We used to learn about our ancestry through family stories, and we took them as truth.

Now, DNA tests can unravel those stories, fleshing out details or disrupting family narratives. 

If you decide to join the millions of consumers who have taken an at-home DNA test, you may be surprised by what you find.

It could be good news. Michael Farragher of Spring Lake Heights, seen in the video below, and Joyce Keating Steinert of Pennsylvania both were happy to find new cousins in their families.

It could be shattering. Catherine St Clair of Texas was crushed to discover that her father was not her biological parent.

Or your DNA test simply might confirm what you always knew about your family, and your life will proceed as normal.

How do you decide whether to roll the dice? As the popularity of DNA testing skyrockets, we all will have to grapple with questions of privacy and ethics.

More people took at-home DNA tests in 2017 than in all other years combined, according to a report by MIT Technology Review, which estimates that 1 in 25 American adults has been tested.

AncestryDNA reported in April 2017 that it had tested 4 million people. By February 2018, that number had increased to 7 million. 

And no wonder. The process is simple:All you have to do is swab your cheek or spit into a test tube, pay about $100 and wait about six weeks for the lab to analyze your DNA.

But should you explore your gene pool? That depends on how much you are willing to risk, and what you see as the reward.

You might, like Farragher, discover a long-lost relative. If you were adopted, or if you were conceived through sperm or egg donors, DNA tests might be your only means of determining your heritage. But you’re also revealing your DNA to a for-profit business, in a world of frequent data breaches, without knowing what potential use it might serve for law enforcement or the government, or anything else in the future.   

On Facebook, people can ask questions and discuss details of their DNA tests on myriad groups, among them: Ancestry DNA For Dummies, AncestryDNA Matching, DD Social, DNA Newbie, 23andMe Newbies, MyHeritage Users Group, DNA Adoptee Research & Reunion, We’re Related Gedmatch Numbers, Share Your Ancestry DNA Results, Roots: Ancestry, DNA & Genetic Geneaology, DNA surprise support group, Ancestry Dot Com – Helping, Sharing and Venting, Genetic Geneaology Tips & Techniques, and DNA Geneaology! Just Ask!

Facebook groups also cater to specific ethnicities and religions: County Donegal DNA MatchFinder, Our Black Ancestry, Tracing the Tribe – Jewish Geneaology on Facebook, Southern Italian DNA and Geneaology, Asia Adoption DNA, and Finnish Geneaology, among many others.   

“I can’t help but think the DNA thing is a little bit associated with the obsession of self, the self-absorption part of it,” said Michael Rockland, a professor of American Studies at Rutgers who teaches a course on “Celebrity Culture.” 

The popularity of DNA testing in a society that values fame, he says, should not surprise anyone. The process is already part of reality TV, including the PBS series “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates” and the TLC series “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Privacy concerns

Before you submit your swab, consider the company’s privacy policy. A few of the variables: Customers can opt in or out of genetic health testing. They can give or withhold permission for their aggregated, encrypted, anonymous data to be used for medical research. They can permit or block contact from people who share their DNA.

“I always wanted to do it,” Joyce Keating Steinert said, of her ancestry test. “I didn’t know what I’d find, but I was terribly curious.”

Privacy concerns squelched any interest she might have had about genetic health testing.

“I was not anxious to follow up with that,” Steinert said.

At 23andMe, you decide whether your saliva sample is stored or discarded after analysis. AncestryDNA customers can request to have their biological samples destroyed.

You have to opt in and give explicit consent in order for these companies to use your data for scientific research.The companies say they do not share, sell, lease or rent your individual information to any third party without your express consent. But the issue is complicated.

People who have had their DNA tested with any private company also can upload the raw data to the public database GEDMatch, which makes it possible to connect with relatives regardless of what testing company they used. 

But it also makes the details of your DNA more accessible, including to law enforcement under certain circumstances. 

In April 2018, data from GEDMatch led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo as a suspect in the notorious “Golden State Killer” murders and rapes that took place in California in the 1970s. Investigators matched DeAngelo’s DNA with those of distant relatives found on the GEDMatch database.

This was to date the most famous arrest made with the help of at-home DNA tests, but police across the nation have used them as a new tool to lead them to suspects. “Bear Brook,” a podcast produced by New Hampshire Public Radio, explored how police used “genetic genealogy,” working with DNA data and traditional genealogists, to backtrack their way to a murder suspect in a cold case.

