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    My Grandmother Was Italian. Why Aren't My Genes Italian?

    Popular DNA ancestry tests don't always find what people expect. That's due to how DNA rearranges itself when egg meets sperm, and also the quirks of genetic databases.
    by Gisele Grayson Jan 22, 2018 4 minutes
    As mother and daughter, Carmen and Gisele Grayson thought their DNA ancestry tests would be very similar. Boy were they surprised.

    Maybe you got one of those find-your-ancestry kits over the holidays. You've sent off your awkwardly-collected saliva sample and now you're awaiting your results. If your experience is anything like that of me and my mom, you may find surprises — not the dramatic "switched at birth," but results that are really different than you expected.

    My mom, Carmen Grayson, taught history for 45 years, high school and college, retiring from Hampton University in the late 90s. But retired history professors never really retire, so she's been researching her family's migrations, though both paper records and now a DNA test. Her father

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