Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I took my first MyHeritage DNA test at RootsTech 2017 in Salt Lake City.

At RootsTech 2024 last March, MyHeritage announced Ethnicity Estimation 2.0 which is to be released this June. There are many good reasons to get their new estimates. The estimates will be a free update for all users who tested on MyHeritage’s Illumina GSA (Global Screening Array) chip (mid 2019 onwards).

Unfortunately, my test was from 2017 and used the Illumina OmniExpress Microarray Chip. So I would not get the new ethnicity estimates, and that got me  thinking that their might be other updates in the future that my old test might miss out on.

So I made the decision to take another MyHeritage DNA test with their new chip and compare my results with my test from 2017 on their old chip.

From Ordering to Results

I ordered my new kit online on Sunday March 17, at what seems to be their perpetual sales price of $49 CAD (for Canadians).

The kit was shipped the next day (Monday March 18) from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and arrived in my mailbox on Friday March 22. I tested myself, activated the test online, and mailed the kit the next day (Saturday March 23) to their lab in Houston, Texas, which is actually the Family Tree DNA lab who do the processing for MyHeritage.

Online at MyHeritage, they let you track the progress of the test.

• Tuesday April 2, the kit arrived at the lab. They said from that point to expect the results on MyHeritage in 3 to 4 weeks.
• Wednesday April 3, DNA extraction was in progress.
• Friday April 12, Microarray process was in progress.
• Monday April 15, the raw data was produced
• Friday April 19, the results were ready and available.

So that only took 26 days which is less than 4 weeks from the time I ordered the test to when my results became available.

My first MyHeritage test which I took at RootsTech in 2017 took just over a month for the results to become available, so their delivery time has remained about the same.

Ethnicity Estimates

The new test still uses their older ethnicity estimates, the version 2.0 estimates as I stated above won’t be available until June.

I (and many other people) have always considered MyHeritage to have the least accurate ethnicity estimates of the major DNA testing companies.  In my case, I have 4 Ashkenazi Jewish grandparents, 8 Ashkenazi Jewish great-grandparents and 16 Ashkenazi Jewish great-great-grandparents. If that’s not 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, then I don’t know what is.

My original estimates from my first MyHeritage DNA test gave me just 83.8% Ashkenazi. They did an update in 2020 which increased that to 85.5%, and another update last August that increased it again to 90.3%.

By comparison, my latest estimates of Ashkenazi at the other companies are:

• Family Tree DNA:  94%
• 23andMe:  98.8%
• Ancestry: 99%

All are much closer to 100% than MyHeritage’s 90.3%.

My new MyHeritage DNA test’’s ethnicity results is a tiny bit better at 90.8% and shows me this:

I have to disagree as I’m absolutely sure that I have zero Scandinavian, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Greek or Italian in me.

In June, I’ll be able to see what the Ethnicity Estimates 2.0 give.

Comparing My Matches

MyHeritage’s setup with multiple tests is nice. I can compare the DNA matches in my two kits easily in two browser windows. Here’s the comparison:

My new test has fewer matches than my old test, but has more closer matches (extended family) than my old test. The 1 “Close family” is my uncle.

The 2017 test shows 1 Theory of Family Relativity, but that Theory is wrong. The new test does not show any Theories, but I likely have to wait until MyHeritage recalculates everyone’s Theories which they do from time to time, before I can see if any show up in my new test.

The 2017 test tells me 219 of my DNA matches’ trees have smart matches with my tree. The new test gives me 200. I can’t determine my relationship with any of those people.

Among my matches, I only know how 3 of them are related to me. My two closes matches are my uncle and a first cousin once removed. The only other is a 2C2R sharing 79.4 cM with me.

Here is a comparison of my top 10 matches.

The first 10 people are my 10 closest matches in my 2024 test. The first 5 are my top 5 in both tests, but then the order starts to diverge.

The next 4 people are from the top 10 in 2017 that did not make the top 10 in 2024.

You can see slight differences in the numbers between the two tests. I wouldn’t consider them to be significant. Although #10 has 3 more matching segments in 2024 than in 2017.

I am surprised that my 8th closest match of my 2024 test does not appear in my 2017 test results. Could it be a brand new tester who has not yet been updated in my older test? Not sure I have an explanation if that’s not the reason.

