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Aug 27, 2026 11:10am PT

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This AncestryDNA Labor Day Sale Helps You ‘Find Your Roots’ at Home for a Portion of the Price

By Anna Tingley

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Anna Tingley

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AncestryDNA is offering one of its steepest discounts of the year for Labor Day, giving amateur genealogists a cheaper way to uncover the kinds of family secrets that regularly leave celebrities stunned on PBS’ “Finding Your Roots.”

Through Sept. 8 at 10 a.m. ET, the genealogy company is taking up to 75% off its DNA offers, dropping the standard AncestryDNA kit from $99 to $34. The test provides an ancestral origins report spanning more than 3,600 geographic regions, plus connections to genetic relatives in Ancestry’s database.

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For just one dollar more, the AncestryDNA + World Explorer Membership package is $35, down from $100, and bundles the DNA kit with three months of Ancestry’s World Explorer plan for $1. The membership unlocks the company’s collection of more than 70 billion U.S. and international records, along with DNA-by-parent tools and more than 100 DNA Traits. The subscription automatically renews at $99.95 every three months unless canceled. An All Access bundle, which adds Newspapers.com, Fold3 military records and accounts for up to five people, is also discounted from $199 to $44 and renews for $149 every three months.

Ancestry has an especially close connection to the celebrity-genealogy boom: the company is a corporate sponsor of PBS’ “Finding Your Roots,” Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s long-running series that combines historical records with DNA analysis to reconstruct the family trees of actors, musicians, athletes and other notable guests. Ancestry has also turned the show into a major piece of its own entertainment marketing, hosting episode recaps and celebrity clips and encouraging viewers to use its DNA tests and record database to conduct a DIY version of the research seen on screen.

Season 12, which aired earlier this year, included everyone from America Ferrera and Darren Criss to Lizzo, Flea, Spike Lee, Kristin Chenoweth, Brittney Griner and Chris Paul. Among its stranger revelations: Hasan Minhaj discovered evidence suggesting his family may have descended from royalty in northern India, while Lizzy Caplan learned that an ancestor arrived in New York with just $3 and that branches of the family she had thought of as Russian were actually rooted in Poland.

The show has already lined up another star-heavy batch of genealogy guinea pigs. “Finding Your Roots” Season 13 is set to premiere Jan. 12, 2027, with guests including Bette Midler, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Rita Moreno, Noah Wyle, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Banks, Nikki Glaser, Mark Cuban and Melissa Etheridge.

That said, DNA companies have faced increasing scrutiny over what happens to genetic information once it enters a private database — an issue thrown into sharp relief by 23andMe’s bankruptcy in 2025. The company’s consumer-genetics assets, including its customer data, were ultimately acquired for $305 million by the nonprofit 23andMe Research Institute, formerly known as TTAM Research Institute and founded by 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki. The transaction followed a 2023 security breach that compromised information connected to millions of customers and sparked renewed debate around the protection of genetic data.

That turmoil arguably makes Ancestry’s current privacy structure a more reassuring proposition than 23andMe’s recent history, though no commercial DNA test is entirely without privacy considerations. Ancestry says it does not voluntarily give law enforcement access to customer data, requires valid legal process for government requests and prohibits law enforcement from using its service to investigate crimes or identify human remains. Users can also permanently delete their DNA results and separately request destruction of their physical biological sample. Genetic information is only included in research shared with outside partners when a user opts into Ancestry’s informed-consent program.

Ancestry’s combination of a massive historical-record library, genetic matching and explicit deletion and law-enforcement policies makes it particularly well suited to people interested primarily in genealogy rather than health-risk testing.

The AncestryDNA portion of the Labor Day sale runs through Sept. 8 at 10 a.m. ET.

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