Displaying family on the DNA platform

Abstract

Direct-to-consumer DNA platforms are significant yet overlooked social media platforms through which millions of users worldwide shape their identities. DNA platforms sort and match users using genetic data, creating novel familial ‘networked publics’ and reinforcing ‘genetic thinking’. Drawing on the concept of ‘family display’, we interpret the accounts of 23 Australians who had distinct motivations for engaging with DNA platforms and differing ‘intensities of display’. Our thematic analysis derived three themes: how participants appropriated platform affordances to curate digital displays of family, how the platform enabled participants to foreground multigenerational narratives of familial continuity and how the platform’s focus on genetic relationships led users to reconfigure existing family understandings. Our findings contribute to conceptualisations of how individuals ‘do’ and ‘display’ family through digital platforms and advance theorisation of the ‘digitalisation of family’ and ‘platformised relationality’.

Introduction

In a digital age, individuals increasingly use digital platforms to represent, curate and legitimise their family. One such site for negotiating family relationships are direct-to-consumer DNA platforms (henceforth DNA platforms), which have seen rapid growth in the last decade, with the databases of the four major DNA companies AncestryDNA, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage collectively attracting more than 41 million users worldwide (de Groot, 2020; for a historical overview of the making of the market, see Hogarth and Saukko, 2017). Participating in DNA testing as part of joining these platforms has become increasingly affordable, with tests retailing for as little as $59 AUD in recent sales and the industry now has a global market value of more than $14.36 billion (Glynn, 2022; Know Your DNA, 2024). Representations of DNA platforms are ubiquitous in contemporary digital cultures today: from media stories about DNA platforms being used in criminal cases (for example, the Golden State Killer) to references in pop music (Lizzo), programmes featuring celebrities tracing their ancestry (Finding Your Roots or Who Do You Think You Are?) and social media users posting content about their own DNA discoveries and disruptions (on YouTube and TikTok). The public eye has also turned to scrutinise the data practices and security of DNA platforms on countless occasions, for example in the 2023 23andMe data breach in which approximately 5.5 million users and 1.4 million additional profiles were exposed.

Like other platforms, DNA platforms are socio-technical infrastructures that organise economic relationships, flows of data and interactions between users (Van Dijck and Poell, 2016). DNA platforms function like many other social media platforms by connecting users in networked publics (boyd, 2010), yet they differ by sorting and matching users by centimorgans (units of genetic measurement) rather than friendship, romantic aspirations or geographical proximity. While genetic testing could be compared to other self-tracking and body monitoring smart technologies, DNA data is unique to the individual yet links genetic relatives, is unchangeable and is predictive of health and physical traits. DNA data is lively, in the sense that it can be visualised, interpreted and appropriated in different ways with distinct outcomes (Ruckenstein, 2017). Indeed, on DNA platforms genetic family is displayed in deliberate and unexpected ways as users interact via direct messages to validate information and initiate relationships with unknown family members (Newton et al., 2023).

Media and communication studies have paid limited attention to DNA platforms, which is surprising given the significant number of users they attract and the interesting questions they raise about personal data, algorithmic intimacy and genetically-driven networked publics (however, see boyd, 2012 on the impact of genetic data on networked privacy). A recent review of literature on amateur family history and DNA testing by Mitchell and Kim (2024) revealed that research has focused on individuals’ motivations for researching family history, their emotional reactions to newfound knowledge or secrets and how family history shapes familial relationships and identity. This work spans family studies and family history, sociology and social sciences, psychology, genetic counselling and community genetics (Mitchell and Kim, 2024) and offers insights into the kinds of people seeking information about family such as amateur family genealogists and members of specific communities who have had limited access to genetic information, such as those affected by adoption or donor conception (Baptista et al., 2016; Conrick et al., 2025; Newton et al., 2023, 2024). However, there has been little focus on the dynamics and use of DNA platforms themselves or how their affordances permit (or otherwise) new experiences of family (for one exception see Ruckenstein, 2017). Thus, there is significant need to understand users’ experiences with DNA platforms, their attitudes to sharing genetic data, motivations for creating digital genetic displays and negotiations with family relationships via the platform.

Here, we employ Finch’s (2007) concept of ‘family display’ to interpret the accounts of 23 Australians who had sought information about family via DNA platforms. We consider how individuals curate digital displays which reorder temporal logics of family, disrupt existing cultural and social narratives and challenge understandings of familial relation. Our contribution advances recent theoretical conceptualisations of family life in the digital era, such as ‘the digitalisation of family’ (Qian and Hu, 2024) or ‘platformised relationality’ (Erstad et al., 2024), where a gap in empirical work on multigenerational families has been highlighted. As we will show, users of DNA platforms follow, repurpose and influence inbuilt affordances (Ronzhyn et al., 2023) to both reify and reimagine what it means to be genetically related.