My Raw Data

In my Comparing Raw Data from 5 DNA Testing Companies, I gave a summary table of the raw data files which I’ll update here adding my new test at the right: (click on the any table for a larger version):

The new raw data file includes fewer SNPs (609,346) than any of my previous tests. Let’s see which chromosomes are tested:

Interestingly, despite testing fewer SNPs overall, the raw data includes more SNPs from the X chromosome than any other company, and includes more SNPs from the Y chromosome than any company except 23andMe. The raw data does not include any mt (mitochondrial) SNPs.

On the Autosomal chromosomes 1 to 22, these are the Allele values supplied:

There are only 701 no calls which is only 0.1% and that is much less than any of the other tests. Like the other companies except 23andMe, insertions and deletions are not included.

It is odd that FTDNA, MyHer v1 and AncestryDNA tests have about twice the number of heterozygous values than the 23andMe, LivingDNA and MyHer v2 tests have. Those are SNPs with different reads from the two chromosomes, i.e: AC, AG, AT, CG, CT and GT. The first three tests used the OmniExpress chip and the latter three used the GSA chip, so maybe something about the difference between these two chips caused this. But I don’t know the reason why.

Here are the values for the X chromosome:

For the X, the new MyHeritage test has included insertions and deletions. Like autosomal, the X also has a much lower percentage of no calls (0.5%) than the other tests. The shaded area are read errors because I am male, so I only have one X chromosome and cannot have two different values. This new test has a similar read error rate (0.3%) to what the other tests did.

Here’s the Y chromosome:

Again, a low no call rate compared to the other tests and only 7 erroneous reads.

Combining These Results With My Others

In my  Creating a Raw Data File from a WGS BAM file article, I ended up combining my 5 chip tests with my WGS test to end up with a raw data file with 1,601,497 SNPs with only 13,546 no calls (0.85%). I refer to that as my All-6 raw data file.

This new MyHeritage test has 609,317 SNPs.

It includes 15,215 new SNPs that were not included in any of my previous tests. Of those 15,095 had values and 120 were no calls.

It disagreed on 247 SNPs, so those need to be changed to no calls.

And it gave values to 3,483 SNPs that from the previous tests were only no calls.

So my All-7 combined file should therefore end up with:

• 1,601,497 + 15,215 = 1,616,719 SNPs
• 13,546 + 120 + 247 – 3,483 = 10,430 no calls
• 10,430 / 1,616,592 = 0.65%

and I will have reduced my percentage no calls from 0.85% to 0.65%.

Raw Data Accuracy

In my 2021 article: Your DNA Raw Data May Have Changed, I noted that the various testing company’s SNPs gave incorrect values for 0.2% to 0.5% of the SNPs which is pretty good. MyHeritage’s test originally was 0.2% (1 error every 603 SNPs) and one of the best. But then, after they changed my raw DNA data, the error rate increased to 0.8% (1 error every 119 SNPs) and it became one of the worst.

This isn’t really anything to worry about for matching relatives, because their matching algorithms allow for a few mismatches every 100 SNPs and still will say the two segments match. This is to take into account the occasional read error and the rare mutation. (No calls are ignored.)

But for analysis of a single SNP for medical purposes, the error rate is important. For that purpose, it is worthwhile knowing if the MyHeritage SNP error rate improved from 0.8%.

For this, I’ll Determine the Accuracy of my new MyHeritage DNA test by the way I describe in the section “The Accuracy of Standard Microarray DNA Tests” from my 2020 article: Determining the Accuracy of DNA Tests.

It seems that this new MyHeritage Test on the newer GSA chip is quite accurate with only 247 readings that differ out from the consensus of 588,234 SNPs of my other tests. That’s just a 0.04% error rate, or 1 error every 2,382 SNPs.

The next best error rate in my Accuracy article was 1 error every 1,391 SNPs for my short read WGS test and 1 out of 612 SNPs for my Family Tree DNA test.

Conclusion

Is it necessary to upgrade your MyHeritage DNA test if yours if your was done with the old Illumina OmniExpress chip up to 2019? For matching purposes, probably not.

But MyHeritage is not supporting the older results for their new ethnicity estimates that will come out in June. When the June results are released and people start reporting how their results changes, we’ll have a better idea whether it might be worthwhile to retest.

