From Ancestry Insights to Data Monitoring: The Truth About the DNA Testing Industry

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There was something about the way three police officers surrounded Michael Usry as they walked him from his New Orleans home to their car in 2014 that made him nervous.

They’d told him on the phone they wanted to speak with him about a nearby hit-and-run. No big deal, he thought: he wasn’t involved. Instead, the then-36-year-old filmmaker was taken under false pretences to an unmarked interrogation room and accused of murder.

“Everybody thinks they know what they’re going to do if they get pulled into an interrogation room,” Usry says.

“They think that they’re going to say, ‘Screw y’all. Where’s my lawyer? I’m not saying anything,’ but that’s not usually how it plays out.”

The recording of his questioning shows Usry, wearing a blue zip-up jacket, jammed into the corner of a tiny interrogation room with a one-way mirror. Two detectives sit opposite him on cheap-looking office chairs that don’t swivel.

They start by casually asking him about his short films, including a horror film he produced called Murderabillia about a man who collects murder-related paraphernalia on the black market.

He answers matter-of-factly: “It was about, you know, a weird guy that collects serial killer artifacts and stuff like that.”

A close up of a man, who is wearing a blue shirt, posing for a photo.

Michael Usry Source: Supplied

Usry will later find out the film’s plot shares eerie similarities with the case the police are investigating, but right now, in this cramped, airless room, he’s scrambling to work out what his interrogators want and why it feels like the walls are closing in on him.

The police move on to question him about a trip he took just out of high school to the ski fields of Utah — a last hurrah before his Mormon mission to spread the good news and baptise believers. Unbeknownst to Usry, it places him close to the crime scene in nearby Idaho Falls, adding weight to the circumstantial case police have built against him.

They go over and over the details: Who did Usry meet? What did he do? Finally, they cut to the chase. Police say they have “evidence” that puts Usry at the crime scene, that “cutting-edge science” has led them to him, and he now has an opportunity to confess.

They ratchet up the pressure, threatening to use a lie detector.

“Tell us what’s going on,” demands one of the detectives.

Tell us what happened, and put yourself in a position because it’s coming. The train’s coming down the track.

The evidence the police had was DNA. They’d taken a sample from the crime scene and found a partial match in a consumer DNA database owned by Ancestry.com

It was the first time in history that law enforcement had forced the world’s biggest direct-to-consumer DNA company to hand over the details of someone in its database.

But crucially, that someone wasn’t Michael Usry. It was his father who had made a decision 15 years earlier to donate his DNA to a genealogy project at his local church.

“My dad had submitted a DNA sample through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and it eventually led to me becoming a suspect in a murder,” he says.

How this information was sold to Ancestry.com and then obtained by police raises questions about data privacy, informed consent and policing that still plagues the DNA industry today.

Mormons, Salt Lake City and the ‘elusive billionaire’

More than 30 million people globally have done a family history DNA test, but few realise this multi-billion dollar industry’s origins trace back to the Mormon church.

Neither did I, until an investigation that forms the basis of the podcast Secrets We Keep: Should I Spit into how our genetic data is being used by police in Australia, led me to Usry and unravelling his story.

The Ancestry.com DNA Today database contains the genetic information of 25 million people. Source: Getty / Bloomberg/George Frey

I wanted to know more about the connection between Usry’s dad’s DNA donation, the Mormon Church and Ancestry.com. So I travelled to Salt Lake City, Utah, the global centre of history and worship for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — also known as the Mormon Church.

From a hotel room, overlooking the city’s breathtaking snow-capped mountains, Usry explains that central to his religion is a ceremony called ‘baptism for the dead’. Mormons study their family history — or genealogy — to discover the names of people who have died without being baptised. During the ceremony, a person dressed in white stands in as a proxy for the deceased, who can then choose to accept the offer of eternal life.

“It’s a beautiful spiritual experience. Done in the temple, which is a holy place and very sacred,” Usry says.

For Mormons, the baptism for the dead unites families across time, for eternity and drives the church and its members’ interest in genealogy.

“You have a lot of very loyal, very believing people that pursue genealogy and they have the belief that they are helping their extended family and their ancestors receive the ‘word of God’ and thus receive salvation,” Usry explains.

They can be very zealous about this research … and it’s strictly a religious cause too.

