Theories will usually be found for some of your DNA Matches.
Visit your DNA Matches to see them. During the first 30 days of this feature, a banner, shown below, will be displayed at the top of your DNA Match list telling you if you have theories. Click the button on this banner to conveniently view all your DNA Matches that have theories.
Whenever a DNA Match has a theory, this is indicated in the DNA Match card, as shown below.
When the estimated relationship (according to the shared DNA) is a wide range, with no clear indication of the true relationship, the theory will assist in narrowing down the relationship. You can compare the relationship suggested by the theory to the relationship suggested by the DNA to see if they are compatible.
Clicking “View theory” on the card will display the full theory, including the complete relationship path. Alternatively, you can start with a summarized view of the theory which is presented in the Review DNA Match page.
When more than one theory is available, this means that we have identified several theories with different relationships between you and the DNA Match. This can happen when people in the family have married within the family in earlier generations. In these situations, you can choose which theory to view by choosing from the drop-down menu.
In summarized theory view, move the mouse over any individual to see additional information.
Click “View full theory” to see a more detailed view that shows which family trees and historical records were used to establish the theory.
Viewing a full theory is a unique capability where MyHeritage’s new technology really shines. Its importance is in that it allows you to see how MyHeritage established the relationship path and which sources of information were used along the way. The top of the Full Theory page shows the estimated relationship (by the DNA) and the relationship suggested by the Theory of Family Relativity™. If more than one theory was found, as mentioned above, you can switch between them.
Theories always begin in your tree and end in the family tree of your DNA Match. The traversal of the path may include other family trees on MyHeritage, Geni, FamilySearch or historical records. Every time you see a horizontal “hop”, this means the theory is using a match to continue from one source to the next. Each Smart Match or Record Match is graded with a confidence level in percent, based on the quality of the match. The higher the score, the better the match is. Smart Matches and Record Matches that were rejected are never used in theories and we also require a very high minimum confidence for every match along the way, to ensure that theories you see are very high quality. The lowest confidence among the matches is considered the confidence score for the entire theory (and is displayed at the top of the page). Within each theory, there are often multiple paths, showing different ways that we arrive at the same theory and providing more evidence to support it. All paths still culminate in the same summarized theory but differ in the sources used along the way. For example, one path may start in your family tree and end immediately in the DNA Match’s family tree: such a short path, if exists, will always be offered first. There may be other paths among the same relatives that follow other trees or other historical records. Clicking any path number to view it. The green icon represents a Smart Match™ between two trees on MyHeritage.
The brown icon represents a Record Match. These are matches with historical records.
Side comment: there is something a bit confusing here because matches with trees on Geni and FamilySearch are currently considered as Record Matches because they are not trees on MyHeritage (although they are family trees and not records). In the future, we will probably reclassify such matches as Smart Matches and we might even rename “Smart Matches” to “Tree Matches” one day.
Click on a match icon (green or brown) to see a convenient side-by-side comparison of the information that exists for that individual in the two sources. Using this information you can determine for yourself whether the match is accurate.
In the example above, the Smart Match looks accurate so it is safe to rely on it.
There is more to a theory than meets the eye. Moving the mouse over any item in a theory opens a tooltip with more information about it. For example, you can move the mouse over the name of a tree owner in order to get access to buttons for contacting that person or viewing the tree. Moving the mouse over a collection name or a historical record opens a tooltip with buttons that allow you to search it, and so on.
Important:
Theory of Family Relativity™ (TOFR) is not a dynamic and automatic system, and in order to generate them, the data from family trees, records, and DNA matches are analyzed. Therefore it is not recommended to delete a person's profile or family tree, to try to fix or change a certain TOFR. By doing so, it will disrupt the calculations, and we will not be able to recalculate it, even if you upload a new tree with the same information as the one which was previously deleted. We are currently working to make it an automatic algorithm.
To learn more about this topic, read this article on the MyHeritage Knowledge Base: The Theory of Family Relativity™ for DNA Matches On the MyHeritage Knowledge Base, you'll find additional articles, webinars, and how-to videos that can help you master your genealogy skills.