Who we are

It all began with a mistake at a lab and a Tennessee log cabin. The year was 2000, when Donald and Teresa Yates took their first DNA tests, and when Don’s came back saying “No Native American.”  The couple knew something was wrong, for both of them had Cherokee heritage. Painstakingly, they checked their results with three other labs and later concluded that Don’s sample must have been swapped. They ended up starting their own DNA testing service. They sold their log cabin on the Natchez Trace, gave up college teaching jobs and moved west, first to Santa Fe, then to Phoenix and finally to Colorado. Over the years in which the Yates’  little family company did battle against the “big box” giants, DNA Consultants emerged as an uncanny bellwether, its pledge always the same—to question conventional answers and treat everybody’s DNA with as much care and respect as the founders’ own ancestry.

Our specialty is forensic ancestry and genealogy, with a unique committment to American Indian, Jewish and ancient DNA research.

Our autosomal products like the Native DNA Fingerprint Plus are available nowhere else. We were the developer of Rare Genes from History and the Basic Haplotype Test, both based on our own population database, atDNA.