The Golden State Killer case has triggered a boom in “genetic genealogy” for solving crimes. But how hard is it to find people by sleuthing in their family trees?
that takes the amount of DNA shared by two people — a number provided by GEDmatch — and tells you the possible family relationships that might explain the match. And Larkin showed me how she uses genealogical websites, public records, and social media posts to piece together a person’s family tree.
It would have been easier if Marina’s two matches were related to each other — then I could have looked for where their family trees intersected to narrow down the range of possible branches to explore. But they weren’t, which means that one was probably from her mother’s side of the family, the other from her father’s.
Rico Ray was a man with Western European ancestry whose closest match — again a possible third cousin — was a police officer in upstate New York. Rico wasThe matches to the profile labeled Katelyn Kim were even less promising, but her ancestry was an interesting mix of Eastern, Southern, and Western European.said, when she later revealed her identity.
Moorhouse, a true crime fan who volunteered for our project because she was fascinated by the Golden State Killer investigation, was surprised that I’d been able to learn these details about her family — particularly because she had kept her own Facebook friend list hidden. But because her relatives had theirs in open view, that was no obstacle to tracking her down.
For Donald Adkins, the best match was a woman who once worked in the fashion footwear industry and is now an Episcopal priest with a senior position in the Diocese of New York. She and Donald shared more than 11% of their DNA, so were likely as close as first cousins. To connect the priest to her half nephew took me less than two hours: Donald was BuzzFeed News Editor-in-ChiefThe only real complication in Smith’s family tree was that his grandfather had married three times.
Both Smith and Honan were struck by how much I’d been able to find out about their families, so quickly. And as journalists who follow debates about online privacy, they were concerned about what this meant for their children. While other volunteers in this project had clearly descended from Europeans, Ethan’s DNA came from Northeast Africa and the area around the Red Sea. And when I started googling Ethan’s closest matches, I found that their names were typically Sudanese.
“In Sudan, there’s quite a bit of racism against people who are seen as more African than Arab,” he said. “And then my DNA comes back, and I’m more African than I am Arab. And like, look, it's a small difference, but that's not to say that it doesn’t mess with your identity a little bit.”I fell back on the same approach — essentially racial profiling based on overall genetic ancestry and the names of the closest matches — for the profile labeled Casandra Reed.
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