Warning on Ancestry (and other) DNA tests?

[MLMshouldbeillegal]

Ancestry, My Heritage and the other DNA testing companies are all pushing their tests as the ideal Christmas gift, and they are cheaper than ever. Ancestry had a black Friday offer for £50, My Heritage even cheaper at £39.

AIBU to think these tests should come with a wee health warning? That although it's marketed as a "find out your ethnicity" tool, in fact it might reveal some long-hidden family secrets?

I have tested with Ancestry and uploaded my data to other sites too. No surprises on my tree, matches with distant cousins who all fit into the picture as I know it. But I also go genealogical client work and I'm currently working with a man in his 70s who was given one of the tests for father's day back in June and is trying to process the fact that he is not matching with other descendants of his grandfather. Or at least the man he thought was his grandfather. So in later life, he's trying to come to terms with his much loved grandfather, who his father absolutely adored, is probably not his biological relative. It's a lot to deal with.

The testing companies really push the "find out if you're part Viking, part Native American" in their marketing but that aspect isn't really very accurate - My Heritage says I'm >2% Iraq/Iran/Turkey and I'm definitely not. Ancestry is more accurate given what I know about my tree.

Taking one of these tests could open up a whole can of worms in terms of relationships in the family, in this generation or further back with people who are long dead, and who you can't get answers from. For some people it can be a lot to process and I dont think the implications are properly laid out.

So you basically think people buy DNA kits but are too thick to know what a DNA kit is?

AdmiralCain, there are some laws in the US about insurance companies using certain types of investigation to avoid paying out, but I don't know details.

What it's important to recognise is that any laws on data use are holding back the sea. The motivation to use personal healthcare data to increase profits will always be there.

It doesn't mean that every single action by every single for-profit company will be driven by this (and hats off to the staff in pharmaceutical companies who worked so hard and are still working hard to find treatments for and vaccines against Covid). But the motivation will always exist, and any slight legal opportunity to use data will be snapped up.

Even if you go into the DNA process well informed, if you do discover that a close relative is not a biological relative, that information is likely to be something you will then share with other family members. They did not make a decision to find this out / take a risk, and so you have removed their opportunity to consent and potentially had a significant impact on them. Personally I probably wouldn't welcome a cousin unexpectedly announcing that my much loved grandfather was not in fact a biological relation.

@KrispyKale

Anyone involved in donor egg or sperm arrangements today or for a past number of years knows that DNA testing will be procureable in the future.

In our family's case the sperm donations were part of ongoing infertily treatment research in the early 70s well before successful IVF. DNA testing to the extent we now have it was in science fiction territory.

I think most people have a very good understanding. Also it helps confirm more recent work yo may be doing on your family tree. Eg everyone on my tree on all sides back to the 1700s was born in the UK or Ireland (as the DNA infers too) so all the elements help confirm other each other.

Yes beware of what it could throw up. DH's cousin recently found out his dad was not his dad. Both his parents have died so there's no answers for him. He'll never know if his dad was aware or not.

@Lockdownbear

If 100 years ago common law marriages were common. What's to say 'adoptions' didn't happen in a similar manner, child needs a home through bereavement or whatever, and either they go to an Auntie or a childless couple?

That would throw a lot of people's search out.

This is also very true. The legal process of adoption wasn't introduced in the UK until 1926. Before then there is often no paper trail and quite often that's exactly what happened, a child was given to parents who couldn't have their own babies, or a distant relative.

I also don't know how I would feel if I was someone who had donated eggs/sperm in the 80s or 90s and had been promised complete anonymity forever. That's really not the case any more and you can't argue that they should have known how science was going to develop.

@Lockdownbear
@loislovesstewie

Thanks

I’ve always thought why the hell would anyone want to do this? But maybe it’s just me. I wouldn’t want to find out I had any more relatives, the ones I had were awful enough.

@Suzanne999

I’ve always thought why the hell would anyone want to do this? But maybe it’s just me. I wouldn’t want to find out I had any more relatives, the ones I had were awful enough.

This made me 😂 My family is tiny in this country. They are lovely. I definitely don't want to hear of anyone else. The ones abroad, from what I know of them, aren't nice. My parents try to ignore them.

My best friend is adopted and her parents want her to go for genetic tests. She said no, as would I.

