6 Minute English / Can you trust ancestry DNA kits?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil.

And I'm Beth.

Nowadays, it's popular to find out more about your family history by tracing your family tree a diagram that shows all the members of a family over a long period of time. What do you know about your family history, Beth?

Well, my Mum actually did our family tree, and she found a lot of our ancestors had emigrated to the United States. But, yeah, I don't know much more than that. What about you?

Well, I'm lucky to have an unusual surname, so it's quite easy to trace my ancestors and somebody in my family has gone back to 1700 and found somebody with my name.

Wow, that's amazing. Well, the internet has made it easier to find the historical records needed to research your ancestry - the origins of your family. But what if you want to find out about a time before historical records began? Luckily, some companies now offer to trace your ancestry using DNA.

DNA is the cellular information that's passed down from parents to children telling the body how to create life. Listener, Chris, from the UK, recently took a DNA ancestry test. When the test returned some unexpected results, Chris called BBC Radio 4 programme, Sliced Bread, wondering how accurate they really were:

Not so long ago I sent off a home DNA testing kit and the results that came back were broadly in line with expectations, but it had some little glitches in there which made me think, is this accurate? Or is it to be taken with a pinch of salt?

Chris wondered whether his results were accurate, or whether to take them with a pinch of salt, an idiom meaning to doubt something is completely true. So, in this programme we'll discuss how accurate DNA ancestry tracing is, and, as usual, we'll learn some useful new words and phrases. And remember, you can find all the vocabulary for this programme on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.