In an effort to avoid the all day onslaught of football on television yesterday I stumbled upon on old episode of The Golden Girls where Blanche was researching her family tree. I recall my daughter having a similar assignment for some class in some year of some school. We got back a few generations on my mother’s side, but my father’s branch and both sides of her mother’s family stalled after two generations, just about the time the families arrived on American shores.

Tracing a family tree can be fun but back then genealogy was a lot of work. It involved going through family bibles and loose documents and asking questions of surviving friends and relatives of parents and grandparents when you could find them. For us it was further complicated by documents that were written in Italian, German, and Czech. Ancestry.com would have come in handy if it had existed then.

While I’m firmly behind the notion of finding your roots, I’m confused over the recent explosion of DNA testing to determine your ancestry. To me, a person’s heritage is what was learned from one’s parents. I’m American of Italian heritage not because some DNA inside me matches the DNA of some others who sent saliva samples to a particular lab, but because my mother and father raised me as American of Italian heritage. Although DNA testing is fine and dandy for determining lineage, there are many reasons why that DNA may not take a straight line to get to you.

For example, let’s look at a couple of the TV commercials’ reasons for why they think you should have your DNA tested and, to put it politely, blow them out of the water.

First there is the one with the earnest sounding man wearing lederhosen and dancing in a German dance troupe. He had his DNA tested and there was no German DNA there. In fact he was Scottish and had to go out and buy a kilt. How could such a thing happen? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe adoption.

Then there is that equally earnest looking couple who were certain that the hubby half is Italian. Where would he have gotten such a foolish idea when his DNA clearly shows he is really “Eastern European.” The idea that nobody is certain of the actual separation of Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans aside, there has been so much commercial trade between northern and eastern Italy and the Austrian empire over the centuries that the trading of DNA was inevitable.

Although you can’t deny that DNA is what makes us, it’s not our DNA that makes us. Oh, it gives us our hair and eyes, our build and bones, and our blood and sex types. But it’s our parents that give us our substance, our values, our reason for being the beings we are. Maybe that’s just as high as our trees need to reach.