You've seen it implicate bad guys on crime dramas like CSI, but now there's a growing trend of using your DNA to get a better idea of who you are and where you're from.

There are at least a dozen websites out there now, like GeneTree.com or Ancestry.com, which both just launched services that, for just under $200, let you send in cotton swabs of your saliva in an effort to help reveal some branches on your family tree.

“The first thing you're going to learn is your deep ancestry. You're going to get a sense of roughly when and where your branch of the world’s family tree migrated out of Africa. But then it becomes a matchmaking game. You get a list of anybody who's got your same genetic signature. So what you want to do is become research buddies with anyone who matches you and if you're really lucky, you'll end up matching somebody who's done a lot more homework than you have,” Megan Smolenyak of Ancestry.com said.

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	Ancestry industry A group of researchers say DNA testing won't reveal your family tree.

But in response to this explosion of new services that offer DNA testing for genealogy, a group of a little more than a dozen researchers from universities across the nation wrote an essay urging the scientific community to essentially warn the public that a quick and simple DNA test won't necessarily offer a quick and simple and definitive answer to all your questions.

Among those researchers was NYU sociologist Ann Morning.

“Either they're tests which are pretty limited in that they can only tell you about one line of your family, so that's like looking at just one branch of your family tree when in fact you've got a gazillion branches. And then tests which do try to give you a more overall picture of your entire family tree they have to do that making a lot of assumptions – assumptions about how we can link your DNA to populations in different parts of the world. So there's a lot of conjecture that goes into making these decisions," Morning said.

But that doesn’t mean the commercial tests are all bunk.

“Genetic genealogy doesn't do away with conventional genealogy and nobody would want it to, because the thrill of the hunt is half the fun, but the two play really well together,” Smolenyak said.

The other big concern with submitting your DNA is privacy – what’s being done with that information. Every service insists it has its own set of safeguards to make sure your results are used just for genealogy purposes.

If you do find a genetic match out there, or someone finds you, typically no names are given out. Instead, contact is usually initiated anonymously through the service.