SAN FRANCISCO – Family history DNA tests are pegged to be hugely popular gifts this Christmas – but are they worth it if you’re one of the 30 percent or so of Americans with ancestors who didn’t come from Europe?

Today, the answer is a qualified maybe. People of color generally aren’t going to get the same specificity of ethnicity estimates as white Americans, though the results are slowly getting more precise for those with ancestors from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Even so, experts suggest collecting DNA from your oldest relatives now, wherever they come from, because one day it’s going to be a genealogical gold mine.

Kalani Mondoy, whose family is part native Hawaiian, ran straight into that particular brick wall when trying to track his mother’s side of the family. Paper records didn’t get him very far.

“In the case of Hawaiians, it’s a lot of oral history. The documentation came later,” he said from Los Angeles where he works as a tax consultant.

He next turned to a genealogical DNA test, which was less helpful than he’d hoped. 

More: These are the top companies offering genealogical DNA testing to learn about your family

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At the time his family did the test on Ancestry.com in 2015, the company had just 18 Polynesian people in its genetic reference panel. Compare that with France, which today has 1,407.

The size of that reference database matters. The more samples available, the better the tests can pinpoint where your ancestors came from. Most of the companies initially used European-centric samples because those were the easiest to get and because that’s where many of their customers’ ancestors came from.

But not all.

And the proportion of people with non-European ancestry buying the tests is increasing every year. That in turn is causing the heavily Euro-centric companies to scramble to add people from Africa, Asia and the Americas to their reference panels, the groups of people whose DNA is used to establish baseline ethnicities. 

They’re all looking for people who have four grandparents from an underrepresented area of the world, genetically speaking, so they can include their DNA in those reference panels and deepen their pool of connections. 

Even so, every company aimed at a general audience has a way to go. Ancestry.com is the only one that publishes a listing of how many people it has in its reference panels for each region. As of November, its Germanic Europe panel included 2,072 people while there were just 65 from Western and Central India and 41 from Northern Africa. 

In the end, it took DNA and hard research for Mondoy to unravel the mystery of who his biological grandfather was, after his mom told the family she was adopted.

That included more than 50 hours in the library going through dozens of rolls of microfilm for days on end, and the discovery of a second cousin through DNA matching. 

“His mother and my mother were first cousins. When I found the potential mother of my mother, she looked just like my mom,” he said.

Mondoy’s family has taken multiple DNA tests, including AncestryDNA, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA. None yet provide the depth he’d like. Early on he was told that 11 percent of Ancestry’s Polynesian samples showed some Scandinavian background, but it was from one single person several generations ago who ended up being in the family of all the 18 people whose samples were included.

“Their databases have more people of European descent because that’s who’s been tested,” he said, though he does allow that things improving. “Polynesians are now up to 28 in the Ancestry database!”

His story illustrates a conundrum for those looking to trace their non-European roots. Genealogical DNA tests compare hundreds of thousands of locations on a person’s genome with databases of known DNA samples, giving customers information about what population groups their ancestors likely came from. 

The results can be very powerful. Today, professional genealogists almost always include DNA analysis in their work because it can provide not only a deep look at where someone’s ancestors came from, but potential matches with other, though often distant, family members that can help trace lineages.

“While courthouses can burn down and records can be lost, the DNA is still there and it keeps track of your history,” said Phillip Goff, a genetic genealogy consultant in Davidson, North Carolina. 

Uncovering the past

Of course, for many Americans, there were never any records to begin with. 

“As African-Americans, we have a distinct challenge in terms of tracing our ancestry, because slavery is a research brick wall. But we’ve got our family history essentially etched into our DNA. Those stories are there to be uncovered,” said Andre Kearns, a genealogist and marketing executive in Washington, D.C.

His wife is from Haiti, but genealogy DNA tests helped him uncover her family connection to Lisa Fanning, an African-American genealogist with ancestry from Wilkes County, Georgia.

Fanning’s historical research uncovered French slave trader Louis Prudhomme, who escaped the Haitian Revolution for Wilkes County where he began importing enslaved Haitians. DNA helped to reveal their family connection, which would have otherwise remained invisible in the historical record. 

Kearns also found a very distant genetic match his father shares with a woman who lives in Cameroon.  

“What that tells me is that we probably share an ancestor from the early 18th century and her ancestors stayed in Cameroon and my ancestors were sold into the slave trade,” he said.

Someone with German roots might have found a horde of second and third cousins  – at least one of whom was sure to have researched detailed family trees going back to the 16th and 17th centuries. An African-American might find only genetic traces showing their ancestors had originally been from the part of Africa that is now Ghana. 

