Which DNA Testing Company will give you the most matches?

Peter's DNA Masterclass recommends testing with Ancestry because it has the best tools (I agree with that) and because it has tested more people than the other companies, which should lead you to more matches.

However, that is not my experience. I currently have 20,844 matches on Ancestry and 22,114 with MyHeritage.
MyHeritage adverts say that they have tested about 8 million people, considerably fewer than Ancestry. I'm not sure how to explain these results. I didn't test with MyHeritage but uploaded my raw data from Ancestry. I don't know whether MyHeritage includes people like me in their total number of tests. I'm aware that Ancestry has tried to exclude non-familial matches with the timber algorithm and by excluding matches below 8Cm. I'm not sure whether those actions alone would explain the lower number of matches on Ancestry. I'm not sure whether I'm an outlier here. How do others compare with my figures?

 

Looking at ISOGG's definition of endogamy, I don't think that's the explanation as none of the groups mentioned by ISOGG appear in my tree.

 

On my direct lines I can only find 1 cousin marriage. On the collateral lines the number is higher than yours but probably in the low 10s rather than hundreds.

 

MyHeritage has a much larger international pool than Ancestry does, so if you have folks in your tree from mainland Europe, you'll see additional matches there. Ancestry has better coverage in the US, Canada, and the UK, so it just depends on where you happen to luck out.

I've got 20K at Ancestry and 10K at MyHeritage and curiously very little overlap - most people haven't transferred their test results there even though they run specials when its free!

 

I'm in my late 60s so it's unlikely to be the latter. But I do have a lot of ancestors from the villages on the Dorset/Somerset/Wiltshire border.

 

Where do you see how many you have? I have 529 shared 4th or over. I have 9,660 at MH.

 

On Ancestry it's under the Shared DNA drop down menu.

 

Thank you, found it. 18,378. Almost twice MH.

 

Ancestry
Close matches 346
Distant Matches 17,017
All matches 17,363

MyHeritage 22,190

Why so many more on MyHeritage? Probably because of endogamy. The majority of my ancestors on both sides are from restricted areas of South Wales. My closest match is on MyHeritage - a known second cousin. Unfortunately she tested on MyHeritage whereas I tested with Ancestry and uploaded to MyHeritage.

 

My grandmother's results (with a European Jewish connection) is coming in at 54,080 at Ancestry; my mother's results (all England/Wales) is 25,535.

I would check on MyHeritage for my own results, which are the only ones uploaded, but it's not letting me sign in. *My ancestry results (with that Jewish connection) are 21,447.