All of that is good. But it raises the question of what other potential uses may be found for DNA. It is all hypothetical, for now.

As Jason Moon, the NHPR reporter behind “Bear Brook,” told the Concord Monitor: “There’s a debate coming in the next several years that we may not be prepared for. People may not even realize it’s coming.”

GINA and vegetable soup

When you take a DNA test, you’re making a decision not only for yourself, but potentially for your entire family, and generations hence.

The federal Genetic Informant Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) of 2008 prohibits genetic discrimination by health insurers or employers. But it does not address the potential use of genetic information by mortgage lenders, schools, life insurers or disability and long-term care insurers.

Because the law is relatively new, GINA has not yet generated many charges or lawsuits, according to a spokeswoman for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Figuring out your genetic ancestry takes more than simply knowing that your mom’s family is mostly Italian and your dad’s side has an Irish surname. 

“Your cultural heritage and your identity are different than your genetic heritage,” said Scott Hadly of 23andMe.

For example, you can have Portuguese ancestors and yet inherit no Iberian DNA.

“Although you get half your DNA from your mom and half from your dad, you’re not a straight 50 percent from your mom, 50 percent from your dad,” Hadly said. “And you’re not one-quarter of what your grandparents were. It’s a range. That’s why if you have siblings, your DNA is not identical to theirs.”

Think of a bowl of vegetable soup as a metaphor for your DNA. All the ingredients in the soup pot come from your ancestors. But when you ladle soup into bowls, you might get more carrots in one bowl, more celery in another.

Surprises revealed by DNA testing are not always welcome. The testing companies tell you about this ahead of time, warning in their instructions that you may learn something you did not want to know, and there will be no way to un-learn it.

Even when you know all that, curiosity can be an irresistible force.

Here are three stories of lives upended, for better or worse, by DNA testing.

‘Of course, I’m going to pull this thread’

Michael Farragher can spin a good yarn about the land of his ancestors.

His parents immigrated to Jersey City from Ballyglunin, a village in County Galway, Ireland. Farragher knows the village first hand, having spent many a childhood summer playing on the family’s dairy farm, which is now run by his 87-year-old uncle, Paddy.

It sounds romantic. And Farragher, as a writer, recognizes the appeal. He has written essays and fiction set in Ballyglunin, inspired by his clan.

But it’s also plain, ordinary stuff to him because it’s what he’s always known. Farragher, who lives in Spring Lake Heights with his wife, Barbara, and their two daughters, takes an interest in his heritage, but he also takes some of it for granted.

For Christmas 2017, Farragher’s wife gave him a DNA test. To nobody’s surprise, his ethnic heritage came back as almost entirely Irish, though it did reveal a splash of Sardinian many centuries back.

Hmm, interesting, Farragher thought, and then moved on with his life, but not before opting in to the feature that allows contact from other relatives. That’s how Barbara O’Toole found him.

Farragher’s grandfather was the youngest of 10 children. There was a gap of 14 years between the birth of the ninth child and that of Farragher’s grandfather.

By the time Farragher’s grandfather was about 5 years old, all his siblings had left Ballyglunin for better opportunities in the United States. He was essentially an only child, with little or no contact with his much older siblings.

“Two generations later,” Farragher said, “a DNA test brings people out of the woodwork.”

Barbara O’Toole’s father and Farragher’s father were first cousins.That makes O’Toole and her sister, Beverly, second cousins to Farragher.

“I’m very close with a lot of my cousins,” Farragher said, “and I don’t have time enough to keep up with them as it is. So, I’m not aggressively seeking new cousins. But I’m open to it.”

Others in his family are less so, including his 82-year-old father, who was suspicious when first told about the O’Toole sisters.

“He said to me, ‘Ah, they’re only after your money,’ ” Farragher recalled, imitating his dad’s brogue.

As for O’Toole, the brogue enchanted her. On a recent trip to Ballyglunin, she warmed to the voices of her newfound relatives as audible proof of her connection to Ireland. 

Farragher, too, was pleased to learn more about this branch of his family.  

“For me, I’m a writer, so this is catnip,” Farragher said. “There’s a story. Of course, I’m going to pull this thread.”

“But it’s good these cousins got to me,” he added. “If they’d reached anyone else in the family, they wouldn’t’ve gotten a call back.”

‘I found this elusive person I knew was out there’

Joyce Keating Steinert grew up with scant information about her father. He died when she was a baby and her older sister was a toddler. Their mother re-married and lost touch with her former in-laws.