Choosing a DNA test

It’s impossible to name one test that’s best for everyone with non-European ancestry because all are constantly updating their panels and their algorithms. While one might be better for Asian-Americans one year, another could increase the number of people on its reference panels for Latin America and come out ahead the next. 

The good news is that once you’ve taken a test, the companies continue to compare your DNA data to their newly-enlarged reference panels, sending along updated reports every couple of years. 

More: Why Ancestry.com changed a lot of ethnicity reports this spring

That’s long been the experience of those with European heritage.

“My husband is southern European, and when he first did the test the data was pretty inaccurate for him, but now it’s starting to catch up,” said Sara Katsanis, a genetics policy researcher at the Duke University Initiative for Science and Society in North Carolina.

AncestryDNA, an offshoot of Ancestry.com, is probably the most popular because it offers the chance to connect with potential genetic matches and also to see how those connections fit into not just your family tree but also others. While initially more focused on health, 23andMe is also very popular.

One smaller site has taken a different approach. AfricanAncestry.com looks solely at African heritage and has since 2003. It has over 33,000 African samples, representing 40 African countries, said Gina Paige, the company’s president. Co-founded by African-American geneticist Rick Kittles, it is 100 percent black-owned. 

“Our mission is very different from other companies. We were formed to help people connect with their ancestry prior to the Atlantic slave trade,” said Gina Paige, the company’s president.

The company doesn’t track non-African ancestry at all. It offers two tests that look at either maternal or paternal lines of decent, though it recommends that people begin with the maternal. Given the long history of enslaved women being raped by white owners, it finds African lineage in 92 percent of the maternal lines it tests but only 65 percent of the paternal lines, Paige said. 

While most genealogical DNA companies see their biggest sales spike around the holidays, for AfricanAncestry it comes during Black History month. 

“February is an even bigger month for us, when there’s a focus on our history, and people want to better understand their place on this continuum that began on the shores of Africa,” she said.

Testing for Native American heritage

Many Hispanic people face a different set of issues when they look to track their families. Most have ancestors from both Europe and from the native peoples of Mexico, Central and South America. 

Moises Garza of Mission, Texas, has been tracking his family’s genealogy since 1998 and recently began doing it professionally. He calls his ancestors “a rainbow of ethnicities. My dad has some British, some Italian and 10 percent Native American,” he said.

He helped found WeAreCousins, a website for South Texas and Northeastern Mexico genealogy and has been able to trace his wife’s family back to the 1690s in Monterrey, Mexico, based on church records. But that’s only an option for the ancestors that came from Europe. When he finds an ancestor who was Native American, it’s usually only because the Spaniards recorded them being baptized or married.

“Other than that, you can’t go further than that because our Native American ancestors didn’t leave us any records,” he said.

DNA isn’t that helpful because there’s less genetic information available on native peoples. Ancestry.com has just 146 samples for Native Americans from all of North, Central and South America. That’s in part because some Native American tribes in the United States discourage members from taking these tests, as they believe the sovereign tribe, not a genetic test, should be the arbiter of membership.

Everybody who ever lived

The thing about genealogical DNA is that if you go back far enough, everyone is related, said Carlos Bustamante, a professor of population genetics at Stanford University in California and MacArthur genius award winner.

“My general view is that within the next decade, we’ll have pretty well worked out the genetic tree of everybody who’s alive and everybody who’s ever lived. I don’t think that’s beyond our scope – it’s just the way the math works out.,” he said. 

That’s the hope of Doug Joe of Modesto, California, a physician who’s used traditional genealogy to track his family in China back to 1,000 AD and is active in the Southern California Chinese Genealogy Group. 

For Asian Americans, what historical data is available depends in part on where they are from. Because of the deep veneration for ancestors in Chinese and Japanese culture, many families have written ancestor records going back dozens of generations – though only for the male line. And in China, many of these zupu, as they’re known, were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.  

To track women, or for families that don’t have access to such records, DNA testing would be helpful except that so far most U.S. companies have relatively small numbers of samples from people in that part of the world, Joe says. 

It’s still very much worth doing, Joe says, though he’s found the tests aren’t all that specific for his family, which is almost entirely from the Pearl River delta in southern China. “The sample size is not that great and I didn’t find anything useful,” he said of the test he did on 23andMe.

Even so, he’s gotten every elderly relative he can tested and is storing the information for the future.

Joe’s passion illustrates a truism voiced by many genealogists whose families come from parts of the world where little genetic data has so far been collected: There will come a time when the databases will be much better, but older generations pass away, so they feel it’s crucial to test and archive now.

“You can’t dig up an ancestor’s grave and test their DNA,” said Joe. “This way, when my great-grandchildren ask, they’ll have the information.”

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