– Prosanta Chakrabarty
With the promotion of DNA testing by for-profit entities, there is a lot of misunderstanding about DNA testing and what it can tell you about one’s lineage. This has led to some confusion about what DNA tests can and cannot do, leading some to think that DNA testing is a quick answer for family lineage, which is really not. In the worst case scenarios, DNA testing has led some to claim to be people they really, are not. E.g. a DNA testing showing 1% Native American does not make you a Native American. This video by Prosanta Chakrabarty helps explains the limitations of what DNA testing can tell you. Hopefully, one can see that DNA testing cannot replace the illumination of family history that genealogical discovery of documents can provide.
Jun 9, 2020
“Dig into the science of how ancestry DNA tests work, their accuracy, and why tracing ancestry is so complicated. — Two sisters take the same DNA test. The results show that one sister is 10% French, the other 0%. Both sisters share the same two parents, and therefore the same set of ancestors. So how can one be 10% more French than the other? Tests like these rely on our DNA to answer questions about our ancestry, but DNA actually can’t tell us everything.”