If like me, you are impressed with entrepreneurs who put together a new business using old and new techniques to serve their customers, you may like this article. It came out a couple of weeks ago. The Making of a DNA Detective, (Alternate link), is about CeCe Moore and her business of helping people find relatives and helping police solve cold case files.
Millions of people have taken DNA tests from the online companies, and Ms. Moore uses the data to help her clients.
Her method:
First, she uses an ancestry test to identify a distant relative—say, a third cousin. She then constructs a family tree, filling out branches with information from public records such as wedding announcements, obituaries and even social media.
“You just keep building and building and building to find that intersection where these different families come together,” she says. “Most second great-grandparents—back then there were big farm and Catholic families. I run into it often where there’s between 15 and 20 children, and it takes a lot of time to build all of those people’s descendants forward.”
We applaud the detective work that goes into the capture of bad guys and gals. As for law abiding people who might just like to be left alone? Read on:
Ms. Moore is fiercely protective of individual privacy and doesn’t want DNA used without people’s consent. Yet making your own DNA public may impinge on your relatives’ privacy. Ms. Moore worries that such fears could deter people from taking ancestry tests and make it harder to put criminals behind bars.
As for the complaint that genealogy can draw innocent relatives of criminals into investigations, she notes that it can also exonerate innocent people who might needlessly be pulled into investigations. “There are hundreds or thousands of people that are investigated in crimes that are innocent,” she notes. “In all of the crimes I’ve worked except one, the [identified perpetrator] didn’t appear on their person-of-interest list.”
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3:53 PM 2/25/2019
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