I was certainly afflicted with the narcissism of self-testing, eager for data about me me me that would separate my indubitably unique DNA from that of the hoi polloi. Was it too harsh to presume that DNA-based ancestry testing was an exercise in self-involvement? Sure, some people (like my enlightened professor friend Maya) were taking the test to see how interconnected we were as a species, scientific affirmation of the hidden bonds that linked us to one another. And yet in less charitable hours, I contemplated that the makers of these tests were capitalizing on an illness that was increasingly symptomatic of this modern age—something that was precisely the opposite of Maya’s lofty quest: the quest to turn inward rather than outward; to look for differences between us rather than similarities. To find, ultimately and irrefutably, the thing that separated you from the rest of humanity, as if you could somehow exempt yourself from its degradations and humiliations. This had long been an existential quest; now we simply had technology to abet our search.

All of the tests I purchased cost between one hundred and three hundred dollars per kit. If you limited your testing to one person and one test, you might be able to call it a deal: a cool Benjamin to find out you were secretly Italian? You couldn’t afford not to! But once you were hooked on the addictive practice of ancestry testing, chances were that you’d probably want to get your mother and father involved—just, you know, to get a little more information. And if that information was weird or juicy or in some way controversial, you’d probably buy a few more tests for your uncle in Chiang Mai, Thailand, or your cousin in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

One hundred dollars became five hundred dollars; three hundred dollars became fifteen hundred dollars. People were giving the DNA kits out as Christmas presents, birthday presents, anniversary gifts. It seemed odd (to me, at least) that Santa Claus would leave the truth about one’s ancestral heritage under the Christmas tree, or that an unwitting husband might prove his wife’s false paternity as a ten-year anniversary gift, but the more I talked to friends and family about what I was doing, the keener their interest. It was like having a fairly accurate Ouija board: Everyone wanted to play. By the end of this project, I’d easily spent well over two thousand dollars on an array of DNA-based ancestry kits, most for this project, some handed out as gifts. This was a lucrative game, all the more impressive since most consumers were usually entirely in the dark about the actual technology they were purchasing. Mostly they took the test and waited, hoping for news that would scientifically affirm—or transform—who they were and where they came from.

Each service’s full-color website garlands the kits with amazing science talk, and a heady rush attends the arrival of these futuristic-seeming gizmos. Some of the kits rely on spit samples for the needed genetic material, saliva that’s collected using a small vial with a spit guard. This is awkward. Other tests use the DNA from a cheek swab, which is administered via a small, doll-sized toothbrush. Both devices are unlike anything you might ever normally come across, and because of this, everything feels very Gattaca.

I started out by testing myself. After all, my DNA would have genetic information about both Henry Wagner and U Myint Kaung, whereas my parents’ would show only discreet European or Asian bloodlines (or so I imagined). Still, it would be necessary to test them, too: to obtain the fullest picture of our family lineage, you wanted the biggest data set. The more people tested, the better the picture. And the older they are, the farther back the genetic information.

Over the course of two afternoons, I swabbed my cheeks with the Thumbelina-sized toothbrush for the good men and women at Family Tree DNA. This was not as easy as it would seem, mostly because you must wait one hour after you eat or drink anything, and I am apparently a very thirsty and hungry person who consumes something liquid or solid approximately every forty-seven minutes. In the end, I had to set a timer to remind myself not to put food or drink in my mouth.

Once that was complete, I dropped the swabbed toothbrush head into a small vial of preserving liquid, registered my kit online, and packed the sample away in a padded envelope destined for the Lone Star State, where it would be analyzed in what I could only imagine was a gleaming lab populated by white-coated genius geneticists.

A few words about enlisting my parents in the project: It had been some time since I asked them for anything substantive, and certainly anything vaguely complicated or complicating. Even as a child, I’d never asked for much, and as far as I can recall, they weren’t particularly hands-on as it concerned my upbringing. (Note: This isn’t just a retrospective, therapy-induced accusation.) My mother bragged that she had never had to wake me up for class or bother me about schoolwork (although this became a source of mild shame when she found herself in a circle of kvetching peers), and my father was often gone for work, a phantom who came home late and yelled on the phone about polling data in southwestern Ohio. They roused themselves briefly to object to my choice of college, but then lapsed back into whatever the opposite of helicopter parenting is.

I was on my own when it came to my professional life—only after I’d accepted a job offer did my parents find out I was even interested in the particular field. (“You’re covering the White House now?” they’d say, in delighted surprise. “You’re going to be hosting a TV show? That’s great!” as if I were telling them that I had planned a vacation to Belize or had finally started meditating.) I had certainly never made any work-related requests of them.

