Whether movies like The Arrival (2016) or Sixth Sense (1999), or photos of crop circles, or mysterious messages in bottles, we simply love the idea of receiving signs from somewhere beyond our imagination.

Perhaps it’s one reason that the internet draws us in so easily. The idea of receiving messages and photos from long-distance friends, business associates from other countries, or unknown relatives intrigues us.

One of our new fascinations? Ancestry.com. Here is a place where you not only can find your distant descendants, as well as their letters, their birth and death certificates, and news and correspondence, but you can now even genetically determine your root ancestry according to mitochondrial DNA, revealing a deeply coded message about who you are in relationship to everyone els…