It’s absolutely an edge case, but there are still a lot of wonky family situations out there, people who are estranged from their family for any number of reasons, adoption, people raised by their grandparents under the impression that they were their parents to hide the fact that their sister is really their mom and they were hiding a teen pregnancy, your mom cheated and your dad isn’t actually your father, etc.

And sometimes that all stays under wraps until someone in the family takes a DNA test.

I have a friend with a big family who just recently discovered that most of her aunts and uncles aren’t actually her grandfather’s biological children. She and her siblings haven’t done a test themselves and her father’s dead so the jury is still out on whether she’s blood related to him or not.

But if she’s not, and she finds out who her actual biological grandfather is, it’s not impossible that that may open up a new pathway to citizenship through him.

And laws change, as a hypothetical, let’s say Poland starts getting antsy (well, antsyer) about Russia doing Russia stuff and really wants more people to feed the war machine in case of WWII breaking out, they already have a citizenship by descent option but the proper documentation to qualify can be tricky, but if they decide they really want to increase immigration I don’t think it would be out of the question for them to open up a pathway for someone who can show a DNA test with X% polish ancestry. In that hypothetical it might be kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but maybe it would still be preferable to the situation in someone’s home country.

It’s just one more tool in the box that can open up new avenues for people to explore. It may not pan out for everyone or even most people who look into it, but in some small handful of cases it may save their lives.