The Business of Ancestry: Exploring the World of Data Mining | Real Stories Full-Length Documentary

there's something in all of us some innate need to know who we are and Why We Are Who We Are and that leads you immediately to start looking into your past it's about selling relationships and it's about making money out of the ways in which people are related to one another we are using genetic tools to make trans-historical truth claims about ancestry and about human history [Music] and in the mid-1990s when I was driven to discover the details of a family's Secret by the mid-2000s after a decade of digging I realized that this sojourned back into my own past could go on forever and in that short time genealogy had become an accelerating online industry and the existential stuff of reality TV but what does knowing your ancestors really tell you about who you are and was my enthusiasm for family history truly my own [Music] is the business of family history really about family or are we essentially data mining the deceased [Music] my first stop is Iceland initially inhabited by Irish monks Iceland was permanently settled by Norseman in the 9th century [Music] icelanders have a renowned passion for genealogy and family history that dates back to the country's founders so what can icelanders strong allegiance to their past possibly tell me about the industry of genealogy [Music] just outside Reykjavik I meet up with a small band of Viking revivalists for some abroad they can only talk about two grandmas two grandfathers you know possibility great-grandfathers or great grandmas if you can remember but we have a whole family tree and we like talking about way back in the past you know you don't have to go far to go out into the country you know every Hill has a name everything every town There's a name from way back into the Viking ages before the TV everybody talked about who your family was everybody knew something about who you were it was enough for you to travel to another town in Iceland that somebody would say ah I can just see from your reflection that you come from this family tree [Music] crash of 2008 and people losing their you know who are we what happened I want to bring the proudness back into the icelanders as Icelandic oral Traditions have faded that National History is now indexed in the world's most complete genealogy database largely financed by a genetic research company called decode genetics I've come to Reykjavik to speak with the creator of icelandica book the Iceland database this one is probably around 1820 or so almost 200 years old East I think a bulk is a name of an old manuscript that was written in Iceland I think around 1200 or so it is also the name of the database we created the book of icelanders even though it's not a book but it contains all the icelanders my name is Frederick schoolerson schoolerson means really son of school which is my father's first name he is basically what we have is a Country-Wide database of almost all available genealogy information on all icelanders from the settlement in the 9th century until the present and I'm told that per capita is a World's single most popular database because more than half of the entire population of the country has actually gone and requested access to it when Eastland like a book came out with its cell phone app TV funny man Jimmy Kimmel couldn't resist ing a book I found out I almost put myself into sex with my aunt he's lending a book so why is the database so popular in Iceland so are they twins no no I ask a young couple about Eastland Decker book when you're young and in the dating scene you look at people you know to see if they're your cousin you know you have to be safe I mean at what point did you check we checked it about two weeks I invited her to a a children's birthday party yeah because he came in and half of the people there were basically her family yeah just like oh my God I'm sleeping with her cousin oh oh fortunately these two families were joined through marriage so rather than blood so what would have happened if you turned out to be second cousins we would have concept yeah I think so yeah jeans are pretty much the same as the ones you find in Scandinavia and the Pharaoh East islands and Northern Scotland and so on being a slanter is really a state of mind [Music] right now I got 34 157 in the tree back in Canada I meet up with Ron Ramer who is studying to become a professional genealogist Levi was my sixth great grandfather's brother this is my uh this Photograph that's my grandmother watching his family history for over 40 years Ron has almost reached his goal of 50 000 verified family members in his family tree [Music] online users he uploads and links these personal records to various genealogical sites there's genealogy.com.ca Olive Tree etc etc ancestry.com like almost three hundred dollars for a Year's membership well I've been a member uh probably seven times [Music] commercially and culturally the lodestone of the West a tribute to the foresight and wisdom of its founder Brigham Young [Music] millions of people from numerous countries access online genealogical services but it doesn't take much digging to learn that the two largest genealogical providers in the world are based here in Utah family search is the largest ancestral organization and it's owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints also known as the LDS or the Mormons yeah I'm Jeff Miller I come from Maryland and I've been actually Salt Lake City about 10 times you go into this hole into the past World outside melts away and I'm afraid of this way it is