This has little to do with Scotland, but the process is much the same. I saw a TV news special on the practice of American black families doing DNA tests to find connections to their African tribes. The people they interviewed had some interesting results. One woman found a large white family that she was closely related to and the two branches of the families have since had a few big reunions. But what was the most interesting was that they submitted the same subject's DNA to three different companies and got back three different results as far as tribal connections.

The reporter interviewed the owners of the three companies and found that to build their databases they went to Africa and paid people for DNA samples. In some cases they got exclusive agreements with whole tribes that they would not give samples to the other companies. This meant that even if a person was decended from a certain tribe they might not know it if that tribe had no samples on file with the company doing the test. The reporter asked why the companies did not share their databases for the good of the community and to help people reconnect with their ancestry and the answer from all three was that this was a business and not a charity project. They were in it to make money.

Now I do not begrudge anyone earning money from whatever legal business they choose, but after seeing that news show, I couldn't help but think of all the people who will never really get the answers they are looking for without submitting multiple samples and then interpreting the results. Even then the results might just be a starting point for more traditional research methods. If all the results pointed toward a certain region, it might just tell you what library to go looking for the answer in.