Background

Digital platforms, affordances and geneticised identity

Digital media scholars have shown sustained interest in how individuals express, represent, promote and manage their identity on a range of digital platforms (boyd, 2010; Van Dijck, 2013). This scholarship has drawn attention to how platform affordances shape how individuals curate information about themselves. A critical concept in media studies, ‘affordances’ are defined as ‘the perceived actual or imagined properties of social media, emerging through the relation of technological, social and contextual, that enable and constrain specific uses of the platform’ (Norman, 1988; Ronzhyn et al., 2023: 3178). In terms of affordances, DNA platforms enable access to family trees and historical records, and facilitate autosomal DNA testing which permits access to ‘traits’ (insights into nutrition, performance and appearance), ‘ancestral origins’ (overviews of geographical ties and immigration pathways) and ‘DNA matches’ (connections with genetic relatives first introduced in 2009). Yet, how users themselves perceive and appropriate the affordances of the platform is understudied. Scholars have noted that much work on families’ use of digital technologies has taken a ‘broad-brush approach’ and overlooked the affordances that enable ‘platformised relationality’ (Erstad et al., 2024: 175). In the context of DNA platforms, a focus on affordances may illuminate users’ anticipation and expectations about how DNA testing digitally mediates family relationships and identities.

Few studies have considered DNA platforms and digital identities. Of these, Strand and Kallen’s (2021) noteworthy research on participants’ desires to ‘be a Viking’ argued that geneticised identities are ‘born at the intersections between the seemingly immutable data of DNA and the personal desires of the individual; between molecular sequences and human dreams’ (Strand and Källén, 2021: 536). This scholarship highlights how geneticised identity is selective and dynamic (see also Kramer, 2011; Ruckenstein, 2017). Similarly, Peters and Gorissen (2023) developed the concept of ‘bio-digital identities’ through focusing on DNA-based playlists offered by Ancestry DNA and Spotify which promote identities that are ‘biologically determined, technologically mediated, and culturally expressed’ (Peters and Gorissen, 2023: 2). While this research offers insight into how DNA platforms shape cultural and ethnic identities, there is significant scope to consider how these platforms mediate familial identities and relationships, and to better understand the ongoing work required to negotiate such relationships, including when DNA data challenge existing understandings of family. Further, how users view the durability of these private platforms and their attitudes towards data protection and privacy warrants further attention.

Genetic thinking, the new family history and algorithmic intimacies

Ideas about genes and genetic connectedness show up in everyday life, as anthropologists and sociologists alike have long highlighted (Mason, 2008; Nordqvist, 2017; Strathern, 1992). Investigating assisted reproduction, Nordqvist explored how ‘genetic thinking’ – that is, the process of rendering genetic relationships meaningful – guides individuals’ thinking and conversations (Nordqvist, 2017). Genetic relationships are often viewed as ‘fixed’ or ‘strong’, whereas nongenetic or social relationships are conceptualised as ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ (Mason, 2008; Nordqvist, 2015). Dimond et al. (2022) later considered how family practices are rendered meaningful in health-related genetic testing finding that decisions related to genetic testing are reflective of family forms, knowledge and practices. Akin to health-related genetic testing, ancestry or genetic genealogy testing also impacts individuals’ understandings of family thus, a focus on the intergenerational family is critical (Newton et al., 2023).

The field of family history has rapidly evolved and expanded via a range of digital tools and databases, mostly notably through the rise of the ‘new family history’ via DNA platforms (Stallard and de Groot, 2020). What distinguishes DNA platforms from previous genealogical tools is their increasingly algorithmic nature. DNA platforms are driven by algorithms through which information is constantly (re)organised and (re)displayed. DNA companies use algorithms to filter, sort and compare users’ genetic data for ‘DNA matching’, that is, to identify users who share a common ancestor, useful for those seeking relationship estimates. ‘Matching’ affordances make visible novel genetically-driven networked publics and give rise to algorithmic intimacies (boyd, 2010; Elliott, 2022). As genetic families are (re)constructed through algorithms and displayed on digital platforms, the boundaries between public and private are less clear.