very emotional for me just a lot of family in the Holocaust and the population at large about half a percent in the United States is a member of a historical society or a genealogical society one in two hundred when we take a look at members of the general public who've registered for family search in the United States that number goes to 25 percent or one in four and that's who we see every day we have 3 000 Volunteers in Utah and we have another 4500 family history centers around the world Each of which is staffed with between 10 and 30 volunteers the volunteers meticulously input or index each record the bride's name is Rebecca r-e-b-e the church is indexing all the census all records Parish records of countries throughout the world once indexed the family links are then made by the church's countless subscribers how big the family search database is a tough question the reason it's tough is that the database contains lots of different components that are actually their own databases so for instance there's a a database of all the names that people have found and submitted as as what we call conclusions conclusions are things that I've done the research and hey that's a person and we've got about a billion actually a little more than a billion of those and then there's all the records that we've been acquiring for over 80 years we have 3.5 billion genealogical images within that image can be number of actual geological records four different birth certificates or it might contain a ledger of a census we estimate they're somewhere between 50 to 60 billion genealogical records out there so we think there's another you know we're maybe a quarter of the way done I'm up to nearly my 500 000 and um I'm up to 485 000 records so I've been doing it for online for nearly four years I do about 10 to 12 000 a month so it is really addictive so why is family search intent on Gathering up all of the genealogical records of the world [Music] family search and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does what it does respective to family history because doctrinally we truly believe that these precious relationships that we have developed in this life with our spouses and our children our mom and dad and our grandparents and our wonderful aunts and uncles they're not going to end at death we truly believe that we will meet them again [Music] we have this innate commission if you will to remember our ancestors who have gone before us and to be sure that our children know them so that they know that they are part of a larger fabric a much bigger Rich Legacy [Music] the reason people come to the family history library is I've coined the term it's the candy store it's all the yummies that are here they're over two and a half million microphone reels uh amazing number of records of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe research is a place where the individual pursuit of family history meets Mormon religious Doctrine it's also clear that Mormons take their mission very seriously as they choose to store their records under a mountain of rock just outside Salt Lake City [Music] the extraction program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints actually began in 1977. in those days we were given microfilms and assigned to take every single name from a specific christening records baptism records instructed to write down the name of every child Kristen from for example 1650 to 1885. literally one by one chronologically from the record in fact Mormons have been Gathering genealogical records since 1894. in accordance with church doctrine now they're at the Forefront of database and storage technology having amassed more than 30 times the amount of information held by the Library of Congress foreign [Music] well genealogy may be somewhat of a hobby for many people for Kevin and many African Americans searching their family histories is quite often an arduous task they're at the family history Library primarily to trace his Origins what I know you know what I think I know is that my family originally was from Ethiopia that's been the story that's been just kind of been brought down through the years on my mother's side of the family and on my father's side of the family my grandmother Choctaw Indian from Austin Texas and then they moved to Oklahoma and on my mother's side of the family goes back probably two generations we're from Los Angeles California your mother was born in 1929. so she should be on the 1930 United States federal census I actually got a taste of knowing who I am and where I came from when I went to Africa when I arrived they made me feel at home it was a feeling that I've never could get anywhere in the United States it was feeling that I don't think I could get anywhere in the world except for Africa Tennessee North Carolina everything's matching up here but I still felt lost when I was in Africa because it was like going to a family reunion and you knew none of your cousins so you have been able to extend your family back a whole generation and through censuses Kevin was able to find and confirm several recent Generations but he wasn't able to confirm one potentially significant family story on his mother's side if the information's accurate we found it back to John Colette who was the white slave owner and those families originated from Knoxville after they were brought here under slavery conditions to live on his Plantation and that is how his mother's side of the family started here in America it's my opinion that it was not a consensual sexual relationship because of the terms of slavery and everything they had to endure in the 1870 census is the first census the large population of African-American appear on as family units because the war ended in 1865. 