Bennett Greenspan

In 1999, Bennett Greenspan couldn't connect his paper trail to prove a genealogical theory so he contacted Dr. Michael Hammer, co-author of a paper on Cohanim genetics, and convinced him to perform a test on two men to see if they were related. The test succeeded, Greenspan saw the value of the process, and the field of genetic genealogy was born. In this talk, industry pioneer Greenspan relates the history of commercial DNA testing for genealogical research, which has evolved from simple Sanger sequencing of a few Y-DNA markers to high-throughput next-generation sequencing of Y and mtDNA, and the emergence of X-DNA and autosomal DNA as valuable tools in solving genealogical puzzles.