Displaying family online

In this article, to consider how individuals engage with DNA platforms and their affordances as a family practice, we draw on the concept of ‘family display’ (Finch, 2007). In the sociology of family and personal life, David Morgan (1996) led thinking about families as constituted in the everyday through routines and activities. Extending this work, Janet Finch (2007) argued that the concept of family display helps us understand how individuals show and legitimise their families and to whom. Display is experienced differently among families who may be deemed more or less legitimate and comes with ‘degrees of intensity’, circumstances in which there is more at stake to show and be understood as family. Finch gives the examples of the routine practice of children’s bedtime reading (2007: 79). Such a practice becomes ‘display’ rather than taken-for-granted when it is done to show a family relation, such as by a stepfather (nongenetic parent) who inscribes his role as a parent through reading to the child, or a father (genetic parent) who was absent on a trip and reinscribes the family relationship by returning to the routine of reading to the child. Although Finch does not emphasise it, these examples make clear that genetics impacts the extent to which practices need to be displayed to legitimise family relationships; a phenomenon that our article seeks to make clear. Further, doing family and managing digital platforms requires emotional work, as researchers have highlighted in relation to display across diverse contexts (Evans, 2022; Jarrett, 2013) and DNA displays may often be uneven, emotional, gendered, time-consuming and/or risky.

Individuals often use specific tools for family display, such as photographs, artefacts, gifts, narratives or family ‘talk’ (Finch, 2007). Digital tools, platforms and affordances too are employed for family display to seek affirmation or legitimacy. Work on digital display has explored how ideas of family is enacted family photography on Instagram (Barnwell et al., 2023), mobile photography and Skype use in transnational families (Cabalquinto, 2020; Share et al., 2018) and how such displays may be for a range of audiences (the self, one’s interlocutor, one’s friends or followers or indeed unknown viewers). Other scholarship has focused on family display through family and household accounts on smart home devices considering how these platforms determine what kinds of families can be displayed and how (Goulden, 2021). Yet the concept of display has not yet been applied to the context of DNA platforms which are arguably a key site of family display. Here we consider how individuals may use these platforms to make their (genetic) family relationships socially visible, legible and valid to/for themselves, their family, institutions and often unknown others. Akin to understanding who can be part of and visualised within the ‘platform family’ on smart home devices (Goulden, 2021), our investigation seeks to understand the motivations, curations and interpretations of family on the DNA platform (including through the affordances and visualisations of ‘ancestral origins’ and ‘DNA matches’) and how such platforms shape understandings and experiences of family.

Methods

This article draws from a study exploring Australians’ experiences of seeking information about family through DNA testing, with ethics approval from The University of Queensland Human Research Ethics Committee (2023/HE001124). Participants were recruited through Facebook groups for DNA testing, genealogy, adoption or donor conception, through partner organisations, word of mouth and snowballing techniques. Semi-structured interviews (n = 23) lasting between 45–120 minutes were conducted and audio recorded, transcribed and de-identified. Participants received a voucher for their time.

All participants had engaged with DNA testing between the 2010s and 2023. A total of 22 of 23 participants had tested with Ancestry DNA and many had also tested with other companies such as My Heritage, 23 & Me or Family Tree DNA and had used GEDMatch, an (until recently) non-proprietary platform that allows users to upload their raw DNA data and search across matches instead of being confined to one company’s database. Most participants described themselves as Australian, White Australian, Anglo Australian or English-speaking Australian and eight participants noted their British, Western European, Eastern European or Southeast Asian or Aboriginal ancestry. Participants were between 30 and 70 years old and two-thirds were female. Six participants were family history enthusiasts, four were sperm or embryo donors, two were recipient parents in donor conception, eight were donor-conceived, five were adoptees and some participants were affected by multiple issues. The diversity within the sample permitted conceptualisation of DNA platforms across a range of family contexts.

Analysis was informed by interpretive traditions in sociology and followed Braun and Clarke’s (2021) approach to reflexive thematic analysis. For this article, a targeted pass of the data was conducted focusing on the concept of family display through which we discerned different motivations for using DNA platforms, with associated intensities of display, including instances where familial legitimacy required activation (Finch, 2007).

Below, excerpts are labelled with a pseudonym, identity category and age range and analysis is organised into three sections: how participants appropriated platform affordances to curate digital displays of family, how the platform enabled participants to foreground a temporal notion of familial continuity and how the focus on genetic relationships on the platform reconfigured existing family understandings.

Developing a digital display of family

The first theme derived from our analysis relates to how participants used the affordances of DNA platforms to create digital displays of family. These affordances included the ability to match with living relatives, to curate origin stories (as with Strand and Källén’s, 2021 research on Viking DNA) and to have ethnicity verified by genetic percentages. Digital displays were automatically shaped by the platform affordances, yet users also actively determined how to integrate information and worked to curate their DNA profiles. Profiles were developed for themselves and for an audience or multiple audiences and the family story was in flux, becoming more legible over time as more matches were displayed (Finch, 2007: 72).

