MyHeritage announced yesterday the release of cM Explainer, a free new feature they say accurately estimates familial relationships between DNA Matches.
cM Explainer is fully integrated into the MyHeritage platform to shed light on any DNA Match found on MyHeritage. It is also available as a standalone tool to benefit people who have tested with other DNA services. This means anyone can use cM Explainer even if their DNA results haven’t been uploaded to MyHeritage.
For every DNA match, cM Explainer offers a detailed prediction of the possible relationships between two people and the probabilities of each relationship, determines their most recent common ancestor, and displays a diagram showing their relationship path.
Other relationship prediction tools typically suggest a range of possible relationships that may be too broad to be useful, such as “3rd to 5th cousin,” or list many relationships with the same probability, leaving some users confused.
MyHeritage’s cM Explainer simplifies the predictions by taking into account the age of each match and assigning a unique probability to every relationship.
cM Explainer was developed by MyHeritage in collaboration with Larry Jones, developer of the cM Solver technology. MyHeritage exclusively licensed this technology from Mr. Jones, and the company’s science team enhanced it further over a period of five months. Among the enhancements are an age algorithm that more accurately pinpoints specific relationships and calculates their probability, and a slick user interface that displays possible relationships and their probabilities.
Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage, said, “Together with Larry Jones, we’ve created an industry-leading solution for genetic genealogy that is only available on MyHeritage. cM Explainer joins our suite of innovative tools to help users better understand how they’re related to their DNA matches.”
MyHeritage’s DNA database has more than 6.5 million customers. With support for 42 languages, it has become the leading consumer DNA test in Europe.
Fiona Brooker wrote a good step-by-step description of cM Explainer on her blog, Memories in time.
