MyHeritage now allows their DNA customers to share their DNA results with a collaborator. This is great news for everyone who does genealogy with a friend and especially for those of us who help others break down brick walls using DNA results!
Sharing allows your collaborator to see your ethnicity estimate, genetic groups, and DNA match list; to message your DNA matches; and to edit your family tree. To protect your privacy, your collaborator will not be able to download or delete your raw DNA data, invite anyone else to view your results, or change your settings.
Your collaborator must already be registered at MyHeritage before you invite them.
The Process is Simple
- Log into your MyHeritage account.
- Under the DNA tab at the top, select “Manage DNA kits.”
- On the next page, click the three vertical dots to the right of the kit you want to share.
- Click “Share DNA result with a collaborator.”
- Enter the email address of the MyHeritage user with whom you want to share.
- Your collaborator will get an email with instructions on how to accept the invitation.
Voila! That’s all it takes. Now the two of you can collaborate easily without risking the security of your own account by sharing login information.
Great news!
I’m so excited about this!
Thank you for keeping up with all the site updates. It is a daunting task.
You’re welcome. This one was much anticipated!
No to changing anything in the trees. I already don’t use anything at myheritage because of the married names all females are given. Most of my female ancestors were married more than once and I don’t know if I’ve found all those marriages. How would I find them at myheritage if they are using some married name I’ve never heard of? Nope. Will never pay the money to use this site.
You can change how women appear in Site Settings > Genealogy.
I agree! I don’t want anybody else to be able to change anything in my tree.
Everything else sounds great, but I won’t be using that feature if it means allowing somebody else to edit my tree.
Fantastic news. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for th update. I’m glad MH has moved down this path, and if you are working with a pro or genuinely collaborating with someone else on your whole tree, then it’s great. However, it doesn’t allow you any privacy whatsoever, so if you have an adoption, NPE, incest, or are the keeper of another family secret , this isn’t an option. My understanding is that it gives access to your entire site so, with MH’s tree settings, you can’t even keep a private tree and a public tree. I assume it is because of the ‘site’ concept but for me the lack of privacy and control means that I won’t utilise it in the same way that I do Ancestry’s DNA sharing and I suspect it will be even harder to persuade people to collaborate on MH. I appreciate that the format of shared match lists at MH means that you don’t need to collaborate with as many people on MH to make progress anyway, but when your match has no idea how to assess their matches, so no clue which of their ancestral lines you share, the match list sharing on Ancestry is a better option.
So pleased with progress but a little disappointed with the execution.
This is an excellent feature and one that I asked an MH staff member to consider in a recent webinar. So, I am thrilled. Like others who have posted here I would prefer that the default doesn’t allow folks we share with to edit our trees. I had hoped that could be controlled in settings where we currently give people access to download or not to download family tree data. But, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
My work-around will be if someone I invite does edit my tree the next time I upload it the current tree can be deleted and replaced by my new tree. But, then I do have to re-attach all my DNA kits to the new tree.
I imagine MH will tweak this new feature. Nice change!
Isn’t this amazing-??!! Such a great idea, and maintains privacy and control as needed.
Unfortunately, it appears that you can only share with one person at a time. At the 3 vertical dots on the right, it is possible to “remove results sharing” to share with another person.
It was as easy as eating peach pie!
Really cool, one of the few things ancestry did better. I think seeing how much dna your match shares with your shared matches is going to be massive when it comes to ancestry
Is it possible to share with more than one collaborator? It appears not because I just took on a search angel project, and the searcher was unable to add me as a collaborator. He said that he has already added a distant cousin as a collaborator and wonders whether we’re limited to just one.
I checked into it, the language is always “a” collaborator but nothing that I have found says anything explicit about multiple collaborators.
The FAQ on the MH site also say that the collaborator must also be a registered MH user and have two-factor authentication turned on. I am and I do, so that wasn’t the problem!
As far as I know, it’s just one.