Cece Moore

It was for health information.

She had worked on Wall Street in that sector and was discouraged about profit making on our health and wanted to give people the power to be able to work with their own genetic information and learn about their own health and take charge of that.

And so her goal was very different than mine and my field.

But we saw what she was doing and said, well, wait a minute.

Can we test our own autosomal DNA at her company and see if we can use it for genealogy?

And so that was really early adopters, people that had been engaged in genetic genealogy with these other types of testing and wanted more.

We just wanted to see if we could learn even more.

We didn't have to at first.

We just had to buy what was a very expensive test back then.

And in that case, you spit in a tube.

This is saliva collection instead of a cheek swab and mail it in.

And back then you could share with anybody.

You could share your information and you could check and see if you shared any DNA with someone.

So we started looking for shared segments, so long, identical segments of DNA, those ATCs and Gs lining up in a row.

Because if you had that, it meant you likely had a common ancestor somewhere in your family tree.

And it opened up the inner branches for exploration.

Now, we didn't know if it would work at first, but at the same time, they had a very forward-thinking scientist named Mike McPherson at 23andMe who created a beta test of a tool called Relative Finder.

And there, they compared everyone in their database against each other to see if they could find those long segments of identical DNA.

So interesting.

Right.