New: Easier navigation in your DNA Match list

At MyHeritage our users’ feedback is extremely important to us. We do our best to listen to the community to provide the best possible family history research experience. Today we released two new features that were requested by our users at the RootsTech conference in Utah in February (thanks Judy Russell, and others!), to make navigating in the list of DNA Matches easier. Following major updates and improvements to our DNA Matching in January 2018, MyHeritage DNA users are receiving 10 times as many matches as before. It’s therefore only natural that there is now demand for easier ways to work with this information and make the most of it.

New: Jump to page

With this feature, you can manually enter the page number you would like to go to, in the list of DNA Matches. From now on, if you are interested in DNA Matches that appear beyond the first few pages of your massive DNA Match list, you don’t need to click through the pages one by one. Simply enter the page number you would like to jump to in the “Go to page” field and then press “Enter”.

New: Increase number of DNA Matches per page

By default, 10 DNA Matches appear on each page of your DNA Match list. To increase that number, you can now select “25” or “50” on the bottom right-hand corner of your DNA Match list, and 25 or 50 DNA Matches, respectively, will appear on each page.

Increasing the number per page makes it easier for power users to use the list, but pages will be slower to load.

Note, that you can also export the entire list of DNA Matches and review them externally, for example in a spreadsheet program. For more details, see our former blog post.

Fix: Distant relationship estimates

We’ve implemented a fix regarding the suggested relationship of DNA Matches that appear to be very distant, based on feedback from the community.

Previously, some DNA Matches with relatively little shared DNA used to be displayed as “3rd cousin – 5th cousin”. This was confusing, because some of these matches were indeed appropriate for this relationship range, while others were much more distant, i.e. having very low cM value for shared DNA. Now, the more distant matches are listed as “3rd cousin – distant cousin”, which is more correct because in reality they might even be your 6th or 7th cousins. Typically, many of these distant matches will be labeled as Medium Confidence or Low Confidence matches, which means that some of them may be false positives. This fix is retroactive and was also applied on existing matches. It’s an important fix because it will help you separate between matches who are likely 5th cousins of yours, and other matches that seem to be more distant than that.

Summary

We hope you enjoy these two shortcuts for navigating your DNA Match list more efficiently. If you aren’t enjoying yet our full suite of genetic genealogy tools, order your MyHeritage DNA kit today, or upload your DNA data from another service which is still free.