Until the last few decades, genealogists had relied solely on historical and legal records to trace their ancestry, such as birth, death, and marriage certificates, military records, and censuses. The Mormon Church has amassed records on 11.5 billion people throughout history from around the world. Copies of this information, collected by Mormon volunteers over a century, are stored in the high-security Granite Mountain Records Vault, located just outside Salt Lake City.

Then, in the nineties, came advances in DNA science and technology that meant immutable, biological data could be used to identify a person and their family.

Watching these developments was Utah-based Mormon billionaire James LeVoy Sorenson.

Dubbed ‘the elusive billionaire’, he was often photographed wearing wide-brimmed, beige cowboy hats. He built dozens of companies in his lifetime, spanning industries from real estate to biotechnology. Among his many claims to fame were the creation of disposable surgical masks and disposable arterial catheters.

Long before the name Ancestry became synonymous with DNA testing, Sorenson was in Norway trying to trace the Norwegian line of his family through traditional genealogy and wondering if the genetic information contained in his cells held the answer.

He’d seen a documentary, Secrets of the Pharaohs, about a young archeogeneticist from the Mormon-run Brigham Young University who was using ancient DNA to identify Egyptian mummies and the familial links between them: Dr Scott Woodward.

Sorenson made a phone call to Woodward that would lead to a multi-billion dollar business and have the unintended consequence of landing Michael Usry in a police interrogation room decades later.

A family tree of the world

It was the summer of 1997, and Woodward’s ground-breaking work had captured the public’s imagination and the media’s attention.

He’d become known on Brigham Young’s campus as the ‘Indiana Jones of DNA’, and biology undergraduates were desperate to get a place in his lab. One of them was biologist Jayne Ekins, who later became one of ‘Woodward’s Angels’.

“He [Woodward] always had some sort of artefact in his hand, a skull or just some ancient-looking thing,” Ekins recalls.

“He was doing so many avant-garde things with DNA at that time. He just had a vision that was really unprecedented.”

A man examining a mummy that is on display.

Dr Scott Woodward examines a mummy at the Egyptian museum in San Jose, California, in 1995. He became known as the ‘Indiana Jones of DNA’. Source: Getty / Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle

One night, Woodward invited his lab students out for dinner to announce that he’d received a phone call from a philanthropist — Sorenson — who would fund him and his team to build a DNA database of unprecedented size and scope, correlating genetic and genealogical data from living people from all across the globe. It would be a family tree of the world.

He told them the billionaire wanted to show the world how genetically similar humans are and that he wanted “world peace”.

Ekins remembers all of the students sitting back and looking at each other in awe.

“We certainly understood that it was possible because carried inside all of our cells is a record of who we are and how it is that we’re related to everyone on the planet. But none of the science has been invented yet, none of the computational biology to crunch billions of pieces of data and turn it into something that is interpretable and useful. None of that has been invented,” Ekins says.

It was like being at the beginning of the internet.

Before the team could start building this family tree of the world, they needed to prove their concept — that they could effectively connect people through DNA. They needed to collect 100,000 DNA samples from volunteers worldwide.

These volunteers would also need to provide their own pedigree charts, stretching back at least four generations. This is because, while DNA is the blueprint for life, it cannot reveal your identity until it’s compared with the known DNA of others.

Ekins explains most of the volunteers came from Mormon congregations.

“They were early, willing, trusting, and very, very highly qualified supporters,” he says.

Among them was Michael Usry’s dad. His blood was drawn at his church by the local GP, who was also a ‘stake patriarch’ with the church (a member who gives patriarchal blessings to other believers).

“He was 100 per cent doing it for baptism for the dead and genealogy research for religious purposes,” Usry says.

“We’re talking about religious, amazing, honest, salt-of-the-earth people; they wouldn’t have thought about what else could this information be used for.

“Here I am, you know, accused [of murder]. My life has been altered because of this. And I hate to think that that’s because of the Mormon Church and what they allowed people to do.”

The Mormon Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah. More than 30 million people globally have done a family history DNA test, but few realise this multi-billion dollar industry’s origins trace back to the Mormon church. Source: Getty

Word of Sorenson’s collection spread, and soon enough, DNA samples were coming in from nearby countries in Latin America, the United Kingdom, and far-flung places like the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand, where the collection hit a snag.

In 2001, blood samples were taken from volunteers in Auckland at a public meeting at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But researchers hadn’t sought approval from any New Zealand ethics committees to do this.

