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Re:California AG Rob Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert fo... by rafaelmn on Saturday March 22, 2025 @07:47PM (#43449647)
How does genetic testing help connect with biological relatives - that only works if there's a database people signed up to ?
Re:California AG Rob Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert fo... by kylecazar on Saturday March 22, 2025 @08:38PM (#43449933)
If you're talking about finding specific biological ancestors (names) then yes.

But certain general ancestral data can be deduced from variations in your DNA that are observed in some known current/historical population. I.e, I share much in common with people sampled from Scotland -> I must be Scottish.

Re:California AG Rob Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert fo... by vintermann on Monday March 24, 2025 @01:59AM (#43458059)
People are warned not to put much trust into the ethnicity estimates, sometimes even by the services themselves. Telling western Europeans apart is hard.

It's either matching to specific people in the service's reference group who have declared that they are Scottish, or it's trying to guess based on the mix of ancestral populations 2000+ years ago ("western hunter gatherer", "early Neolithic farmer" etc.)