1865. somehow I have to explain this to my children and it wasn't right to begin with so for me to be the one to have to explain it acknowledge it deal with it and pass it on almost makes me wish I didn't know in the first place when we start talking about our history my history as an African-American it usually turns into a point to where it hits a nerve with somebody that you know we really you know we really don't even want to go there or to turn into a joke yeah we'll just kind of start joking about the history and everybody just kind of laughs their way out of the picture that's my mom and just a little girl it happens here we are you know I I would like to to to move on I would like to find out if through the years we've got a couple of doctors or lawyers or or if I have a great great grandfather that was a slave and and wound up a businessman like with property I want something something good to come from this that is going to make us a Proud Family Lisa I and the children I'm proud [Music] now while family search is the largest non-profit genealogical organization in the world ancestry.com is the largest for-profit company and it's located in Provo 30 miles from Salt Lake City I've arranged to meet the original Cove Paul Allen my best friend and I Dan Taggart were involved in the founding of ancestry we started out in our careers as CD-ROM Publishers and in 1995 we published our first genealogy product targeted only at the LDS Market it was called the LDS family history suite and it made a million dollars in five months there was such a demand for it that we eventually dropped out of our graduate programs just do this business full-time it was so wildly successful that we realized that there's a huge possible industry or market for genealogy products I quickly realized that the internet that the World Wide Web would overtake CD-ROM and we thought what better content to put on the internet than all of the genealogical records of the world and in fact we published the very first genealogy databases on the internet that I'm aware of we started with the Social Security death index publicly available database from the government we just purchased the CD-ROMs and then reformatted them to make them more accessible and searchable online just to attract a lot of traffic and it went crazy [Music] while there's no official business relationship between ancestry.com and the Mormons family search database they do engage in collaborative efforts ancestry.com will on occasion publish billions of new records from family searches collection largely input by volunteers I asked Shipley Munson about this arrangement our goal is Mission driven and they're now answerable every quarter to their shareholders so that will by necessity create a certain Divergence but I will tell you that our view is we are as committed to ancestry's success as we are to our own because we're trying to build a community and we understand that they need to make money on certain collections so in many cases we have chosen not to publish collections that are only available in ancestry because they need oxygen to breathe [Music] it is hard to imagine having started all this without having some relationship with the LDS Church the LDS church has been the single most important factor in the evolution of genealogy for the past Century there's no question and it's because they don't have a need to make money on genealogy for them it's a matter of faith foreign [Music] despite the volume of the Mormon and ancestry databases Kevin was left with a large gap in his family history and found no evidence of a connection to a white slave owner turning to science he's decided to try DNA he and Lisa have come to the Sorensen Foundation also in Salt Lake City to speak to Scott Woodward we may not have the exact answer for you yet we have Scott is the head of the foundation which extends genealogies using DNA late summer of 1999 I received a phone call at my home at about two o'clock in the morning the man on the other end of the line said are you Scott Woodward do you know anything about DNA and he said well this is Jim Sorensen I want you to tell me how much it would cost me to do the DNA of Norway he was actually in Norway at the time that he called me looking for roots DNA I explored that question realized that it was a tremendous amount of money I mean I said it's going to cost you a half a billion dollars and said I can do that and I thought I set my sights way too low first of all but I said you know I think that there's a more interesting question that we can ask here if we had one hundred thousand DNA samples in our database that it would be likely that we could take just about anybody in the world and let them know whether or not they were included within a small population of people or excluded from that small population of people and I think that we could probably do the DNA of the world the entire world for a tenth the cost Sorensen has since gathered the 100 000 DNA samples that Scott proposed and combines them with genealogical records to trace family history in 2012 ancestry.com purchased the DNA related assets of Sorensen to be used for their new service ancestry DNA in July 2015 ancestry.com sold access to their DNA database to Calico a google-owned medical research company it's clear that DNA analysis or genetic genealogy is growing in both popularity and usage but DNA results can't tell you the name of your great great grandmother