On DNA and thorny questions of genealogy

Charles introduced himself to me via an email. He said he was assisting his 80-year-old cousin, John, who has a DNA match with one of my relatives and therefore believes he is “closely connected” to my family.

Charles further explained that he and John were trying to determine whether the connection was at my grandfather or my great-grandfather’s generational line. Essentially, he wanted to know if I, as the oldest surviving member of the Horsburgh family, was willing to help by “doing” a DNA kit.

To say that I was shocked to discover that I might have a hitherto unknown 80-year-old relative would be an understatement. I was also shocked to receive a request to consider participating in a DNA process that I knew little or nothing about.

But as always, information is power. The business of personal genetic-testing kits is booming, and as such, it is incumbent upon consumers to learn about the risks associated with this business.

Based on my experience and research, there are risks associated with sharing your DNA with these testing companies. One of the big risks revolves around privacy. Your personal genetic information is uniquely yours. As such, you should be careful entrusting it to companies that you may or may not be able to trust.

Can you trust a profit-oriented company to refrain from sharing your information with a third party? Currently two companies are being investigated related to their policies for handling personal information and genetic data.

How well will these companies protect your information from hacking? Recently, 92 million accounts from a genealogy and a DNA testing service were found on a private server.

Unlike medical providers, genetic testing companies are not bound by health privacy laws. With such a loosely regulated industry, the burden falls to individual consumers to protect their data through terms and conditions with these companies. We need government to take a more active role in regulating unsafe data practices.

Over and above these legitimate concerns, though, there is a more immediate and human element risk to sharing your DNA with a genealogy company. What I discovered is that the science of DNA genealogy is complicated and difficult to understand.

How reliable and valid is it? There are certainly scientific skeptics who contend that the DNA information, which you are given as a consumer, is not as accurate as claimed.

But as I discovered, genealogy researchers may be prone to treating DNA results as sacrosanct. These researchers may have good intentions, but it is also often the case that you are putting controversial scientific information in the hands of vulnerable people who are desperate to establish genealogical connections.

Charles, for example, based on a DNA match with my relative and his cousin John, opined that my relative is John’s second or third cousin. But not only that, without any corroboration, he also concluded that my grandfather or one of his brothers or my great grandfather, was John’s father.

In genealogy, research details are important. It turned out that John’s father, James, who was born in 1893 in the northeast corner of Scotland, was an illegitimate child of a domestic servant. John justifiably wanted to discover who James’ father was.

We all want a sense of continuity in our lives. Who we are is connected to whom our ancestors were, thus the appeal of genealogy research.

Given that in 1893 my grandfather was 18 and lived in Edinburgh with his reputable family, including his 59-year-old father, it did not make sense to me that either one of them would have fathered a child 132 years ago in a location nowhere near Edinburgh.

But this is the dilemma you face when you get a request to submit your DNA. Do you spend your time and money participating in a speculative DNA venture that may lead you down a rabbit hole?

We must recognize that DNA testing has its limits. The passage of time is one such limit. At this late date, John is not going to determine who his grandfather was.

I declined Charles’s request to provide a DNA sample.

Mac Horsburgh lives in Winnipeg.