Excerpt from The Lost Family by Libby Copeland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In researching this book, I toured the first American company to offer at-home DNA testing for ancestry, in Houston, Texas, and the biggest, in Lehi, Utah. I tested my own DNA at three companies, and looked for relatives, and learned the imprecisions of ethnicity predictions while comparing the results the various companies gave me. I spent a day at the biggest genealogical library in the world, where history was a breathing thing, alive in the records. Meanwhile, police began making end runs around the limitations of government-run DNA databases, instead using genetic material gathered by consumer testing services to solve horrific cases that had been cold for decades— and igniting fierce privacy debates. And the databases of people who'd undergone at-home DNA testing went from eight million by the summer of 2017 to nearly thirty million just two years later. By the time you read this, the number could be two or three times that. The sheer girth of those numbers means that even if you don't choose to send away for a kit, it increasingly doesn't matter. Especially in the United States, where DNA testing is more popular than anywhere else, all of us are already drawn in by the decisions of other people who share our genetic material— people who, in many cases, we've never met. As bioethicist Thomas H. Murray told me, "You don't get to opt out."

This means you may become a statistic— someone who discovers a genetic fact that upends your sense of self, forces you to rethink what you know about race and religion, about your place in your family and your role in the world. Statistics are heartless that way. The more I reported for this book, the more seekers I talked to, the more I came to feel that we are embarking on a vast social experiment, the full implications of which we can't yet know.

This is the story of the seekers, who are grappling with essential questions about identity. What makes us who we are? It is the story of Alice, who did not know she would become one of them. That is, one of us.

Excerpted from The Lost Family by Libby Copeland. Copyright © 2020 by Libby Copeland. Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.