The diversity of reasons behind DNA testing was succinctly captured by one participant, Ally:

It’s a massive hobby worldwide. . .People are really interested in knowing their genetic heritage, so people have done so much work building their paper family trees and now we’re using DNA testing. Some people love it as a hobby and just like to unearth little family mysteries and confirm where they’ve come from, whereas people like me are obviously looking for answers to big mysteries and questions. (Ally, donor-conceived, 40s).

Users’ motivations to access displays of family varied according to their biographical information, identities and interests, for example as genealogy enthusiasts or as someone affected by donor conception or adoption. Here we see how DNA platforms are used to verify suspicions or confirm paper records and research; DNA testing promises to offer solid proof and demystify heritage. This is an example of what Nordqvist calls ‘genetic thinking’ where DNA makes family connections feel meaningful and strong (2017).

For others, the platforms’ affordance to trace an origin story held more value. Some participants perceived genealogy to hold particular allure for populations like White Australians or North Americans, as citizens of settler colonies with an unclear or troubling ‘back story’ (see also Basu, 2007). As Emily noted:

Europeans in general are not particularly interested in doing family history stuff. Not like Australians. Australians are mad for it because in general we come from elsewhere. You know, we want to know what our back story is. (Emily, hobby genealogist, 60s).

While ethnicity estimates are a key selling point, participants remained on the DNA platform for other reasons (see also Strand and Kallen, 2021). Regular engagement was often driven by the promise of new connections with ‘living relatives’ and/or the possibility of unearthing ‘missing’ family history records:

[DNA testing] told me my percentage of all the different ethnicities, but it didn’t tell me the actual story. When you do the actual research, you can find out like, more personal things [about ancestry]. . . the hospitals where they were born, how they died, newspaper articles. Whereas the DNA is just kind of percentages. (Rebecca, donor, 40s).

Here, ‘the percentages’ are contrasted with the ‘actual story’ and ‘actual research’, where the active process of carefully and critically assembling information to inform a more well-rounded family history was required. Participants made use of key affordances of the DNA platforms, alongside practices of curating a family tree from historical databases to verify the stories with DNA evidence. Blending these features, users displayed family as simultaneously history and genes, lived experience and biology, stories and evidence.

The algorithmic sorting which compared users’ genetic data for DNA matching often ‘only’ revealed participants’ distant relatives:

I did the test, sent it off, did the wait, got it, and there was only like second and third cousins. (Kay, donor-conceived, 32.)

Participants were hoping to confirm their genetic histories through DNA testing (although disruption occurred too). This waiting process felt more hopeful as the platform grew over the months and years as more users joined. Thus, the stickiness of the platforms lay in the promise of new information and matches – new algorithmic intimacies – always emerging as new people submitted their DNA (see Elliott, 2022):

I am hoping for more matches, and I think there will be more, because more and more people are taking DNA tests now. (Linda, hobby genealogist, 70s).

Linda was one of several participants who was pursuing ‘matches’ with specific relatives (a larger audience for her DNA display) to find out more information about her cultural background. Linda described conducting genealogical research in New Zealand to confirm suspected Māori heritage:

I got the results back and it said Australian Aboriginal, so it made me shift to a more productive area of research. . . I haven’t actually been able to match anything with the Aboriginal side at all, only very small matches – you know, like 6 or 7 centimorgans, nothing more than that. So, I haven’t achieved anything with the DNA on the Aboriginal side at all. (Linda, hobby genealogist, 70s)

Linda’s gesturing to ‘productivity’ and ‘achievement’ evoke a clear sense of working towards a particular goal or result, highlighting how participants viewed the process of assembling their digital displays as labour. Yet what exactly Linda hoped to ‘achieve’ through this genealogical work remained somewhat unclear, as did her expectations about the kind of timeframes required and kinds of relationships that may emerge.

Like Linda, Brad conveyed disappointment associated with unclear ‘proof’ of his Aboriginal ancestry:

I tried to get proof. . . but as yet it hasn’t been really forthcoming. . . Oh look, you might have a feeling. But the proof is the test, isn’t it? You know, you might have that feeling within yourself that you are [Aboriginal] but, being Tasmanian, you need proof there to actually be recognised. (Brad, hobby genealogist, 60s).

Brad actively worked to secure a legible digital display of Aboriginality by searching for evidence via Aboriginal connections, and in this sense, the display was both to believe his ‘feelings within himself’, and as proof for institutions to be legally recognised as Aboriginal. The platform’s capacity to knit people into existing genetic webs, and for these to provide proof of identity, was a valued affordance, for both personal and social reasons. As research has noted the ethnising and racialising aspects of the platforms can be problematic however they remain influential in defining how many users identify (James and Bonam, 2022; Kampourakis and Fux, 2025).

