Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Salagasa.

Coming up, who do you think you are and who do you think I am?

Genetic genealogy companies promised to give us answers.

If you knew that your great-grandfather built an empire or that your great-grandmother fought one.

If you knew they stayed strong in a time of pain or wild in the face of the law.

But just how accurate are the results of these companies?

And what exactly happens to the data we entrust to them,

some of which is already being used to help solve crimes in the US.

That's all coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC.

It was perhaps always inevitable that in our age of identity politics, we appear to be more obsessed than ever in finding out who we are and who our ancestors are.

According to the MIT Technology Review, by the start of this year, more than 26 million consumers had added their DNA to four leading commercial ancestry and health databases.

Companies like 23 and me, ancestry and family tree ancestry and health databases. Companies like 23 and Me, Ancestry and Family Tree DNA and My Heritage.

Their DNA home testing kits were one of the top stocking fillers last Christmas,

and MIT expects more than 100 million people will get their DNA tested within the next two years.

Among those who've already done it is an American called Bill Wires.

We sent our reporter Anna Nariskovich to meet Bill and his wife Ilva at their home in Berlin in Germany.

My sister got me interested in DNA testing

because I'm kind of interested in researching family tree and so on.

Being an American, you have all these European roots.

I just do it as a hobby.

Many people do crossword puzzles and so on,

but I think it's just a way for me to investigate history. Every family, if you go back

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