The Genetic Groups feature is an ethnicity breakdown covering 2100+ geographic regions. Genetic Groups are now available for free to anyone who has already tested with MyHeritage DNA and they can be accessed under their Ethnicity Estimate results.
For each Genetic Group we display additional valuable insights into the group such as top places where the group’s members lived during different time periods, migration patterns, common surnames, common given names, common ethnicities, and related groups that share similar DNA segments.
In the example below, the heatmap denotes places where the group members lived during a specific time period.
Example of additional information displayed for a Genetic Group of Irish, English, and German settlers who immigrated to the USA (mainly to the large cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago) and some other destinations (click to zoom).
As the most popular DNA test outside the United States, MyHeritage has the unique advantage of having tested millions of users around the world, including in Europe, Latin America, and other countries. By applying machine learning and other algorithms to the rich DNA data and family trees associated with those DNA kits, we were able to determine what’s unique in each Genetic Group.
Genetic Groups can offer in-depth insights into your ancestors’ past geographic locations and migration patterns. They can point to a province, district, or region where people that you share DNA with have lived, or they can sometimes denote a larger area, and in both cases tell you more about the story of where your ancestors come from.
For example, one of the ethnicities defined by our Ethnicity Estimate is Scandinavian, which includes Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. Now, with Genetic Groups, we can get more granular and not only say which of these countries your ancestors came from, but also pinpoint those origins among 100 Genetic Groups from Sweden, 103 from Norway, 49 from Denmark, and 4 from Iceland, revealing where specifically in Scandinavia you are from. Your results may indicate that you are Norwegian, and tell you which county, such as Vestland, and possibly even which city your ancestors came from.
Founder Population
In order to understand the locations and paths of your ancestors, it’s important, to begin with founder populations. These are groups of people who lived in the same area and remained in the same region for centuries, only marrying within that group or perhaps migrating as a group.
The descendants of a group that originated from the same location, at a specific point in time, have shared DNA segments that they inherited from the group’s founding fathers and mothers. By identifying billions of those very small shared DNA segments and pinpointing which Genetic Groups those segments belong to, we have been able to associate MyHeritage DNA users with those Genetic Groups.
Genetic Groups differ from Ethnicity Estimates, in that a particular group can be comprised of one or several ethnicities. Members of a group share geographic origins, but they may have a certain mixture of ethnicities. For example, you could have a group of people that settled in Australia but who originated from England and Germany. Sometimes a group of people with different origins migrated to one location, and they became a melting pot, effectively creating a new group of their own.
Being a member of a Genetic Group does not come with a percentage; you are either a member of the group, or you are not. If you are a member of a Genetic Group, it means that we found a sufficient number of segments in your DNA that belong to or originate from that group.
Each Genetic Group to which you belong is assigned a confidence level based on the length of the DNA segments that are matched, the number of matches you have to the various DNA segments of the group, and other factors. Being part of a Genetic Group with low confidence can still be very interesting.
You may be a member of several Genetic Groups because you may have ancestors who inherited segments from founding fathers or descendants of various Genetic Groups. While the vast majority of our users will see one or more Genetic Groups in their results following this update, some users won't get any Genetic Groups, either because they are descendants of very rare ethnicities or groups that we currently don't have or because their confidence levels were below our thresholds.
Algorithms were used on a huge reference set of 1.7 million DNA kits to identify distinct Genetic Groups, and derive the DNA segments of the founding fathers and mothers of those groups.
We looked for connections between the members of a group to reveal and document each group’s unique story. We did this by leveraging aggregated ancestral metadata from the family trees associated with the DNA kits in the reference set, together with the genetic ethnicity results of the group members. The end result is that we merged some of the groups that were very similar into larger groups. This process included multiple iterations of fine-tuning, and at its completion more than 2100 distinct Genetic Groups emerged.
We then examined an additional two million DNA kits that were not part of the original reference set to validate the accuracy of the Genetic Groups, and performed final calibration.
Like Father, like Son
We then researched each and every one of the 2,114 groups, examining geography, history, and migration patterns spanning centuries. We curated the groups and gave each group a meaningful name and description that reflects the story of that group. This meticulous task was led by our Senior VP of Product Management, Uri Gonen, who was one of the earliest employees of MyHeritage. Uri played a crucial role in bringing this feature to life, dedicating his work on this project to his late father Amiram Gonen who was a professor of geography. Prof. Gonen authored a pioneering book, Encyclopedia of the People of the World, published 27 years ago, which very much resembles the work that Uri has completed now in identifying the Genetic Groups of the world.
Unique Genetic Groups on MyHeritage
The outstanding resolution of Genetic Groups and the innovative technology that powers this feature means that MyHeritage is now able to identify many populations that have never hitherto been detected by any consumer DNA test.
To learn more about this topic, read this article on the MyHeritage Knowledge Base: Genetic Groups on MyHeritage. On MyHeritage Knowledge Base, you'll find additional articles, webinars, and how-to videos that can help you master your genealogy skills.