Now You See Them . . .

 

There must be a reason why I am so feverishly pursuing all the suggested DNA matches on Ancestry.com's ThruLines. With all the changes in the field of genetic genealogy lately, perhaps I'm anticipating the other shoe to drop, as if one event will trigger a predictable follow through. Those tools to organize our DNA matches? Now we see them, but then, maybe, soon we won't.

Though I'm not a social media maven, the other day I spotted a post on not-Twitter from Jonny Perl. If that name doesn't exactly ring a bell for you, let me introduce a man with initiative and creativity: the web developer who devised a DNA visualization tool which took the grand prize at the 2018 DNA Technology Innovation contest at RootsTech and has seen his site grown rapidly since then.

I tend to pay attention to someone like that. So when he states that a key DNA testing company now seems  "completely useless for genealogy purposes," I pay attention.

The situation Jonny Perl was referring to is the company response to last October's unauthorized access to accounts at 23andMe via stolen passwords. Among other actions taken to protect their customers, the company removed access to its "Relatives in Common" tool, a most helpful utility for sorting through a customer's DNA matches for genealogical purposes. The Perl website, DNA Painter, had outlined that situation last November.

While that instance understandably caused a ripple effect throughout the entire genetic genealogy universe—including at other companies in that same industry—it also causes me to wonder just how long this technological gift will still be available for family history use. After all, I haven't forgotten the chill factor impacting DNA testing in the wake of the Golden State Killer case—a strange mix of wonder at the capabilities of the science, combined with a future-shock response recoiling at the very real specter of civil liberties abuses. After all—and I've tracked this in my biweekly counts—the rate of new DNA matches added to my accounts week over week has markedly decreased since that point when the news of the Golden State Killer's arrest broke in April 2018.

For now, I'll consider it prudent to quickly review my DNA matches—even those most distant ones like the descendants of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter—and glean whatever hints I can find in the process of studying those matches. We may have entered a golden era of genetic genealogy, but we could find ourselves leaving it just as quickly as we stumbled upon it at its dawning.