Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Inside The Shady World Of DNA Testing Companies

Should you drunkenly celebrate St. Patrick's Day or Oktoberfest? Can you brag about your ancestors having first-class seats on the Mayflower? Do you need to feel extra, extra bad about slavery? All these questions and more can be answered by sending a vial of your spit off to a company like Ancestry.com, 23andMe, or Living DNA ... in theory. But the reality of those businesses is a lot less science, and a lot more hustle. We talked with Morgan, who works for one of the major ancestry testing companies. He had some interesting things to say ...

Genetics experts from the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina have gone so far as to say that these companies are preying on people, because they don't truly have the information they need to pinpoint your origins on a map, and that it's not possible to trace unique ancestry that way. As they put it, "That's the beauty of this scam. The companies aren't scamming you. They're not giving you fraudulent information. They are giving you data, real data, and allowing you to scam yourself."

Morgan admitted to having changed people's results. "We only did this on rare occasions, when we knew they weren't using it as means to harm someone." A lot of this is done under the guise of having the tests line up with what the business already knows of the customer's expectations. It's easier to do that than to deal with an endless parade of clients who are intensely pissed off because they aren't as Dutch as they expected to be.

Genetic ancestry tests have caused a lot of problems, from cops being treated differently when they suddenly learn they're of mixed race to happy marriages ending when a test reveals hidden infidelities. So Morgan gets lots and lots of calls.

"The number one reason they call us after they get their results back is to contest something that exposed a family secret. Sometimes it was a parent not really being their parent, or an orphan who didn't know their history now finding out that they were half Native American this entire time and needing someone to talk to." Obviously, that kind of news would be shocking for anyone. But sometimes it goes well beyond mere shock.

"We had a Jewish man in Canada ask us to make it look like he was from Israel. His results showed him to be from Eastern Europe, and based on his last name, we said it was all but certain his ancestors were from Poland. Judging by his family history, they probably came over around WWII, for reasons you can probably imagine. But no, he said he was Jewish and wanted 'Eastern European' changed to the area Israel is in."

As you might guess, being Jewish doesn't work that way. There's a big difference between Jewish people who came from European ancestry and someone whose family has been living in the land currently occupied by Israel for thousands of years. "Israel is new ... and by saying he's from there by blood, we'd be saying he was Arab. We have changed things on occasion ... and we played along with him over the phone. 'Sure, we can change your ancestry to being from the near Middle East.' We gave him the option of being more from Egypt, more from Syria, or more Arab. He wasn't what you would call happy that those were his only options, and when operator asked him, 'Would you like to be Arab?' he slammed the phone down."

People baffle me

I'm probably not going to worry about this today.

my 23&me test had me mostly british incl scotch-irish, then german, french, and scandinavian. for whatever reason, our family history has lot's of Native american blood, not so in the test, only a smidgeon. can't explain it, unless it got bred out along the way.

I know where I came from .... The United F u c k ing States of America...... 100% American!!!

I know where I came from .... The United F u c k ing States of America...... 100% American!!!