ABSTRACT

This paper is a critical review of family historians’ use of DNA test results, as a set of cultural practices with several prominent geographical components. We specifically concentrate on the leisure pursuit of family history, rather than on the discipline of genetics and genome projects in cultural context (discussed by Rabinow, 1999 and Greenhough, 2006); but discuss scientific findings to the degree that they inform genetic (or “deep”) genealogy, an avocation demonstrating a strong appetite for accurate scientific data. (See, for example, the popular overviews of genome studies by Wells, 2006; Sykes, 2006; and Oppenheimer, 2006.) In response to Greenhough and Roe’s (2006) concern with “how people are actually making sense of the possibilities posed by biotechnological innovation,” we consider how DNA research encourages family historians to rethink basic geographic concepts like ethnicity, migration, diffusion, and spatial correlation.