Participants were also motivated by matching with living relatives. Knowing she was conceived via a sperm donor, Anna was searching for information about her paternal family:

They’ll [the DNA platform will] send me an email being like, ‘oh, you’ve got a new match’ and then I’ll get really excited and log on and it’ll be on my mum’s side. [Anna laughs]. That’s all known. I’m not that interested in looking into the long family history. . . (Anna, donor-conceived, 30s)

For Anna, her ‘mum’s side’ and its ‘long family history’ was deemed uninteresting, as her genetic kin from this line were already known (or knowable). Rather, she sought matches with her donor and donor siblings. Likewise, participants who had been sperm donors discussed how they used DNA platforms because they suspected their donor-conceived offspring, may be searching for them or might incidentally discover they were donor-conceived via the DNA platform (Newton et al., 2023). John (a former sperm donor) explained how he deliberately a put himself on display for his offspring to match with him:

I wanted to make myself available to any of the DC [donor-conceived] children who wanted to find me. . . as proactively as I could, make myself findable. (John, donor, 60s).

Here, we also begin to see specific temporal logics emerge which shape John’s motivation to make himself ‘findable’ – as his donor offspring grow up, they may seek information about their paternal family history. Thus, the digital platform is both past- and future-oriented, offering a range of ways to display the self temporally, as we explore further in the following theme.

Curating family temporally

The second theme encompassed temporal displays of family; specifically, how participants curated intergenerational histories through the platform. A key affordance of the DNA platform was search and display of deep roots, families that felt continuous across time, in keeping with the ‘certainty’ offered by the DNA evidence itself. Platform users described the work that went into creating and maintaining family displays as evidence of the family’s duration. The display’s audience is imagined to be a family that stretches into the future, as well as a potentially wider audience that sees the struggles of ancestors as historically significant.

Some participants adopted a role within their families as the searcher, keeper and/or distributor of family history as gleaned through the DNA platform for a living and known family audience. Participants described a firm sense of responsibility tied to this role, often reflective of their positioning within their family, as the only child or as a childless person, echoing Finch’s argument that the intensity of display often matters more in families in which links feel more tenuous or less anchored in well-worn social scripts. This was the case for Zoya whose family fled their home country within the former Eastern Bloc when she was a young child:

I’m the eldest and I’m probably the holder of the family history. So, I’m the one that remembers the village we came from, and I’ve been back a few times and that is the reason why I am involved in DNA. . . I manage 40 DNA kits. (Zoya, hobby genealogist, 60s).

As the eldest sibling with the clearest memories of her family’s village, Zoya described a clear identity and corresponding responsibility as the custodian of her family’s history. Beyond her own DNA testing and overseeing 40 other DNA profiles, Zoya was also driven to document history:

I have also transcribed all the records that are surviving from 1795 to 1820. I am mapping the entire village. . . I have no academic background, no research background, so this is just my methodology. . . What I discovered was [that] there were very few people of my generation who knew any oral history, so I had to talk to the older people to try and find somebody that knew something, very little is written down. (Zoya, hobby genealogist, 60s).

Zoya actively propagates her ancestors’ and community’s history through preserving oral histories and historical records. We see, then, how individuals gather contemporary and historical information from across generations to display on the DNA platform, creating a family and cultural archive that lends a temporal continuity despite disruption via dislocation.

Danielle engaged in similar genealogical work:

I have equated it to gold mining. . . finding this rare little nugget that’s been sitting there and waiting, it could be hundreds of years with no one noticing and finally finding it and opening up little doors that have been closed for a long time and keeping names alive. I don’t have children, so I thought it was my way of keeping the family tree alive, too (Danielle, hobby genealogist, 40s).

Danielle was childless and thus felt an increased responsibility to investigate and document her family’s lineage for decedents. Her reflection also disrupts the temporality of how one creates and continues family legacies. It is not only the creation of new generations that keeps the family going, but the discovery of the family’s past: the unearthing of ‘gold’ and the opening of ‘closed doors’ generates evidence of enduring family in the present.

Others reflected on the future of their DNA profile, beyond their lifetime, and the role of the DNA platform as a place to create but also bequeath family displays like heirlooms. Indeed, users’ desires to leave their account as a family legacy has been coopted by platforms as a formal affordance. For example, like other platforms, Ancestry.com offers the service of ‘passing on’ a ‘legacy account’. Ally desribed the future of her profile as follows:

My children will likely take over my Ancestry account and my donor’s Ancestry account and manage them and still have more people [close relatives] pop up long after I’m gone. It’s disappointing that we don’t know how many or for how long, it is the permanent unknown (Ally, donor-conceived, 40s).

