there's a few more questions to consider if you're an expert and want really detailed mitochondrial and y dna reports tested all of them once again whole genome sequencing then you'll definitely want to go with family tree dna however if you're more of an average person and simply want to spend about 100 bucks on a simple test you'll want to go with either my heritage or ancestry i'd recommend my heritage for anyone who is jewish or lives outside of north america and i'd recommend ancestry for those in the u.s or canada finally if you want a bit of both health info and genealogy info or you want to find out your haplogroups without breaking the bank i'd say that you can't go wrong with 23 and me okay so that was a look at some of the dna tests out there you can find a link to all of these tests as well as a few discount codes in the description yeah just look in my description below although i don't have circle down there and if you have taken more than one test let me know in the comments which one you thought was best and why thanks for watching all right great video i mean i you know i i wasn't expecting anything bad for matt you know he's he is a smart guy he has a great channel if anyone watching my channel has not seen useful charts check it out it's super interesting and i i would bet that you've probably seen one of his videos even if you don't remember that it was one of his one thing i do want to say like at the end where he's kind of breaking down what you know what test you want to take and people ask me that all the time what's the best test personally if you are into genealogy and money is not an issue test on all of them um i think what most people usually say is do the test on either ancestry 23 me then you can upload it for free to the family tree dna database in the myheritage database for genetic matching plus there's ged match living dna genie net genie all these other places to upload it 23andme doesn't allow uploads but then to also test that paid to test there um personally i would say i would say ancestry over 23andme um 23andme does have genealogy stuff but they recently did a whole thing where they put more tools behind the paywall um and then they also cut out a lot of matches and they they did a whole lot of stuff that a lot of people in the genealogy community weren't the happiest about um but they are a very large database ancestry is the largest database so i i you know matt was saying if you're jewish you know you should test at myheritage um which if you're really interested in the admixture stuff and trying to figure out do you have safari or mizrahi or something like that yeah maybe my heritage might be a good choice but if it's just for looking for matches my heritage and ancestry are pretty good but i would also say too if you are really into the genealogy stuff and you really want to find out the health stuff i know his video is about circle but i would suggest checking out my video about a nebula whole genome sequencing because whole genome sequencing gives you a lot it does your whole genome um and then it gives you a lot of information on the health stuff it constantly puts new studies out and it gives you the most in-depth look at your dna by far just watch my video and you'll see everything i go into and they plan to eventually do some sort of collaboration with family tree dna but that still has yet to happen although they recently did uh finalize the thing with y full which is now active but overall i would say this was a great video i do kind of find it funny he didn't really spend a whole lot of time going into the actual like you know here's the ad mixture like he does talk about it for the most part and you know he has done a lot of genealogy research on his own family and so you know he really understands the power of these tests beyond just the admixture and i'm so happy so so happy thank you so much matt for showing your genetic matches and talking about how you even were able to find this first cousin from ancestry that you knew nothing about previously so awesome video so happy i watched it um this one you know came out may 28th i'm watching this today's june 5th so just last week as soon as it came out i put it in my watch list and i've gotten probably a dozen maybe even more comments and things saying i should watch it and uh yeah i i knew i had to well thank you so much for checking out this video if you did enjoy please be sure to give it a like that really does help me out you can also subscribe by clicking right here it is completely free to do so you can also follow me on facebook twitter or instagram genievlogger i'm the genie vlogger see my next video