GeneTree

» see genetree.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

If you load the last archived copy of genetree.com and read the source rather than the page, you find the site's obituary sitting inside a function definition. function closing_notice(), and then a string: "The GeneTree website is no longer available. However, if you have not downloaded your DNA results and pedigree data, you may do so for a short period of time." Sixteen years of a company ended as an alert box waiting to be triggered.

Terrence Carmichael started it in 1997, two years after finishing a masters in molecular biology and genetics at Wayne State. The pitch was in the strapline the logo carried: genealogy plus DNA plus community. You ordered a test, or typed in results from somebody else's test, and the site matched you against its database and let you build a tree and write to the relatives it found. Commercial ancestry testing would not reach a mass audience for another decade.

Being early did not pay. Carmichael sold the assets in the autumn of 2001 to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, the nonprofit funded by the Utah billionaire James LeVoy Sorenson, which ran GeneTree as the consumer face of a research collection that eventually held tens of thousands of donated samples with their matching pedigrees.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The Sorenson collection was the valuable thing, not the website. Over a decade the foundation assembled genetic data paired with documented family trees, donated by people who understood they were contributing to research. For a genealogist that pairing is the whole game, because a DNA match is only useful if somebody has already done the paper work of establishing who is who.

Ancestry.com bought access to it in March 2012 and told its own customers so, describing the purchase as "an extensive collection of DNA assets from Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, a non-profit organization." Ancestry launched its own autosomal test to subscribers the same spring. GeneTree stopped taking orders in roughly April 2012.

None of this arrived in Turkey on that timetable, and most of it still has not. Mailing a saliva sample to Utah to learn about your great-grandfather was an American hobby with American infrastructure under it. Where I grew up the same question usually gets answered by asking which village the family came from.

~ what got buried with it ~

Customers had the rest of 2012 to retrieve their own data. After 1 January 2013 the GeneTree accounts were gone, and getting at your results meant holding an active Ancestry.com subscription and having manually re-entered them before the door closed. People who had paid for a test in 2004 and not logged in since lost the lot.

The donated research database outlived the site by two years and then went the same way. Ancestry took the Sorenson database down on 14 May 2015, saying it had been used for purposes other than those intended, with no plans to put it back. Thousands of people had given a sample to science, and the thing they gave it to turned into an asset on somebody's balance sheet and was switched off when it stopped being convenient. The domain today belongs to somebody running an environmental blog under the GeneTree name, which has no connection to any of this.

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