or where she was born so what can this scientific approach to ancestry really tell us about where we come from or Who We Are I speak to Alondra Nelson at Columbia University do people produce stories from genetic genealogy the same way they would from genealogical records sure I mean I think one thing that one might say is that the purpose of genealogy is to make stories right so what's changed in this moment or in the 21st century is that there's a different relationship to the story making so we might say with conventional genealogy that genealogists were involved in the story making because they'd be doing the archival work they'd been you know collecting oral histories for members of their family and these sorts of things what's different about genetic story making is that the data or the evidence has scientific Authority you have scientists capital S science capital G genetics telling you who you are your DNA contains a road map all the way back through time to those common ancestors it's as if they were dropping breadcrumbs on your DNA to let you find your way back home what are the limits of genetic genealogy there are limits around the technology so there are lots of different types of tests that one can use and that the companies that variously do the types of testing use different techniques and different proprietary databases and so consumers I think are left to just trust that these inferences are the correct inferences and basically what the companies are doing is creating identity categories out of probability and statistics right the other issue is that in the case of for example admixture testing which gives one a proportion of sub-Saharan African East Asian or European ancestry to create these categories and give people percentages of their composite whole is also to make assumptions about what human history has been and the assumption that admixture scientists make often is that at one time we were a hundred percent so there were populations that were 100 sub-Saharan African purely so 100 percent East Asian purely so and that we can give contemporary people proportions of who they are today and that really flies in the face of everything we know about human behavior and also what we know and anthropology about human migration like we've been mixtures for a very long time what are the implications of genetic genealogy for our understanding of racial and ethnic differences one implication is in the same way that genealogy reduces how we think about families right to a kind of biological Essence we can run the risk of too readily taking up essentialist ideas about racial identity solidify a true connection to the motherland acquire a new new Pride know who you are and it's a particular risk I think for communities that like African Americans that very much want information about ancestry that's been denied them but find themselves almost I think potentially in a Faustian bargain where in order to get information that's been denied because of historical trauma one has to enter into a conversation with thinking about race in a biological way that we know is not correct or true when in fact it's a social and political category [Music] foreign [Music] that a DNA analysis can potentially reveal one's likelihood for an illness or a disease and icelanders were perhaps the first to learn this but in a manner that might serve as a cautionary Tale by 1996 Friedrich had personally entered 300 000 records in the eastlandica book database greatly assisted by the parish records microfilmed by the Mormons in the 60s and 70s that year he was approached by a startup company called decode genetics I had planned to continue just adding data by myself in my spare time I estimated it will take me 40 years or so and would completed the uh the retirement home or whatever but the people at the ecoats basically said we need this database we cannot wait 20 30 40 years we need it in two three or four years so how much money do you need decode is interested in genetic diseases or vulnerabilities to certain diseases we're not talking about the diseases caused by a single recessive gene or something like that nothing simple but issues like where a particular gene or a combination of genes may increase the likelihood of getting a particular Disease by 50 60 100 or whatever and in order to be able to do that kind of research they needed a database of genealogy information and they also needed set of genetic samples to go along with it so they had a large number of people volunteering their genetic samples then they got authorization from the Privacy Commission of Iceland to link those two together along with genealogical records decode was given access to the medical records of the entire country of Iceland and was permitted to use them in its research in a manner known as presumed consent however opposition to the project soon emerged Richard lewinton in the New York Times argued that this Arrangement had transformed the entire population of Iceland into a captive biomedical community eventually more than 20 000 icelanders chose to opt out Friedrich about icelander's concerns the issues were when they wanted to link to certain types of medical history information and wanted to link wanted to include information on people that were deceased and had not given their informed consent to being included in a database 8 16 3264. that caused substantial controversy doctor patient Privileges and there are people that say okay you may discover that my my grandfather was carrying some Gene and who knows that may imply that I have a one in four chances of actually having