Like many amateur genealogists, Ari Ehrlich started out just wanting to see if he was related to British royalty. You know, like Prince George and Princess Charlotte.
But last year’s gift of a subscription to Utah-based Ancestry.com ballooned a mild interest into a full-blown obsession (not a “mental disorder,” Ari insists, just an uncontrollable drive for discovery).
The site’s tools, data and DNA testing opened a door to bloodlines and human history, sucking the New York researcher into a vortex of marriage and death certificates, immigration papers, evolving surnames, mixed ethnicities and religious wars.
He began to pinpoint, for example, when Scottish-Irish freckles and ginger coloring made their way into an Ashkenazi Jewish gene pool.