Genealogy Online

As sequencing technologies have become more popular, and more readily accessible, online genealogy companies have begun offering genetic testing, promising to tell their customers about their ancestors’ countries of “origin”, and possibly to find long lost family members. Moreover, companies like 23andMe offer information that they suggest will help consumers optimize their health and wellbeing. The landing page (March 2022) for 23andMe’s Canadian site declares that “Your personal health experience starts with meaningful info from your DNA”, with bubbles highlighting various “DNA Reports” including Wellness, Deep Sleep, and Heart Health Reports. The company offers two tiers of service–a consumer can pay $129 CAD for the “Ancestry + Traits Service” (“the most comprehensive ancestry breakdown on the market”) or $249 CAD for the “Health + Ancestry Service” (“a more complete picture of your health with insights from your genetic data”).

A DNA test from 23andMe will allow you to “Know your genes. Own your health”, or so the company would have us believe. The landing page alone offers more claims than we can possibly enumerate here, and also strongly encourages their customers to opt-in to their research programme. In early 2020, that research programme allowed 23andMe to sell the rights to a drug that it developed using information from its database to a Spanish pharmaceutical company. It seems clear that those who avail themselves of 23andMe’s services are not simply customers–they, and more importantly their DNA, are a product, and a valuable one at that. 

Another giant in online genetic genealogy, AncestryDNA, focuses its marketing on promises to reveal its customers’ ancestral origins (unsurprisingly, given its name). Its landing page invites customers to “Uncover your past with AncestryDNAⓡ”, and claiming that “Millions of people have uncovered something new about themselves. You can too.” It promises not only to tell you where your ancestors were from–“your origins in over 1,500 regions”–but also to provide you with “the most connections to living relatives”. In fact, as AncestryDNA’s website acknowledges in a section titled “Unexpected DNA Matches”, connections to people you don’t expect, or a lack of connections to people you do expect, is not uncommon. In fact, NPE Friends Fellowship, a support group that AncestryDNA offers as a resource at the bottom of their “Unexpected DNA Matches” page, suggests that 5-10% of those who have taken an at-home DNA test have found that they are not biologically related to someone they believed was their parent. 

As Sarah Zhang writes in an article for The Atlantic, “DNA tests…unearthed affairs, secret pregnancies, quietly buried incidents of rape and incest, and fertility doctors using their own sperm to inseminate patients” (2018). AncestryDNA acknowledges that there is a risk clients may discover things that are disturbing to them, saying “...there are certainly cases where a discovery might be quite unexpected … We also have a small, dedicated group of representatives who are specially trained to speak to customers with more sensitive queries” (Zhang 2018). Likewise, 23andMe noted that although they could predict close genetic relationships with great confidence, they are not in the business of providing paternity tests. Such results are not necessarily a source of lifelong trauma–Zhang shares stories of people connecting with family members they didn’t know existed, building important links and coming to regard the unexpected result in a more neutral or even positive light–but it’s clear that these tests may entail greater risks than is immediately evident to the average customer seeking out an at-home DNA ancestry test. 

Keeping secrets of any kind has become more and more complicated in the information age–DNA ancestry testing creates yet another layer of complexity. Whether or not these secrets ought to be kept is another question entirely. Regardless, these companies and their services have become part of a seismic shift in our understanding and expectation of privacy in even the most intimate spheres of our lives.

Suggested Reading

TallBear, K., 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. U of Minnesota Press.

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. 2016. The Gene: An Intimate History.

Zimmer, Carl. “Individual Z.” In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity, 182–213. New York: Dutton, 2018.

 The implications of DNA data storage are wide ranging and should be understood through the nuanced historical, political, infrastructural and social context of DNA research and technology. Each of the modules on this site offer a unique way for you to conceptualize and question genomic media.