Even Cheaper: Ask Mom and Dad

Here's an article from Discover magazine by reporter Boonsri Dickinson, who chronicles her use of DNA-based ancestry testing services. "The business of genealogy is going genetic, as entrepreneurial scientists hijack the kinds of DNA analysis previously used to determine evolutionary relationships and give them a personal spin," she writes. Dickinson signed on with the Genographic Project, tested her paternal lineage with Family Tree DNA, and became a customer of 23andMe to look at ancestry markers across her genome. Ultimately, she says, the results were not too impressive. "Clearly I had hoped for too much from the ancestry tests. In the future, DNA databases will expand and the new-style genealogists will get better at interpreting our genome," she writes. "But the events that define who we are will continue to unspool as they always have—through experience and serendipity."