Using Genetic Groups At MyHeritage To Narrow Down Matches & Build A Segment Map

The Genetic group filter at MyHeritage has help me build out my segment map at Genome Mate Pro. If I only filter by ethnicity it's too broad in many cases. For instance if I filter just by Ireland there are millions of people in the United States with Irish ancestors, it would take a great deal of time to sort through all of those matches. My paternal family's Irish ancestors are from Galway and Mayo if I search at AncestryDNA, for instance, using these more narrow places I still get a large number of matches because many Americans also have ancestry from those counties. We may match with thousands of people at AncestryDNA on our Irish lines. Many of those thousands of matches probably do share ancestors hundreds of years ago. Since most of us can't possibly build a tree that far back due to record losses, collecting those matches isn't useful. Matching with Genetic Groups means the match has strong ties and close relatives living in Ireland currently or they descend from more recent immigrants. Also there are many people in these Genetic Groups that don't have birthplaces of their ancestors listed. They are in these communities based on shared DNA. I've found many trees with only names and no places listed. These groups gather people together who are living in Ireland with those who may not even know where in Ireland their family came from. The same is true in regards to all of the genetic groups representing many different places.  

It would be very helpful if AncestryDNA and 23andMe also had DNA community filters. 

Another nice feature of the Genetic Groups at MyHeritage is that you don't have to be a member of a Genetic Group to filter your matches by those groups. Below I searched for Ireland.

If you then scroll down you'll see these specific Irish county Genetic Groups you can compare with. 

I'm finding the Genetic Group matches are generally matches from the very specific areas my family came from if the groups are narrow in scope. Below you can see some of the Genetic Groups are broad and some are narrow. Using the narrow groups does narrow down strong matches from the specific areas our ancestors came from. 

My Kapple/Kurta family lived in the Austro-Hungarian border area as you see in the above Genetic Group Austria (Burgenland) and Hungary (Vas) group we belong to at MyHeritage. Below you can see when I filter matches by this Genetic Group an Austrian match shows up in the match list next to someone currently living in Hungary. You see the Austrian and Hungarian flags representing the matches ethnicity. This demonstrates that these matches are living in a very specific location associated with my family.

The Ireland (Mayo, Galway, Roscommon and Sligo Genetic Group filter brings up 505 matches. If I filter by Irish ethnicity I get 4,489 matches. Filtering by people from Ireland  brings up 250 matches and is also a wonderful filter. 

The 505 Genetic group matches can be sorted by largest segment etc. I mainly look at the high to medium confidence matches. I only look at low confidence matches who share a specific surname or place. 

You can apply more than one filter. Applying the filter that shows matches from Ireland along with Genetic Group matches whittles down the 505 Genetic Group matches to 81. Practically all these matches are from the specific area my family is from in Eastern Galway and Southern County Mayo. 

I'm using the segment data from the matches I'm finding, who share the same specific places and surnames associated with my family, to build a chromosome map for myself , and relatives who tested. 

If there was a similar Genetic Group filter at 23andMe it would also help me to collect segments and build out my segment map. A filter like this at AncestryDNA wouldn't help me build my segment map, they don't provide segment data, but it would help to narrow down matches. 

MyHeritage DNA has all of the best features, great filters, trees, and segment data. It would be nice if every company had the same great features.