that Gene I don't like that information to become available I don't like my insurance company to even have the most remote chance of getting that information ultimately the initial ruling allowing decode access to icelander's medical records was ruled unconstitutional as it failed to protect personal privacy however in 2012 decode and all the Icelandic records were purchased by an American pharmaceutical company called Amgen so can we talk about technology for a minute I mean the reason you have been able to create this complete database is because you've had the technology to do it we did approach things in a slightly different way instead of looking for individual people and tracing their ancestry we approach this as I said as a data mining operation for example one thing we did we computerized entire censuses we were not tracing the ancestry of individual people that sort of appeared as a side effect of going through the entire mountain of data it's a very fragile condition and for our purposes today I thought this would be useful data mining of aggregated Records opens up a number of questions around ownership and privacy especially for people who are simply pursuing their personal family histories should people be concerned about the privacy of the genealogical records that they upload to various sites the fine print on any genealogy or DNA site which few people ever read reveals a complex relationship between users and their donated information [Music] ownership of genealogy data is at best a gray area and it depends really on what you're talking about the data itself the we call the phone book for the Dead the the birth dates and names and places that's public information for the most part in in the United States but when a company goes in and adds value by aggregating a lot of data and then combining it with a retrieval system that aggregated information just like a phone book becomes copyrightable who owns the information depends on the type of record but record custodians obviously or the original owners of those records as soon as you donate that in a public forum well it pretty much becomes public so if you want your family tree to stay just the way it is and you remember it then you might not want to share it too freely with the internet the way it is today my online family tree I think yeah they could probably do what they want with it except I think there's protection for a living people I think they kind of scrub out the living relatives but as far as I know as soon as someone is deceased their own personal privacy is no longer a human right I guess you would say and so I'm not sure there's any movement or any effort to try to protect any records that pertain to people who are no longer living we have multinational companies doing big business selling people's information to them about their family members in the past information that maybe 50 100 years ago people would have naturally had passed down from generation to generation if there's a new data set that's emerged they very much Market that as the new thing that they have on offer and it's both about selling genealogy to people as yet uninitiated but it's also about reselling genealogy to those who might have been pursuing it but have dropped it history is marketed all around us whether it's in terms of the kinds of food that we're eating whether it's in terms of the kinds of country houses that we're looking at whether it's in terms of returning to vintage clothing on the street so history is sold everywhere genealogy is just one manifestation of that I think it's very rare that the genealogy industry as a whole really approaches the question of ethics and the ways in which family history should be dealt with sensitively given that there's multiple stakeholders in a family history not just a person doing the research but the people who are being researched so I think there's a great deal to say about the ethics of research in genealogy I personally do not worry for a minute I at least lose no sleep about the possibility of somebody finding my information in the LDS church database a new family search and using it for illegal purposes I believe that I'm sufficiently protected commercial websites they will need to say when we invite you to donate all of your family history data we will at least guarantee that no one anywhere could gain access to Modern information and use it for evil purposes [Music] we have a fundamental belief that we lived before we came here and our our objective is to go back and return and live again with our heavenly father and Central to that is acceptance of Jesus Christ and acceptance of the ordinances of the Gospel like baptism what about those who came to this earth and never had a chance to hear about Jesus Christ to be taught the doctrine of the gospel and have those ordinances performed We Believe that once we die here we will live in a state of a spiritual existence for a certain amount of time after which we will be literally resurrected and as you may know millions billions of people have lived and died on this Earth without having heard of the Gospel of Jesus Christ so there must be provision after this life that those people are given the opportunity to hear and either accept or reject that message their mission is the Salvation of the human race both living and dead they have this rather unusual practice of involving deceased persons in their religion they acquire records throughout the world and they had something called the extraction program that when they got the records here in Salt Lake City they then farmed out copies of these records