Oh yeah, that's the way it happens all right. Of course, the gnomes' first responsibility is to work in their owners' gardens, look cute, maintain ambiance and charm, etc. But whenever there's a moment of free time, they go to work on "The Project," hammering out whichever genome they've been contracted for by the US Dept. of Energy. If you can get them to work on your mitochondrial DNA, they might tell you what tribe you're originally from. Or it could be bad news and you could discover that you're actually not a human at all but a magical being---gnome, elf, centaur, faun, dryad, nayad, or even a muse, even if only by distant relation.