New Zealand authorities expressed concerns that asking participants to give blood on the same evening as having the project explained to them meant they wouldn’t have enough time to think about it and talk with their families before agreeing to donate.

Their other concern was that the consent form allowed donors’ DNA to be stored and used in future research without the specific, additional approval.

As I later found out, the consent form also didn’t preclude the transfer of the data, which was initially collected as part of a Brigham Young University study, then transferred to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF) created by Sorenson, and eventually passed on to Ancestry.com.

Why this DNA, donated freely by church members to a not-for-profit, ended up in a multi-billion dollar company’s hands and later accessed by police is a question that has always bothered Usry.

“I feel like one person trying to get, you know, to squeeze an answer out of a gigantic corporation,” he says.

‘It was scary stuff’

Woodward is now retired and living on a ranch in Utah, still wondering how far DNA science can take us.

“Alice in Wonderland said you can’t believe impossible things, right? The white Queen said, ‘Well, I’ve often imagined six impossible things before breakfast’. Predictive genetics is extremely difficult and maybe I could even use the word impossible. But sequencing the human genome was impossible before it was done,” he says.

Before the Mormon Indiana Jones of DNA was digging up Egyptian mummies, he was involved in one of the greatest scientific achievements in history, known as the Human Genome Project. Launched in 1990, the project ran until early 2003 and mapped the whole human genome, opening up all the possibilities of DNA, including in the fields of healthcare, evolutionary science and forensics.

Before this, Woodward had been collecting DNA from large, local multigenerational Mormon families who kept records of their family trees, enabling scientists to track the inheritance of genetic traits and diseases. In 1989, this led to the discovery of genetic markers for cystic fibrosis, providing proof of concept for the Human Genome Project.

Woodward says that moment still makes his hair stand on end today: “It was just an amazing feeling that I’ve got this. Wow.”

So why did this scientist with a background in inheritable diseases want to create a family tree of the world?

“Can I use the Miss America answer? World peace,” he says jokingly.

“We can laugh at that, but really our idea and our thoughts were that if we can take two people and sit them down at a table and not just tell them that they’re related to each other in some, you know, mystical way out there, but actually show them their pieces of DNA that they share from a common ancestor, that they will think differently about each other,” he says.

Three men, wearing suits and ties, holding a large check for US$5 million.

The late James LeVoy Sorenson (left) pictured in 2004. Dubbed ‘the elusive billionaire’, he built dozens of companies in his lifetime, spanning industries from real estate to biotechnology. Source: Getty / Business Wire

With a passion for discovery, Woodward also sought to push science forward as far as possible, and his relationship with Sorenson provided him with the means to do so.

Shortly after Sorenson started pursuing ‘world peace’ through his non-profit SMGF, he created a corporate umbrella called Sorenson Genomics. It housed and operated numerous DNA testing companies and pioneered online consumer genetic testing.

In 2003, SMGF severed its ties with Brigham Young University. Woodward and his team, including Ekins, left the campus and relocated to Sorenson’s corporate headquarters in Salt Lake City, where Sorenson had spared no expense to build state of the art labs to extract, sequence and type DNA for his other companies, including one called Sorenson Forensics, which was set up to work with police.

The detectives who interrogated Usry in 2016 had sent DNA from the crime scene to Sorenson Forensics to determine if the killer could be found in the SMGF database. The company advised police that one of the matches their search returned was a close relative of the suspect. The match was Usry’s dad.

However, Sorenson Forensics couldn’t hand over the name and location details associated with the DNA profile as the database had since been transferred to Ancestry.

Woodward says it was his idea to pitch DNA acquisition to Ancestry, which, prior to the mid-2010s, had primarily relied on genealogical records to publish family histories on its website and in print publications. But Woodward says it wasn’t about money: he wanted access to Ancestry’s billions of records.

“It was the data they had that we didn’t have,” he says.

“We realised that, yeah, we could probably make a lot of money with this. And we made a conscious decision that we’re not going to go down that road. Our goal here is to build a database that can be used for genealogical purposes.”

At first, Ancestry said no.

“It was scary stuff. This was a whole new idea. Ancestry was concerned about the ethics.”

Eventually, in 2012, the company got on board and Woodward, along with the 120,000 DNA samples in the Sorenson database, transferred over to Ancestry, becoming their first director of genomic discovery.

The data was transferred under the same consent form that Mormon Church members like Usry’s dad had signed when they donated their DNA to the Brigham Young University study.

