DNA Testing: Who Am I? (Hint: Still Don't Know)

Hands of my grandfather, Photo by the author. Shot on a Mamiya 645, 50mm. Western Kazakhstan, 2025

I recently did what millions of others have done: I spit into a plastic tube, mailed it to a lab, and waited for an email to tell me "who I am."

When the notification finally popped up, I expected a moment of profound clarity. I thought I’d finally see a straight line back to the people I’ve been researching. Instead, I got a pie chart.

The Pie Chart Problem

There is something deeply clinical about seeing your existence broken down into color-coded percentages. 32% this, 14% that, 2% "unassigned." It’s a clean, digital answer to a messy, ancient question.

The problem is that a DNA test doesn’t give you an identity; it gives you an ancestral map. It tells you where your biology was manufactured, but it says absolutely nothing else. It tells me where my ancestors lived, but not their life stories.

The Missing Link

Looking at a DNA report feels like looking at a list of ingredients without the recipe. I have the components of a lineage, but the actual connection—the felt sense of belonging to a specific story-is still missing or feels very vague.

I found myself staring at the "unassigned" 2% more than the big numbers. That tiny sliver of "we don't know" felt more honest than the rest of the chart. It represented the gaps in the record, the lost names, and the migrations that left no paper trail. I guess I was hoping for a more detailed report that would show exactly which of my ancestors had genes from where. I wanted to see family tree with assigned DNA to my ancestors. My paternal lineage is Czech-German, and my maternal lineage is from Kazakhstan. I already knew that and just got it confirmed.

The Race Against Time

Staring at that digital map made me realize something much more urgent. While I was looking for answers in a lab in another country, I realized I was missing stories and family history.

I thought about my grandfather and realized his memory is slowly fading. The stories he carries - the ones that aren't written in our blood but in his lived experience - are the only true bridge I have left since he's my oldest living ancestor.

A DNA test can tell me I'm related to a region, but only my grandfather can tell me what his mother’s voice sounded like or what it was like to grow up. I’ve realized I have to ask him everything. I have to be relentless with my questions. During autumn 2025, I flew to his village in Western Kazakhstan and conducted a series of video interviews that ranged from silly questions to existential ones, from obsessively recording everything about him to capturing him on my analog camera. At one point, I asked him to give my son (now a toddler) and me advice on life and to tell my son hello in the future, when he is old enough to watch the videos. Makes me emotional just to think about it. The interview was conducted in Russian and Kazakh, and it was helpful that the speech-to-text translation improved significantly.

The Key for My Son

Maybe that’s what this entire project, Ancestral Vision, has been about from the start. This obsession drives the need to capture the past, to build "vessels" for memory, and to dig through all the tools available at this time in history to capture everything there is to know about our joined families with Hugi.

I’m doing this so I can hand the keys to my son.

I want to take everything I’ve found - the scientific data, the ancestral stories, the artistic symbols, and the fading memories of his great-grandfather - and bundle them into something he can hold. I want him to have a grounded sense of his own existence, not just as a percentage on a screen, but as a continuation of a long, proud, and very human story. The AI-powered Oracle is there to remember much more than one single human possibly can.