Ally described how her account was not for her children per se, rather her children would inherit the roles and responsibilities of the digital display once she had died, highlighting her discomfort about passing on the uncertainty of her donor conception. Ally foregrounded the liveliness of the DNA platform as a display that would continue to grow and change. The platforms’ future orientation and openness allowed for hope that family mysteries could still be solved as the family, and the display, continue. As a form of ‘platformised relationality’ the DNA platform became the one hope for finding relations that could not be confirmed otherwise (Erstad et al., 2024: 166).

Participants were aware of media coverage about data breaches and how data may be used by law enforcement and insurers, yet most participants predicted that DNA platforms would continue to grow, imagined the platforms existing for the rest of their lives and felt that being on the DNA platform was worthwhile:

The are people who quite passionately say it [DNA testing in donor conception] is wrong. . . You haven’t got a snowflakes chance in hell of stopping it happening. It’s just taken off and it’s not gonna stop. (John, donor, 60s).

Participants valued that via the platforms they could position themselves as historians who through their genealogical work were able to fix the family within a social timeline, sealing a wider significance and extending the audience for family display. Genealogy was viewed as a form of social history or even women’s history:

To me, social history is women’s history. Because it’s not history, ‘his-story’. It’s her-story to me, because social history is the story of households and families and social obligation, and all of those things. (Emily, hobby genealogist, 61).

By learning about ancestry, participants were also learning about broader social and cultural patterns, as well as their evolution – a form of history markedly different from the dominant male-dominated public history. As Peters and Gorissen (2023) argue, many individuals and communities negotiate the meanings of this technoscience in nuanced ways, resulting in various claims to, or rejection of, identification. The DNA platform becomes a space to re-compose gendered and familial stories in a way that is temporally mutable and multidirectional.

Foregrounding genetic relationships

The final theme concerns how DNA testing introduced nuances to how participants described family relationships as genetic compared to social. The novel genetic information provided by DNA testing could challenge or strengthen pre-existing ideas of family relationships and relatedness. Genetic familial relationships could be legitimised, prioritised, downplayed or hidden (through the hiding matches affordance) on the DNA display.

DNA platforms were used in ways not initially afforded, as participants often deliberately searched for living relatives and the ways in which the platforms facilitated family connections also changed over time (see also Conrick et al., 2025). This process was perhaps most pronounced for donor-conceived participants, who discovered the existence and/or identity of close relatives (i.e. a biological parent or half-siblings) via DNA testing:

It was really healing and helped me build up my identity because through the process of reaching out to DNA relatives and building trees, I got a really good understanding of the path of that family, that side of me. . . Like yes, it helped me identify one sibling and the donor. . . but I think that whole process did wonders for my sense of self. Just going through that sort of created this really special bond with my biological father, because he’s interested in genealogy too. (Kay, donor-conceived, 32.)

Here, the platform is meaningful because users can not only seek and identify specific genetic relatives, but also ‘build trees’, learn about a new shared family history, share in a hobby of seeking knowledge and connection, and gain a stronger sense of self. Others’ sense of self was disrupted by insights from the platform. For example, some people discovered their donor-conceived status through DNA matches, such as John’s donor-conceived son:

He said ‘No, no, this is some sort of a scam here. No, I’ve just got to ignore this’. And he said he was quite rude to them. Sort of, ‘no, no, piss off’. And then when I [biological father] popped up, he was, ‘Actually no. OK, there is something here to be investigated’ . . .he said [to me] ‘I’m really puzzled by this match. Does it make sense to you?’ So, with my very low-key approach, I replied and said ‘yeah, it does make sense to me’ (John, donor, 60s).

Unlike Kay, John’s donor-conceived son did not approach DNA testing with an awareness of his donor-conceived status. Thus, despite differing motivations and intentions behind engaging with DNA technologies, the discovery of previously unknown genetic relationships was possible. Using the DNA platform is therefore not solely an exercise in documenting the lives of ancestors but in finding living connections and revising the family structure in real-time. While this may not have been an intended affordance of the DNA platforms, it is widely used in this way, after users discover living relatives either intentionally or by surprise (Stallard and de Groot, 2020: 275).

Many participants held a strong conviction that individuals have a right to family history. These values led some participants to engage in forms of historical sense-making or ‘paying-it-forward’ to other users, often strangers:

I am happy to help without ever asking for a single cent because I believe that each individual is entitled to that information and I don’t have a right to make money from that. (Zoya, hobby genealogist, 60s).

Yet not everybody on the DNA platform logged on regularly or shared knowledge freely, reflecting varying investment in family history among users. Brad had difficulty communicating with his closest genetic match who he perceived as a critical figure for resolving his case and expressed frustration at this relative’s recalcitrance to share information Brad perceived as belonging to the family:

Whether they don’t want to pass on any information, that is their prerogative. . . Yeah, it is disappointing at times, but you know, it’s just something that goes along with genealogy. . . Personally, I think it [genealogical information] belongs to the family more broadly. (Brad, hobby genealogist, 60s).