In fact, the requests I made these days tended toward asking them to take better care of themselves—to go see the cardiologist (my mother) or the physician (my father)—or the occasional fact check on a detail as it concerned the family recipe for chicken with tangerine peels (Mom) or the 1972 Iowa caucus (Dad). Inviting them to take part in anything more high-stakes and unusual was like offering a hot-air balloon ride to a cat: The prospect was both mystifying and fearsome, and I hoped it wouldn’t end in disaster.

My mother was, as she is wont to be, slightly baffled by the whole process—she typically avoided anything smacking of the Internet or unfamiliar scientific processes. But she was game. She approached my grandmother about donating some of her saliva for a 23andMe test, and reported back that our favorite nonagenarian was “very enthused!”

“I thought she would say, ‘Oh what a bother,’ ” my mother recalled. “She hates things she’s not expecting. But I explained that we were going to analyze her spit for genetic material and it would tell us what her heritage was.”

My grandmother was nothing if not extremely interested in herself and so dutifully sat on the couch to expectorate her sample.

“She didn’t have much saliva!” said my mother, by way of a warning. (It was enough.)

As it concerned my father, I think he was somewhat skeptical about why he was being asked to do this. He’d given me a thorough catalogue of his childhood memories and knew that I’d spoken to his sisters and my cousins to fill in the missing pieces. He knew I’d gone as far as his grandfather’s birthplace of Esch-sur-Alzette, and he was likely annoyed (or hurt) that I hadn’t asked him to come with me, though as far as I was concerned, a father-daughter excursion was never in the cards. I’d had limited time and wanted to get the work done—not to get caught up in what I knew would be multiple meandering and possibly totally inconclusive reminiscences about our past. Not to mention, my father had an annoying habit of adopting (his version of) the local accent, in a pathetic and ill-advised bid to “fit in.” Once, when we were in Paris, someone actually answered his French-accented English in actual French—and then he was really up shit’s proverbial creek.

Perhaps it was my own paranoid projection, but I worried that he could smell the bouquet of Mogen David wine in the air, and knew that I might be searching for some sort of illicit truth about our family, rather than chronicling our extraordinary story of triumph and faith.

“I’m so interested in what we’ll find!” he emailed me, unconvincingly, upon receipt of the zippy multicolored 23andMe test kit. “When will we get results?”

I surreptitiously registered my email address for his results, in case the tests came back showing him to be indeed 24.7 percent Ashkenazi Jewish…or something otherwise significantly unexpected. As open-minded as I knew my father to be in his political leanings, the narrative about where he’d come from—and the ethnic traditions he’d inherited—were central to his concept of self, and he was increasingly reliant on this narrative as he got older. He felt kinship with all of Washington’s Irish Catholic pols—especially ones from the Midwest—a union that was sociocultural as much as professional.

Though I, too, was technically part of this stock, I was never a part of this circle, owing in large part to my age and gender and weirdly independent childhood; this conclave was the province of older, white men. He had regular beers and burgers with them, he made note of the ones who worshipped at Holy Trinity church in Georgetown, and he often shook their hands on Sunday after mass, before they launched into talk of Congress or the White House or whatever was animating the world of politics. To cancel (or threaten) this membership in this flock using genetic data that showed him to be of other blood would have created a schism that I was not at all excited to broker. If some anonymous geneticists in Silicon Valley determined an ethnicity counter to his expectations, I figured I’d need to walk him through the results…and then spend some time battling it out with him to convince him they were, in fact, accurate.

I felt a healthy amount of trepidation about all that was at stake, but, unsurprisingly, I decided to ignore it and instead went forward, hoping for the best—like a teenage homecoming queen descending to the basement in act two of a slasher flick.

Ever since the start of this harebrained odyssey, I had been looking for community. With scientific precision, DNA could ensure me of my place in a sprawling, continuing narrative; confirm my role in this cast of characters; and declare, finally, that I belonged somewhere, even if it wasn’t a country or a city on terra firma. The double helix might reveal that I had people in Indonesia, Iran, or Tibet; or maybe “home” was just Burma and Luxembourg and always had been. No matter the result, I would find myself in a long, unbreakable chain. I could know that I was not an astronaut without a base station: There was life in the universe. I longed to finally receive a message, like a static-riddled dispatch from Mission Control beamed across oceans of time and space: You Are Not Alone.