Discover Your Roots

DNA testing offers insights into your family tree, but watch out for unintended consequences.

- Patricia Mertz Esswein

When people would ask Carrie Reynolds about her ethnicity, she didn’t know the answer. Reynolds, of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., was born in 1975 and adopted. So, in early 2018, she bought a genetic testing kit from Ancestry DNA, spit in a tube and sent her sample off for processing.

Reynolds’s results surprised her in more ways than one. Because of her dark hair and hazel eyes, she figured she was Spanish, Italian or Cherokee. Turns out she is mostly English, a little Irish and Scottish, and a tad Swedish. And her genetic matches among other test-takers in Ancestry’s database included two half-siblings. Reynolds messaged them through Ancestry’s system, and one, Mark, also an adoptee, responded immediately. The pair decided to team up to find their biological parents. A couple of months later, they were notified of a third half-sibling in the system, a sister who filled them in about their biological father.

Reynolds and Mark met their biological dad, who received them warmly and told them about their mothers. Reynolds wrote to hers but never heard back. She was disappointed, she says, but focuses on the fact that the people who raised her are her parents. “My family is my family, no matter what the DNA says,” she says.

More than 28.5 million consumers have purchased a genetic-testing kit from one of the four largest direct-to-consumer testing companies: AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage and 23andMe. The companies plan to ramp up their advertising and offer discounts during the holidays, and you may be enticed to sign up.