Have you tried Ancestry’s DNA Compare feature yet? Launched in March 2023, this new addition provides even greater insight into our shared ancestry with friends and relatives.
Ancestry’s DNA Compare feature is one of several new tools introduced and enhanced over the past year to assist its DNA customers in learning even more from their results. Other notable updates have included DNA Match Grouping By Parent and Ethnicity Inheritance Sideview capabilities.
What Is Compare My DNA on Ancestry
On your Ancestry DNA Story page, under Ethnicity Estimate you will see an option called Compare My DNA which allows you to compare your results against those of any DNA matches or anyone who has shared their Ancestry DNA results with you. This feature allows for easier DNA comparison!
DNA Compare is a fantastic educational resource designed to help all those who have taken an Ancestry DNA test learn more about the inheritance of DNA.
Compare Ethnicity Regions
Here you can view a side-by-side comparison between you and up to 10 DNA matches, showing all of the ethnicity regions inherited from their ancestors by both parties.
Additionally, you will also be able to see which DNA Communities you and your selected matches belong to.
As previously available, DNA matches allow us to view their ethnicity regions compared with ours; however, before this feature it was only possible to view one at a time. Now with this feature we can compare multiple matches at the same time, making this feature particularly helpful in comparing groups of cousins or siblings, for instance.
Compare DNA Communities We can compare DNA communities that our matches belong to and see which groups belong. Even if we do not belong directly, these results may allow us to see whether other people within their DNA match group belong.
This tool saves both time and provides useful visualizations.
How to Compare Ancestry Results using DNA Compare
Your Ancestry DNA Compare feature can be found by accessing your main ethnicity estimate page and clicking “Compare My DNA”. Below the regions and DNA Communities sections is where this button will appear – below that button there should be a blue button labeled “Compare my DNA”.
Remove and Add Matches to DNA Comparison
When first using this tool, your comparison will automatically include results of yourself as well as any nearby DNA matches. You can opt to delete these matches at any time by clicking on their names and selecting “remove this match.”
To add someone new to your DNA Compare page, just click on the blue plus sign marked with “Add someone”. A dialog box will open that allows you to either enter their name manually, or choose them from your list of DNA matches and results that you manage.
Who Can You Compare Your DNA With? With Ancestry DNA Compare (also called DNA Compare), you can use our new tool to make a comparison between your Ancestry ethnicity results and those of anyone who has taken an Ancestry DNA test. To compare results with someone not in your immediate DNA match list, they would need to share their test results with you first.
Ancestry DNA customers who share genetic matches should appear when you search for them using the DNA Compare tool. To compare with someone not your match, they will have to invite you via their Ancestry DNA test settings page for access.
To properly utilize the DNA Compare tool, we must enable matches on our results to enable comparison with others’ DNA results on Ancestry. Furthermore, all our genetic relatives should allow matching so we can compare ours against theirs.
If your Ancestry results do not yet include DNA matching, please navigate to the DNA test settings page and scroll down to Visibility and sharing section, where click the DNA matches arrow and set it to display matches.
What can you learn with Ancestry DNA Compare?
AncestryDNA Compare can give you insight into your relationships to a particular group of relatives and can also help reveal patterns in your results and offer additional insight.
I recently began exploring DNA Compare to see what insights can be gleaned about my family from our DNA results. One thing that struck me immediately was the usefulness of comparing both of my parents’ communities against mine – an area which needed improvement before beginning this experiment!
Below I have included my DNA Communities as they compare with my parents’ DNA Communities in the United States. Although both parents had some overlap between communities in America, some may have also been present amongst my DNA Communities.
However, after reviewing this very user-friendly comparison feature, I realized that my parents do not share any US DNA Communities at all – making the comparison process so much simpler than having to switch back and forth between all three results separately.
Who knows what interesting observations may emerge when using this tool for personal comparisons?
Conclusion
I hope that this article has provided you with enough knowledge to use the DNA Compare tool on Ancestry. After exploring it yourself, be sure to come back here and let me know what surprises or discoveries have arisen from using it – including which regions and communities your relatives share (or do not) with.
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