Zoya and Brad’s experiences illustrate the collaborative nature of genealogical research on DNA platforms: while Zoya had volunteered her time and knowledge to others, Brad’s practice had been hindered by unwilling matches.

DNA testing often unearthed suppressed or taboo topics within families, including affairs, illegitimacy, unexpected parentage, convict backgrounds and unknown or complex ethnic identities. These issues often prompted questions regarding changing social values and historical meanings of such family secrets and individuals’ own role as custodians of such knowledge. Within the Australian context of this sample, this often manifested in relation to convict and Settler backgrounds. Paul’s donor-conceived daughter had grown up with non-British parents and through learning about his biological parentage, she came to an uncomfortable realisation that she held British heritage:

In her mind the Anglo-Saxon part of Australia was very much the colonisers and the oppressors and had done all these bad things, and then suddenly she finds out that half of her ancestry is that. . . she’s had to sort of deal with that a little bit. (Paul, donor, 62).

Paul’s new daughter was suddenly required to position herself within a coloniser identity that she had previously thought herself apart from. Relatedly, Emily described the roadblocks she had faced in connecting with German relatives, where DNA testing was viewed trepidatiously and used less:

They [German people] have this horror of ‘I don’t wanna find out that I’m related to Nazis’…. we’re not really responsible for what our ancestors did. We need to learn the lessons from what they did if it was bad and when you know better, you do better (Emily, genealogist, 60s).

According to Emily, individuals should confront their own cultural and social history through DNA testing and genetic displays served to guide contemporary moral standards. Yet the accommodation of new genetic information could be confronting and culturally charged, throwing users into rethinking their inheritance and identification in relation to historical wrongdoing and to display changes in moral identity over time. This fits with Jacqui Gabb’s (2011: 38) extension of Finch’s concept, in her suggestion that families are also constituted by what is kept off-display.

Akin to what was off-display, there was incompleteness and limitations to the DNA platform. One could not capture nongenetic family members in displays:

I talk to him all the time, but we’re not blood related. And so I can’t put them on my tree even though I call him my cousin, even though we’re connected. (Danielle, hobby genealogist, 40s).

Danielle described how you could be ‘connected’ with someone as family, yet the DNA platform made visible and privileged genetic relationships alone. In this way, DNA platforms contribute to ‘genetic thinking’ by reifying certain kinds of familial connections.

Conclusion

In this article we have explored family display on social media platforms by analysing users’ accounts of how and why they use DNA platforms to forge genetic ancestral and living relationships. Building on existing empirical scholarship on amateur family history and DNA testing (Mitchell and Kim, 2024), this is the first study to conceptualise how the affordances of DNA platforms enable a range of novel family practices. We have demonstrated how Finch’s concept of display (2007) illuminates how people make visible and ‘do family’ on DNA platforms for themselves, for existing family and descendants, for unknown others (for example, unknown offspring who may be searching for them) or even for institutions (for example, ‘proof’ of Aboriginality for institutional recognition). Beyond specific audiences, participants also had broader social imaginaries and motivations for cultivating DNA displays underpinned by communal and political values, for example participants sought to accurately document ‘her-story’ or help others trace information based on a conviction regarding the right to know one’s identity. Finch (2007) emphasises that all families engage in display, a phenomenon that has been shown in previous studies of visual platforms (Barnwell et al., 2023; Cabalquinto, 2020; Share et al., 2018). However, here we highlight how the intensity of display deepens in contexts where familial relation cannot be taken for granted, deviate from established social scripts, are disrupted or are not yet confirmed. In these cases, it becomes important to explicitly represent genetic relationships in displays.

Our analysis revealed how engagement with DNA platforms serves as evidence to legitimise relation, highlighting the power of ‘genetic thinking’, that is, how ‘genetic connections are rendered meaningful and so become meaningful’ (Nordqvist, 2017: 878). We have shown how in the context of DNA platforms ‘genetic thinking’ encompasses a range of practices – from affirming a sense of self by visualising one’s position within a familial network, orienting oneself within a broader social and cultural histories, sharing the hobby with others, creating a legacy, contributing to the documentation and digitalisation of family and much more. DNA platforms are therefore highly valuable for users seeking to intensify display as affordances allow users to actively seek, establish and document genetic matches, situate new genetic data within more established forms of genealogical mapping, such as collating – and opting to make public – family trees and documents.

