Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives.
These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold case murders and to investigate crimes like the 2022 killing of four University of Idaho students. Crime-scene DNA submitted to genealogy sites has helped investigators identify suspects and human remains by first identifying relatives.
The use of public records and family-tree building is crucial to this technique, and its main tool has been the genealogy site Ancestry, which has vast amounts of individual DNA profiles and public records.
More than 1,400 cases have been solved with the help of so-called genetic genealogy investigations, most of them with help from Ancestry. But a recent step taken by the site is now deterring many police agencies from employing this crime-solving technique.
In August, Ancestry revised the terms and conditions on its site to make it clear that its services were off-limits “for law enforcement purposes” without a legal order or warrant, which can be hard to get, because of privacy concerns. This followed the addition last year to the terms and conditions that the services could not be used for “judicial proceedings.”
Investigators say the implications are dire and will result in crucial criminal cases slowing or stalling entirely, denying answers to grieving families.
“Everyone who does this work has depended on the records database that Ancestry controls,” said David Gurney, who runs Ramapo College’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in New Jersey. “Without it, casework is going to be a lot slower, and there will be some cases that can’t be resolved at all.”
Before the August revision, Mr. Gurney said, the terms and conditions language remained vague enough that law enforcement officials, medical examiners and investigators believed Ancestry did not object to their use of the site’s collaborative platform, which allows family-tree building and easy access to public records.
For the Ramapo center, those records have helped solve dozens of cases, including the exonerations of two men last year, Professor Gurney said. But the center got an email last month saying its account had been canceled for violating the company’s terms and conditions.
In its letter to Ramapo, Ancestry said it had recently “become aware that your account is soliciting DNA samples to be used for cold cases.”
Without that one-stop clearinghouse for public records, investigators’ work will slow drastically, Professor Gurney said, adding that law enforcement authorities were now avoiding Ancestry because of the revised terms.
In a statement, an Ancestry spokeswoman said the company had merely clarified a longstanding policy.
“Ancestry is intended solely for family history research, not law enforcement,” the spokeswoman, Gina Spatafore, said. The company, she added, has long prohibited “law enforcement, or those acting on its behalf, from using Ancestry to investigate crimes except through due process. ”She did not elaborate on why the clarification had been issued this summer.
The development highlights a tension between privacy concerns and the push to solve crimes when it comes to genetic material, said Natalie Ram, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law and a genetic-privacy expert.
Millions of people willingly enter their DNA into consumer databases. But exposing an identity’s basic code also exposes its secrets. Some people are leery of giving others, including those with badges, free access.
Years ago, DNA found at a crime scene was useful as evidence if it could be directly matched in a law enforcement database to a specific suspect or close relative. Now, investigators can upload that DNA to direct-to-consumer sites with vast troves of genetic information that has been voluntarily shared.
The use of public genealogy sites to solve cold cases had a breakthrough moment in 2018, when the authorities used GEDmatch to identify Joseph James DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer. Personal genetic testing was taking off, and millions of Americans were buying inexpensive DNA kits to learn more about their backgrounds.
Ancestry, already hugely popular, offered customers the ability to augment their genetic results with access to the site’s huge public records database and tools for building family trees and finding links to other users.
A private, for-profit company, Ancestry has over $1 billion in annual revenue and more than three million paying subscribers, according to its website. It is owned by the private equity behemoth Blackstone, which bought it in a $4.7 billion deal in 2020.
“Ancestry has made part of its pitch to consumers that it doesn’t cooperate with law enforcement,” Ms. Ram said. “If it’s getting calls from users saying, ‘You said you don’t cooperate with law enforcement, so why am I getting an email from someone claiming to be an investigator?’ — that could be a problem for business.”
Suggesting a possible explanation for Ancestry’s clarification of its terms, she added: “We’ve seen some people in law enforcement playing fast and loose with following terms of service for consumer genetics platforms, or outright flouting them.”
Law enforcement authorities’ use of genetic material came under scrutiny this year when court records revealed that F.B.I. investigators had compared a crime-scene DNA profile with GEDMatch and another consumer database, MyHeritage, to identify Bryan Kohberger as the killer of the University of Idaho students. Mr. Kohberger’s defense team argued the access to the site without a warrant violated his client’s constitutional rights, but the judge in the case rejected the argument.
Some officials have proposed laws to curtail the use of DNA databases for law enforcement purposes, but it has been largely left to the companies themselves to regulate investigative genetic genealogy.
Like some other companies, including 23andMe, Ancestry bars the authorities from accessing its DNA database without a court order, which can be difficult to obtain because of judges’ privacy and evidentiary concerns, and because the searches can seem overly broad.
CeCe Moore, a prominent genetic genealogist who serves as a researcher for the television series “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates Jr., said it would be “impossible for anyone to quickly recreate” Ancestry’s invaluable stockpile of information.
“Over 99 percent of all genetic genealogy investigations have used public records from Ancestry,” said Ms. Moore, who has, with the assistance of genetic genealogy, also helped the authorities identify suspects in hundreds of criminal cases.
Lauren Robilliard, a staff genealogist with the Toronto Police Service’s investigative genetic genealogy unit, said that Ancestry’s database, which includes census, death and cemetery records from 88 countries and over 140 million family trees, has been critical in the more than 50 cases the unit has solved in the past five years.
“It’s like a huge library across the world, and we can’t physically go to all these places to access the records,” she said.
At the Ramapo center, where staff members, volunteers and trainees must now rely on smaller databases, Professor Gurney said his investigators had never sought to search Ancestry’s genetic database. It would not be useful in any case because genetic profiles from crime scenes or human remains cannot be uploaded to the site.
It was Ancestry’s wealth of public records, he said, that had helped investigators solve 38 cases since the center opened three years ago.
Family trees and genealogy records found on Ancestry by Ramapo investigators helped lead to the arrest last year of the killer in a 1974 cold case in Wisconsin. Ancestry’s newspaper archives and census records helped lead the Ramapo team to the real killer in a 1987 murder for which two brothers were wrongly imprisoned for nearly 25 years.
Barring access to that kind of information, the professor said, would thwart efforts to “catch dangerous criminals and bring justice” to crime victims and families of the missing.
Professor Gurney said that, for help with family tree analysis, members of his team had sometimes contacted Ancestry users through the site’s messaging service to ask if they might agree to genetic genealogical searching to help an investigation by transferring their genetic profiles to another site, GEDmatch Pro, that offers users the ability to opt in to such searches.
Ramapo team members, he said, always told those they contacted “exactly who we were and why we were asking.”
The New Jersey State Police have used Ancestry to help solve 15 cold cases since 2023, according to Lt. Rick Kuhrt, the cold case unit’s commander.
Ancestry information helped the unit identify, from a foot inside a shoe found in the Delaware River, the remains of a Pennsylvania woman who disappeared in 2014, he said. The unit also determined that bones that washed up on South Jersey beaches belonged to the captain of a schooner that sank in 1844.
“Most of these cases, honestly, would never have been solved without Ancestry,” he said.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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