Dec
19
Surprise DNA results turn customer-service reps Into therapists
Posted in: Uncategorized
It was a one-line chat reply from an AncestryDNA customer-service rep that ripped Catherine St. Clair’s life apart.
St. Clair, 57, is her family’s resident genealogist and had sent her saliva to Ancestry for testing. So when her brother Mike showed up as a “first cousin or close relative,” she assumed it must be a glitch. Even stranger: The test showed that someone she had never heard of was a much closer genetic match than Mike.
She contacted Ancestry customer service through the website’s chat feature. Calmly, a representative named Pam explained centimorgans, a unit for measuring genetic linkage. Siblings, Pam said, normally share about 2,600 centimorgans of DNA, while half-siblings share 1,800.
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