We argue that DNA platforms are social media platforms that warrant attention and analysis by media and communications researchers. Our analysis begins to fill a critical gap in media studies literature regarding how individuals construct, represent and manage relationships and identities through the affordances of DNA platforms. Our findings reveal the range of affordances that draw people to DNA platforms to display their families’ ‘bio-digital identity’ (Peters and Gorissen, 2023) as part of what Stallard and de Groot (2020) have titled ‘the new family history’. This article bridges work in media studies and sociology, mapping the nuanced ways that affordances are perceived and appropriated by users practicing family display. We demonstrate that what is unique about the use of these platforms and their promise of an ever-evolving geneticised identity. As such, our findings contribute to burgeoning work on the ‘digitalisation of family’ (Qian and Hu, 2024) and ‘platformisation of relationality’ (Erstad et al., 2024) by elucidating how digital platforms amplify connections between family members, in this case by reinforcing genetic relatedness.

DNA platforms market themselves as avenues to ‘discover your full story’, ‘unlock each part of your genetic ancestry’, ‘uncover your heritage’ and ‘make new family connections’. Our findings underscore how users of DNA platforms have varied aims (some aligning, others diverging from the marketing): to match with living relatives; to curate stories of origin; to demystify family folklore; to verify ethnicity or parentage; to reunify a dislocated family; or to face difficult genetic connections. Although it is clear (particularly to media and communication studies researchers) that private platforms can be extremely fragile, participants in this study predicted the platforms would continue to grow and felt the personal benefits they gained from the platform outweighed the risks in terms of data security and privacy. We found that participants were particularly drawn to the promise of an ever-changing database and the hope for new matches in the future, even if the platform had not yet confirmed or denied the connections sought. Yet achieving the promises of the platforms of family display often required significant digital and emotional labour, uncertainty and waiting, and genetic profiles often remained incomplete. Platforms capitalised on this ‘openness’ with consistent and emerging features such as ‘new match notifications’ and ‘legacy accounts’, making the platform sticky and worthy of a continued subscription or regular logins. Indeed, several participants spoke of the hope of new information and the intention to pass their search and account onto the next generation. The platform therefore afforded the ‘certainty’ of genetic evidence, yet the ‘openness’ of a shifting database, with users seemingly not too worried about how the latter challenges the legitimacy of the former. In this way, the platform offered the possibility to display known and possible stories at once. As such, the DNA platform (its corporate heads, shareholders, designers, etc.) is an active mediator for (re)making family and shifts in/to the platform (pricing, access, affordances, labels and language, visualisations, etc.) can have material consequences for the lives of its users. Future research should continue to consider the distinctions between how DNA platforms represent their purpose and potential and how users’ appropriate and experience the platforms.

Our work aligns with Qian and Hu’s (2024: 1160) argument that digital spaces have the potential to reconfigure ‘temporal–spatial modalities’; digital displays on DNA platforms reordered temporal logics of family. Our findings highlight how users were drawn to the DNA platforms’ multiple affordances for temporal storytelling, even when this brought emotional and relational challenges. Users could identify and document deep ancestries using the record databases and family tree tools while also connecting with living relatives, who, in turn, could become both co-authors and audiences for displays. These dual functions were particularly valuable for creating intensity of display for users who were part of diasporas or were seeking to confirm their ethnicity or parentage. For these participants, the ‘living’ aspect of the platform was more prominent, as users worked with and against changing platform affordances to access information that was either gate-kept by living family, record-holding bodies or by genetic matches on the platform itself. DNA platforms allow such participants to display a multidirectional temporal story that is unfolding in past, present and into the future. Family trees are updated to document a historical lineage, unearthing ancestral histories and the family story remains radically open to future changes and the restructuring of the living family over time as new genetic matches are found, relationships forged and information shared. While for users that were met with roadblocks, gate-keeping or limited matches DNA platforms could be frustrating yet the power of ‘genetic thinking’ remained strong: with faith and patience an ever-present ‘proof’ would be revealed.

Our study has a number of strengths and some limitations. Whereas other studies of family display on digital platforms have focused on analyses of content on platforms, our study focused on users’ lived experience. Participants were recruited via a number of channels and were likely highly motivated users of DNA platforms. Although the study focused on Australian users’ experiences, insights are likely relevant to other settler colonial contexts. Participants were not asked their educational background, income/class or profession which could illuminate insights and future studies could elicit this demographic information.

The direct-to-consumer DNA platform is a form of social media, a site of family display and a vehicle for genetic thinking. DNA platforms have thus far been a blind-spot in digital media research, despite rapid growth and engagement by millions of users. Attention to the practices and displays on these platforms generates knowledge about how users combine ideas of genetics and cultural history to create geneticised identities that can refigure how we do family in the digital, genetic age.