… and including deceased people.

This is something you want your online genealogy programs to do for you. Privacy of living people is important, so you want living people to be excluded.

MyHeritage displays living people like this, showing all the people with their birth surname and a given name of “<Private>”:

Geni is similar, but shows the married surname of the wife rather than her birth surname:

Ancestry does not give you surnames, but does include all the people and shows you the sex of each person:

FamilySearch does not show living people at all (unless you are the person who entered the information). I like this best. If you want to keep living people private, then don’t show them or include them at all.

Specifying a Person as Living

Most online systems allow you to specify if a person is living or deceased.

At MyHeritage:

At Ancestry:

This is good. Every person has to have this designation set. And you can only specify the death information if you’ve marked the person as deceased.

There are two problems with this.

1. The status may be entered incorrectly and a living person is marked as deceased.
2. A living person eventually dies, and it could be years before it is even realized that the person has passed.

The online programs do try to mitigate this.

At Ancestry, if the status is not entered and there is no death information but there is a birth date, then if the age is less than 100, the person is treated as living. See: Living People in Family Trees (ancestry.com)

FamilySearch does something similar.checking for a birth 110 years ago, marriage 95 years ago, or a child born 95 years ago. See: How Family Tree decides if a person is living or dead • FamilySearch

Privacy in Desktop Software

For the most part, genealogy desktop software is for private use. Since others will not often be looking at your desktop tree, privatizing living people is not as important.

However, if you export your database to GEDCOM in order to load it to an online tree or send it to someone, then you’ll want to exclude your living people and their associated sources and media from the GEDCOM file.

Most programs cannot do that. If it’s going to an online tree, you’ll have to rely on the online tree’s privacy settings to hide your living people for you.

What makes this difficult is that most desktop programs don’t make you specify if each person is living or deceased. In a way, that is good, because we often do not know if a person is still living or not. In fact we may leave out birth and death dates completely for deceased people if we don’t know the dates they lived. We might just enter their name and sex if that is all we know. but we don’t want them to be treated as living if no death date was listed. So what do we do?

Filtering Living People

The new version of Behold I am working on will include a number of ways to filter the people you want to display. One of the filters will be to exclude living people.

The new version of Behold will also include GEDCOM export. It will export just the people and information that has not been filtered out.

It took me a few days to come up with the algorithm to do this, but I finally figured out something that should work very well. It goes like this:

1. For each person in the tree with a birthdate::
2. If the person was born at least 100 years ago, then:
• Mark the person as deceased
• Go through the person’s ancestors and mark them all as deceased as well. (Can stop at ancestors with birthdates, since they will get done).

Then upon export, only people with death information or with a birthdate will be included, along with the sources and media for only these people. If there is no death date for a person, then the following GEDCOM line will be included to indicate that this person is deceased.

1 DEAT Y

Most programs reading that GEDCOM line will recognize it, and mark the person as deceased.

One more thing:  If you have a person who died, but one or both parents are still alive, then I feel the child should remain private. It is not fair to the living parent(s) to give information about their deceased child. Many programs display the information about the child, but Behold will not.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’ll find the filtering of living people to be a useful feature in the next version of Behold. To follow my progress as I finish up Version 2.0, check out my Behold Future Plans webpage.

Bertha German was born April 1, 1924 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The youngest of 7 children, living together in a small house at 524 Flora Avenue.

Toby Braunstein was born on April 7th, 6 days later and 600 km (370 miles) to the west on the farm in the rural municipality of Tullymet, Saskatchewan, Canada. He was the youngest of 4 children.

Toby’s father died of Tuberculosis when he was just 7 months old. Toby’s older siblings went to the Jewish Orphanage in Winnipeg, but Toby being still a baby, was allowed to stay with his mother. The matchmakers of the community went to work and just over 4 years later, Toby’s mother married Louis Kessler who was a recent widower himself. She and Toby moved 240 km (150 miles) south to Louis’ farm in the Sonnenfeld,Colony in Saskatchewan and she was able to take Toby’s older sister out of the orphanage to be with them.

Bertha’s mother died when when Bertha was just 9 years old. Her older sisters and brothers helped her father raise her.

When she was in grade 1, Bertha’s sister saw a “Baby Peggy” in a movie and liked the name and started calling by the name of “Peggy”, and somehow Peggy became the name everyone called her and the name she called herself.

