By Kristen V. Brown
Curtis Rogers is used to helping people track down their relatives. The 79-year-old Florida grandfather of six founded a genealogy website that helps hobbyists like himself trace the branches on their family tree.
In the past few weeks, though, Rogers has been fielding inquiries from a different kind of user: the police.
Rogers runs GEDmatch, a free, open-source website that became headline fodder last month when it helped investigators find the suspected Golden State Killer, who terrorized California with a series of break-ins, rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s. GEDmatch lets users voluntarily share raw genetic data from DNA-testing companies such as 23andMe Inc., and try to find relatives who may have sent in samples from a different service, like AncestryDNA.
Nearly a million people have uploaded profiles to GEDmatch. Hoping for a lead in the Golden State Killer case, investigators used DNA data from one of the killer’s crime scenes to hunt the site for relatives who could lead them to a suspect.
When 72-year-old former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo was charged in the case after eluding authorities for four decades, and investigators said GEDmatch played a key role in finding him, Rogers was as surprised…