Scott explains that under the terms, Ancestry was not able to commercialise the data, but that it could be used for “internal scientific discovery” and there was nothing stopping Ancestry from using it in their marketing story.

Ancestry heralded the launch of its “highly anticipated AncestryDNA services” in a press release, announcing it “combined new, state-of-the-art DNA science with the world’s largest online family history resource and a broad global database of DNA samples”.

“I think at the beginning, DNA for them was very much something to bring people into Ancestry,” Woodward says.

“The amount that they were charging for their DNA test and the data that they were giving back, they were losing money on every one of those [tests] that they were doing.

But their hope was that they could then interest those people that were coming in, in a subscription to their other services, and so they could bring maybe 2.5 million people into ancestry through DNA.

Today, the company’s DNA database contains the genetic information of 25 million people.

Its ethnicity prediction tests are a major selling point for Ancestry but Woodward is keen to point out there are no DNA markers for ethnicity. What these tests actually reveal is where your family lived in the world at a certain point in time, and the results are based on information already in the database as a reference. That is why many customers of DNA kits will see their ethnicity percentages change over time.

‘Real interesting’: DNA’s unintended applications

When Ancestry first acquired the Sorenson database 13 years ago, it kept it online as a free resource for genealogists to trace their family history. But after news broke that police had used it to drag Usry in for questioning over a murder, the company shut it down.

The fact that police were using information given for family history purposes as part of their investigations deeply divided the public. For some, it was police using whatever tools they could to get a killer off the street. Others viewed it as a major breach of privacy and consent.

“I wasn’t and still even today [am] not real bothered by that,” he says.

Since his days identifying the familial relationships of ancient Egyptian mummies, the big-thinking scientist knew that police would eventually want to use family history databases to solve crime. The shared nature of human DNA means anyone can be traced, whether they are individually listed in the database or not.

“We knew that we could look at relationships, and we may not necessarily find the specific individual that matched the DNA 100 per cent, but we could find other individuals that were related to that individual if we had a massive database. And that’s where it started to get real interesting,” Woodward says.

The technology has come a long way since Usry was falsely accused of murder because of his father’s DNA, but the principle of using family history databases and, indeed, law enforcement-owned databases to identify people via their relatives remains the same.

Today, what’s known as familial searching and its more powerful cousin, forensic investigative genetic genealogy, are used by police in many countries globally, including Australia.

Representatives from federal and state agencies have told me that the way they are using DNA now is evolving from simply matching a sample from a crime scene to a profile held in a criminal database, to intelligence-driven applications for investigators, such as generating leads before the start of an investigation.

A book with the title: The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.

For Mormons, a ceremony known as the baptism for the dead unites families across time, for eternity and drives the church and its members’ interest in genealogy. Source: Getty / Alacatr

DNA is now also being used to reveal things like eye colour, height, biogeographic ancestry and facial features to investigators, and yet no laws have needed to change to allow police to implement what they call these “advanced DNA capabilities” and search methods.

Usry says these are worrying developments.

“With what’s happened to me, I’ve always felt like I had to be on the other side of this spectrum. We have to try to at least exercise caution with this technology,” he says.

More than a month after Usry’s interrogation in 2014, during which police took a DNA swab, he received confirmation from police that his DNA did not match the samples taken from the crime scene. He was off the hook, but it would be another seven years before the true killer was arrested — a subject I explore more in Secrets We Keep: Should I Spit.

But even today, Usry still worries about how his dad’s DNA sample might be used, particularly by its new owner.

In 2023, American private equity firm Blackstone bought Ancestry for US$4.7 billion ($7.1 billion). Blackstone is one of the world’s largest investment firms, with interests in real estate, insurance and biotech.

At the time of the sale, Ancestry said in a press release: “Looking ahead, in collaboration with Blackstone, we will continue to leverage our unique content, while bringing to life our long-term vision of personalised preventive health.”

While the use of DNA in personalised healthcare has the potential to radically improve our quality of life, Usry says it’s how that data is collected that matters.

“The way that they got it started was through the members of the Mormon Church. They got their samples, thousands and thousands of them. The people of the Mormon Church didn’t submit their DNA to Ancestry.com so that cops could more easily catch their family members when they committed crimes. They submitted their DNA for religious purposes based on baptism for the dead.

“I feel like for it to slip into an overuse of power, it happens so slowly and so gradually that it’s hard for people to imagine how it could be used until it actually is being used.”