Toby and his sister went to a one-room schoolhouse about 2.5 km (1.5 miles) away in the nearby town of Ratcliffe, Saskatchewan. Their surname at school was Kessler.

Life in a small 6 room home in the city for a single father and 7 children was not easy. But the children went to school and the older ones soon married. Peggy finished high school and got a job as a secretary after becoming proficient at typing 90 words per minute.

Life on the farm in a small 4 room home for Toby’s family of 4 was not not easy. Prairie winters were brutal. In 1932, Toby’s stepfather was disabled by a sleigh accident and Toby had to take over running the farm. They had 320 acres with horses, cows, chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs and cats and also planted crops and grew vegetables. Toby loved doing the farm work, and he would hitch two horses to the sleigh to take him and his sister to school on school days. His brothers, who were still being schooled at the orphanage in Winnipeg, visited Toby on the farm several times.

Above: Toby (back row, center) with his brothers, sister and mother at his farmhouse in 1941.

Toby’s stepfather passed away in 1940, when Toby was 16. He, his mother and his sister stayed on the farm during the war years. When the war ended, they looked for a better life in the big city of Winnipeg. There, Toby started work as a taxi driver.

Toby courted Peggy, picking her up at her house in his taxi. Peggy was worried that Toby was several years younger than him, but was relieved to find out he was only 6 days younger. They married in 1950 in Winnipeg. Toby legally changed his surname from Braunstein to Kessler prior to getting married. Peggy didn’t legally change her given name, but signed her name as Peggy Bertha Kessler.

Above: Toby and Peggy on the steps of their first home at 408 Rupertsland Avenue in Winnipeg in 1950

They had a daughter Esther in 1951 named after Peggy’s mother, and a son Louis (me) in 1956 named after Toby’s stepfather.

The next year they purchased a newly built 1040 square foot three bedroom bungalow at 375 Perth Avenue which was at the time at the edge of the city for about $9,000.

Toby took a real estate course and became a real estate broker and started his own company which he called T. Kessler Realty. He built an office in the basement of their home on Perth Ave and worked from their home. Over a 38 year career, mostly on his own, he gave personalized service and helped hundreds of people in the neighborhood sell or purchase a home.

Peggy was a stay-at-home mom who helped Toby with the paperwork for his business and for a time worked from the house as an insurance agent.

Toby and Peggy both had lots of family – aunts, uncles and cousins –living in Winnipeg. Peggy loved to have family over and would entertain any and all who would come by with pastry and drink ready at a moments notice.

They loved and enjoyed their children and gave them life experiences taking them everywhere, from playgrounds to parks to beaches and summer cottages, to the zoo, the planetarium, the museum, to movies, to supermarkets and shopping malls, on horseback rides and car trips to the Rockies and Vancouver.

To instill independence into their children, they made sure that by high school their children took an after school job at the library a block away. And Toby set up a youth organization so that they’d meet others and maybe meet their future spouse.

They were successful in their efforts and both children married giving their parents four grandchildren for them to spoil.

Toby and Peggy sold the house and moved into an apartment. They had their children and grandchildren over every Sunday for dinner together.

Toby had an angina attack in his 40’s and took up jogging years before jogging because a thing. Ten years later, they joined the newly built Reh-Fit Centre where both Toby and Peggy would go together to do their exercises three times a week.

Once preparing the Sunday dinners became too difficult for Peggy, the family switched to eating out on Sundays, testing out dozens of different family restaurants in the city. Toby and Peggy always enjoyed attending their grandchildren’s events, from dancing to school plays to graduations.

Peggy Kessler (1924 – 2008) and Toby Kessler (1924 – 2014)

In 2007, Peggy was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. She worked her hardest to fight it but succumbed 6 months later at the age of 84 on her youngest granddaughter’s 16th birthday.

Toby then moved to a retirement home. After 3 years on his own, he had a heart attack and was relocated to the nursing home where his sister and one of his brothers were living. He spent a happy last 3 years there, enjoying visits at least 3 times a week from his children, before passing away on the day that would have been his 64th wedding anniversary, just short of his 90th birthday.

Thank you Mom and Dad for the life you instilled upon me and your daughter and your grandchildren. We’ll always love and remember you.