to Mormons who would extract the information and then have religious rights performed on these individuals we believe that the technology is placed here by Our Father in heaven for purpose and one of the most important purposes for all these technological tools is to give humans the ability to recreate the family tree of the human race [Music] by all accounts ausa Greta has a family although widowed she lives in Reykjavik surrounded by her children and grandchildren [Music] despite this she feels that an important part of her family is missing at the age of five her mother told her that her father was not her biological father and that her biological father was another Icelander she even provided his name some empty space came into my heart so I decided to try to contact this father that my mother had told me about when I was five years old when I own things he told me that he thought he was not my father and he asked me if I thought he was rich or something and that had never crossed my mind ten years later after the death of her mother she contacted him again and asked if he would take a DNA test he said no never do you know why you feel so strongly about trying to find your father well I can't really say it's just some deep deep desire like a force or something some I need to know you know it's an empty space [Music] eventually I also went to an attorney arguing for a DNA test based simply on anecdotal evidence ultimately she succeeded even though the man in question had died but the results turned out to be negative um I felt like the world a bit collapsed you know because I always believed what I was told so suddenly I had to face something was Untold to me a month or so after the results of the test an ant appeared and told us his sister that her mother in fact had a secret she'd had an affair with an American Soldier but wanted to keep it hidden so why had you never talked about it I've never seen it you've never seen them in that time yeah you don't talk about these things thank you after queries amongst relatives and army records Elsa came up with a possible image and name for the soldier I feel a little lost you know since then Elsa succeeded in soliciting the DNA of two of this man's children from the United States once again the results turned out to be negative do you think that you'll keep looking no matter what yeah I asked Stephen at Harvard University about some of the popular assumptions around DNA's relationship to Identity psychologists call this essentialism the conviction that living things have some hidden Essence some kind of Wonder substance or spirit that basically makes them what they are and it probably goes into our intuitive genealogy our sense that who we are can be explained in part by this mysterious stuff that we have inherited from our ancestors now sometimes this is given a concrete form like the notion of blood of bad blood or something being in the blood sometimes the essence is thought of more as a spirit as invisible stuff that somehow you inherit nowadays we're apt to identify it of course with DNA give us that good information Kevin and Lisa are back at Sorensen for Kevin's DNA results so the first thing that we did is we looked at your mitochondrial DNA this is DNA that you inherited from your mother who inherited from her mother who got it from her mother and her mother so when we looked at that DNA we found that the type of DNA that you have there is probably not really surprising to you it comes from Africa okay okay turns out that the two that are most closely related to you come from Benin and from Ghana really Ethiopia is out of it we haven't seen anybody in Ethiopians so far but here's another interesting one Kevin's DNA analysis also went on to reveal likely Brazilian and Native American ancestry now we've also looked at your Y chromosome DNA that you inherited from your father and from your grandfather and this is where oh maybe you'll be a little surprised there okay it's not African really yeah it is it's European okay that's on my father's side I'm white we got it on both sides all right we're cousins I think people's uh genealogical curiosity and their their essentialist uh intuitions run up against An Inconvenient mathematical truth which is that your connection to you with your ancestors decreases geometrically with a number of generations ago that they lived now the connection between genes and uh traits is statistical at best even among identical twins who share all their DNA they correlate pretty highly but not perfectly well then you go to your parents and they had half your genes and go to your grandparents and each grandparent has a quarter of your genes and a great grandparent each one has an eighth and a sixteenth and it very quickly tails off to just about nothing uh worse because there have to be an exponentially increasing number of ancestors that you had you reach a point in history where there just weren't enough ancestors to go around and so everyone's ancestors start to collapse with everyone else's ancestors and even if it's true that you're a great great great great Etc grandparent was Native American or very smart or very courageous he was probably the great great great great grandparent of everyone you're going to bump into in the street as well everyone's ancestors collapses collapse with everyone else's ancestors if you go back far enough [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] the issues around social versus genetic families also adds further complexity to the mix as Anna a post-operative transgender can tell you somewhat surprisingly she's also the