As a white person in the United States with its history of forcible deprivation of peoples of their roots, I feel that everyone—African Americans and Native Americans especially—has the right to try to use genetic data to help fill in missing pieces in his or her family history. Nevertheless, for those who assume that personal ancestry testing results have the authority of science, it is important to keep in mind that many of the results are easily misinterpreted and rarely include the warnings that scientists attach to tentative findings.