Geralyn Keating, on the other hand, grew up hearing tales of her uncle’s two little girls, who had lost their father at a young age. They were often in the back of her mind.

In January 2018, Steinert took a DNA test. Two months later, her name popped up as a relative to Keating, who now lives in Howell.

 “I knew this had to be one of my uncle’s daughters,” Keating said.

Steinert did not even know Keating existed, and was blindsided when Keating reached out to her. 

“I don’t know what I expected,” said Steinert, who lives in Westchester, Pennsylvania. “But to hear someone say, ‘Our fathers were brothers’ was not at all what I expected.”

“I was thrilled I found this elusive person I knew was out there,” Keating said.

Steinert has yet to meet her cousin in person, but has received family photos from her, including a 1948 group photo taken at Keating’s parents’ engagement party.

“When I saw those photos, I thought, ‘These are MY people,’ ” Steinert said. “There’s my mom, pictured with all this family, and there’s me and my sister, with all these relatives. It was so potent to me.”

“Unfortunately, no photo exists of Joyce and me,” Keating said. “Yet.”

‘I would rather live a difficult truth than a comfortable lie’

Catherine St Clair, who lives in Texas, had no trepidation about taking the DNA test her four siblings gave her in 2017.

But test results revealed no genetic connection to her paternal line.

St Clair called AncestryDNA to question what she assumed was an error in her test report.

“I give them props for how they handled it with me,” St Clair said. “Gently, tenderly, professionally.”

Still, there was little that could soften the blow. St Clair remembers the exact time and date when she learned that the man who had raised her was not her biological father, and that her siblings were really half-siblings.

She would later befriend many other people who experienced the shock of what genealogists called a “non-parental event,” or NPE. St Clair prefers to define it as “not the parent expected.”

“We all remember when the floor fell out for us,” St Clair said. “May 17th at noon, for me.”

A month later, St Clair founded DNA NPE Friends, a secret Facebook group that she hoped would reach others in her situation.

Earlier, St Clair had posted a comment on the Facebook page for the syndicated radio host Delilah, who had asked her followers if they’d learned anything new from DNA testing.

“People were saying they found they had Native American heritage,” St Clair recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ So I posted, ‘I discovered my dad was not my biological father.’ ”

Within minutes, her phone pinged with a private message from another Delilah fan: “OMG, I thought I was the only one.”

“We talked and cried for three hours together,” St Clair said. “We shared our anxieties and confusion. I didn’t know how to feel. Everyone says that nothing has changed. But it has.”

St Clair’s mother and the dad who raised her had both died by the time she learned about her NPE. St Clair burrowed into the AncestryDNA site and found a genetic match with a half-sister on her biological father’s side.

The half-sister knew of another half-sister, who grew up with their biological father. This man had also died, so there was nobody left to answer St Clair’s many questions.

From what St Clair pieced together through information from her half-sisters, her mother and her biological father briefly worked together. St Clair didn’t feel the need to know anything else.

“Frankly, that’s a personal thing between the two of them,” she said.

St Clair does not believe her mother or either of her fathers knew about the misattributed parentage.

She established a relationship with her two half-sisters, and they sent her photos of their father.

“When I got the pictures of my biological father, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather,” St Clair said. “I have uniquely colored eyes. They’re not green or brown. I always put ‘hazel,’ but that’s not what they are. They’re gold, with a ring around them. He had them, too.”

“Seeing those photos was a big comfort for me,” she said. “It was like I looked into my eyes for the first time.”  

Having examined her family mystery as far as she could, St Clair turned her attention to her DNA NPE Friends group. She had hoped to collect a dozen people who could support each other.

 “We added 1,038 people in one year,” St Clair said.

As of December 2018, membership in the group had surpassed 4,000.

St Clair no longer feels isolated. She has become a spokeswoman and an advocate for NPE’s through her foundation, NPE Friends Fellowship.

“There’s a lot of good that’s come from it,” St Clair said of her NPE experience. “I have a lot more family now. I’m a happy story. There are some NPE’s where doors are shut in their faces.”

And if she could go back in time, and refrain from taking the test, would she? Would she un-learn what she now knows?

“I absolutely would want to know,” St Clair said, without hesitation. “I would rather live a difficult truth than a comfortable lie.”

SHARE YOUR STORY

Do you have a story to share about DNA testing? We want to hear about it. Email Kelly-Jane Cotter at kcotter@gannettnj.com.

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