Like many people, I imagine, I've spent some of January doing a bit of 'sorting and planning' to help me achieve what I'd like to during the year.
So now I just need to actually do the things I've planned!
One of the first tasks was to update the graph of how many close matches I have at Ancestry. At the time of my last post, the review of 2025, the number had increased to 376 close matches. I now have 378 close matches - and I also noticed yesterday that I had exactly 20,000 matches, in total, there.
(But that total had already increased to 20,003 by this morning.)
Since I was interested in the rate of increase, I also looked at the change in the totals over the years:
The Ancestry test was launched in the US in 2012 and then in the UK, in January 2015.1 One can see that, after an initial slow start, for me, the three years between 2017-2019 saw the most new close matches, with an average of 50 across those three years. Numbers have since reduced, averaging 30-35 per year, but are quite variable.
From the graph, many of the years seem to show a higher rate of increase in the early months of the year - probably due to the sales in December, and 'Christmas gifting', which results in more kits being processed during those early months.
It will be interesting to see if the early part of this year shows the same sort of curve. Although kit prices at Ancestry were reduced, those of one of the other companies, MyHeritage, were even cheaper.
And, with the news that MyHeritage was moving on to "Whole Genome Sequencing" (WGS)2, perhaps more people will have opted to purchase kits from there instead?
Either way, I'm sure, with this change, there will be a surge in the numbers at MyHeritage - if only because of all those who have already taken DNA tests elsewhere now deciding to try the new test, as well.
I admit it - I did too. ☺
My kit is currently in the "WGS in progress" stage, and I am looking forward to receiving the results. It will be interesting to see how they compare to those received from the other companies I have tested with, and especially with those kits I transferred to MyHeritage.
Unfortunately, I've not been tracking numbers there in the same way, with those transferred kits - but perhaps it will be worth starting to do so, once these new results are in.
Notes and Sources
1. Launch dates of the autosomal DNA test at Ancestry: https://isogg.org/wiki/AncestryDNA
https://blog.myheritage.com/2025/10/myheritage-upgrades-its-dna-tests-to-whole-genome-sequencing/
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