To estimate your ancestral ethnicity, MyHeritage compares your DNA with the DNA of living people around the globe whose genetic ethnicity is known. We call these people the Founder Populations.
Founder Populations are modern groups that descend from a few individuals who left one area to settle another for political, religious, or social reasons. Founder populations amplify certain gene variants while maintaining significant stretches of uniformity in other DNA sequences.
We have reached out to thousands of MyHeritage users from all around the world who are members of Founder Populations — their family trees exemplify consistent heritage from the same region or ethnicity for many generations.
We are very happy that several thousands of those users have participated in the project, which now allows MyHeritage to calculate your Ethnicity Estimate based on these groups and regions, going back to a few hundred to up to 2,000 years ago.
To learn more about this topic, read this article on the MyHeritage Knowledge Base:
The Founder Populations Project: How MyHeritage Estimates Your Ethnicities. On the MyHeritage Knowledge Base, you'll find additional articles, webinars, and how-to videos that can help you master your genealogy skills.