Yes and it’s going to cause a lot of angst and hurt in children that have been conceived via donor egg/sperm in the next few years as a generation where this has become more commonplace gets older and more able to access these sites

On the flip side, genetic genealogy has been solving cold cases, many from decades ago, thanks to people uploading their results to these websites. Rapes, murders, etc. solved many years later because a relative of the perpetrator has uploaded their DNA results and experts can trace back through family trees to find the owner of their unknown DNA sample. So it's not all bad!

@Starcaller

On the flip side, genetic genealogy has been solving cold cases, many from decades ago, thanks to people uploading their results to these websites. Rapes, murders, etc. solved many years later because a relative of the perpetrator has uploaded their DNA results and experts can trace back through family trees to find the owner of their unknown DNA sample. So it's not all bad!

So police experts are using the sites to do this?

There's an excellent article on it here (quite long but really interesting)

@DaisyNGO At the moment it gets outsourced to genetic genealogy experts and specific companies. Essentially you provide the company with a sample of your suspect DNA and they build a profile that they can then run through their databases to find relatives, who might end up being very distantly related to the perpetrators. Then genetic genealogists have the job of combing through the family trees forensically to unpick everything and find where the trail likely leads. It can be quite intricate and gruelling work as families can have a lot of branches.

Once they have a likely name, officers then obtain DNA samples from the suspects, often by going through their rubbish or surveilling them and picking up old cups and things they've used. Sometimes they will test a closer relative of the suspect to narrow it down to a specific lineage.

It's in the small print of most of these DNA collection things that they can be used for law enforcement purposes.

There have been a not insignificant number now of murders and rapes solved by genetic genealogy. Sometimes the perpetrator is deceased, but sometimes they are still alive and able to be prosecuted.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/how-your-family-tree-could-catch-a-killer

My article link didn't post!

@WorraLiberty

AIBU to think these tests should come with a wee health warning? That although it's marketed as a "find out your ethnicity" tool, in fact it might reveal some long-hidden family secrets?

Because it's painstakingly, blindingly obvious?

I agree. Come one, here buy our dna test to discover more about your ancestry. Disclaimer: you might discover more about your ancestry.

How thick are people that they don't understand this?

The Golden State Killer is probably the most famous case that has been solved by genetic genealogy. Thirteen murders and 50 rapes and I'm sure he thought he had got away with it after so long. But they found a distant match to his DNA in the GEDmatch database, and managed to find a common ancestor dating back to the 1800s. The genealogists built 25 family trees and he was in one of them, along with 1000 other people. They had to eliminate them all through stuff like age, location, sex, etc to get to a more manageable number and until he was the only one left.

There's a great podcast called DNA:ID if anyone is interested in that kind of thing that focuses specially on cases solved by genetic genealogy. Bear Brook is another longer form podcast that's really excellent too and goes a lot into the details of the process. It's really fascinating stuff.

@Starcaller

There's an excellent article on it here (quite long but really interesting)

Not in the UK they aren't!

The UK police can look at partial matches on the police DNA database - so they might look at close matches for a sample taken from a rape victim for example, find potential cousins, uncles, brothers, and work back from there. But ONLY from people who have had their DNA taken when they were charged/convicted/whatever. Police in the UK are not using DNA given to Ancestry or any of the other companies to catch criminals.

The USA is a different matter. The Golden State killer was caught in this way, and the same techniques have been used to identify human remains - there's a really good podcast called Bear Brook all about this. It's controversial though.

Snap, @Starcaller - the Bear Brook podcast really was very good.

Yes, sorry should have clarified I'm talking about it in a worldwide sense, not specially UK. But I wonder what the future might be here with not the police having access to this data directly but the DNA companies who harvest the data being able to use it for their own purposes in this way, which might include running matches to police-supplied DNA. Like in the US, the police themselves are not directly accessing the data - they have to pay the private collection agencies to do it for them and they just act on the results. The only DNA the police themselves are using is suspect DNA.

I’ve bought one of these for myself. My mum’s birth certificate was blank under father so Im actively hoping to see if I have some relatives somewhere! I’d love to know who my grandfather was but everyone who could possibly know has been dead for a while. People aren’t stupid, they can simply not choose to have these tests if they’re worried about any possibility of unexpected results.

I'm waiting for my Ancestry kit to arrive...

There are definitely some secrets to be uncovered in my family history!!

My husband and I did the My Heritage DNA kit last year and it was disappointing. I deliberately hadn't uploaded my family tree to the website so the results took ages to get back, when I did I just don't believe they were accurate. I must get in touch with them actually as I'd like to them to destroy my DNA file. I'd like to try the Ancestry one though.