chair of the genealogical Society of Iceland this is my grandparents my mother's parents and this is my grandfather's ancestors and my grandmothers Anna has three children and six grandchildren the oldest son is 14. and then and do they call you grandmother three of them so you've thought a great deal about what family means yes I do but families are changing yeah I know I know everything about it in your entry in icelandica book it has your name and your gender female and then it says that you were the father of three sons so what kind of problem does that create for Eastland but not so much problem anymore because we are increasing number of people so they have to think about it what do you do that Eastland like a book doesn't do we work more on people's lives so it's more family history than strict genealogy do you think that the social relations are more important than the biological ones I think so it's more important but in most cases we have we have to think about it from both sides [Music] Society has changed what we consider to be a family we get all kinds of complications now that we did not have 20 30 years ago we have complications with sex change operations where it's not entirely clear whether to list somebody as a generic parent father or mother we have complications where it comes to same-sex marriages [Music] thank you [Music] we are going to get maybe more complications in the future if we ever get human cloning or partial genetic contributions to a child this is all solvable I mean right now we can solve those issues by allowing people to have four different types of motors and three different types of others we have to just basically add a few categories but for all practical purposes people are doing genealogy for two different reasons either uh for genetic reasons where those complications are listed are irrelevant it doesn't matter who is living with whom only Who provided the genetic material and on the other side you have the technology as a social point of view where the genetic stuff is completely irrelevant and all it matters is who do the people in question consider to be their family and that's where things get really interesting to be something absolutely essential for Life what plant can grow without them what human then can grow without roots but what is rootedness is it rootedness to other people is it rootedness in time is it rootedness in place to particular communities to a landscape to a particular place where a residence let's say or a family has lived so this considerable uncertainty everybody thinks everybody needs to have roots genealogous signal is really important but they're not quite sure what that means Elsa has still not found her biological father has since however found a small photo in her mother's possessions and now believes this might be him she's hoping that by telling her story in this documentary it will lead somehow to his discovery Kevin's DNA results did not match much of what he'd been told through family stories finding European bloodlines on his father's side and no evidence of a connection to Ethiopia [Music] I feel a disconnect kind of from what I have known and what I have been kind of going with I'm reassured by the DNA I'm not reassured anymore based on paper because all the stories that were told on paper or through Word of Mouth through the generations are obviously not true because they're nowhere in the DNA huge and there were three of them Ron on the other hand seems to have gotten a lot more than he bargained for what it does is it lists the place and everybody that's from that place that's in your tree Leamington Ontario leader Saskatchewan New Market zai brooken Germany Zurich Switzerland uh is how many pages uh 1200 pages of places [Music] we have a database that covers just about everybody since say 1650 or so and of course then the manuscripts go all the way back to 700 or so of course they get slightly more questionable the further back you go in particular since one of the major genealogies In Those Old manuscripts in the Viking gods and well it's fun to be able to claim to be descended from a court it's somewhat questionable in from a scientific point of view [Music] stay true to our mission which we think is a larger Mission than for most companies we need to get many many many more people involved in researching their families and their family histories that are involved today we need to engage beginners at the point of entry and attract more people who are interested but haven't started yet and tip them into the first steps imagine if you had a sample from every person that lives on this planet that you had actually all of the gene pool to analyze and eventually that's what will happen they'll have the entire gene pool analyzed when that happens they can reconstruct all of the lines from the information that exists in our DNA all the way back to our you know whoever our first ancestors were Adam and Eve thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Real Stories

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Keywords: documentary 2023, full length documentaries 2023, documentary movies - topic, free documentaries on YouTube, Real stories uk, real stories full documentary 2023, real stories, Genealogy, Data mining, Deceased, Ancestry, Privacy concerns, Ethics, DNA, Family secrets, North America, Ambitions, Key players, Industry, Searching for answers, Human cost, Business, Risks and rewards, Dark side, Uncovering the truth, Consequences, Documentary

Id: o71KudxJiR0

Length: 56min 6sec (3366 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023