Abandoned as an infant in a Minneapolis laundry room almost 50 years ago, Liz Kellner used 23andMe to help <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-21929" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-200x200.jpg" alt="Liz Quote" width="200" height="200" />her piece together the story of her birth.
In the process, she was able to connect with a biological sister, Tammy, who like her had been abandoned as an infant; the sisters have pieced together their stories, connected with other siblings and even found their biological parents.


We first <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/putting-it-together/">wrote about Liz</a> two years ago, and a few days ago, ABC News covered Liz and Tammy’s story.
Their story was also recently covered by the <a href="http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_29002587/woman-left-baby-at-st-paul-hospital-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Pioneer Press</a>. You can check out the ABC News piece below.
&nbsp;
<iframe loading="lazy" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/thFNeUTh_iw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Sisters Connecting After 50 Years

When Kelle Scott connected with some distant cousins on 23andMe she didn’t realize
<div id="attachment_23409" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23409" class="size-medium wp-image-23409" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-300x169.jpg" alt="Pat Nosoko" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-880x495.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Pat Nosko</div>
she’d also stumbled on the perfect gift for her mom – family.


Kelle’s mom, Pat Nosko, was adopted, and never knew her biological parents. Kelle had originally used 23andMe just to find out a little bit about her family’s ancestral background, but what she found was a missing branch on her family tree.


“This was a most unanticipated result,” Kelle said.
Her mother, Pat, was adopted in 1950. She knew what her name had been at birth, Charlotte Farmer. She knew where and when she was born, but not much else. Although Pat wanted to know more, she said she never pursued a search in part because she didn’t want to hurt her adoptive parents.


“I was adopted by lovely people,” she said.


And Pat never felt like there was a hole in her life she needed to fill, so she left it alone for 65 years.


Then her daughter tested with 23andMe, connected with a third cousin named Jane, who’d began piecing together an extensive family tree. When she asked Kelle for information about her mom, Kelle told Jane her mom
<div id="attachment_23412" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23412" class="size-medium wp-image-23412" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2-300x169.jpg" alt="Pat, left, and her daughter Kelle." width="300" height="169" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2-880x495.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/pat-kelle-2.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Pat, left, and her daughter Kelle.</div>
was adopted and she didn’t know much of anything. She did, however, know her mother’s birth date, and the name she was born with, Charlotte Farmer.
That little bit of information was enough and one morning before dawn, Kelle got a message from Jane.


&#8220;I think I found your mother&#8217;s birth mom,&#8221; Jane said.


It turned out that Pat’s biological siblings – she had six – had posted on three adoption message boards saying that they were looking for a sister, adopted in 1950, named Charlotte Farmer.
Those messages were like “bread crumbs” giving their biological sister a way to find them, if she wanted.
For Kelle this was momentous news, but the messages were old.


“I needed to give this information to my mom, but I’d hoped that first I could find at least one living relative who was looking for her,” said Kelle.
So Kelle and Jane kept searching, trying to find a living family member for Pat.
She had a name of one of Pat&#8217;s sisters, Angel Fitzgerald.
Pat had no idea.
<iframe loading="lazy" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VnujfbhfVNA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>


“It was kind of amazing because I didn’t know any of this was going on,” said Pat.


Kelle found a few phone numbers for different women named &#8220;Angel Fitzgerald.&#8221; She didn&#8217;t know which one might be her mother&#8217;s sister. So she gave a few of the numbers to her mother.
One of the numbers she called, she asked for Angel Fitzgerald. When the woman said it was, Kelle asked her if she was the same Angel Fitzgerald looking for &#8220;Charlotte Farmer.&#8221; It was.
Pat was stunned.
“I was speechless,” she said. “It took me a little bit before I could speak.”


The sisters spoke for the first time ever, and Pat found all of her six siblings, their children, the aunt she’d been named for and the names of her mother and maternal grandparents.
Not long before Christmas, the sisters met for the first time in person.


“It&#8217;s the most amazingly beautiful gift I could have ever hoped to give my mother,” her daughter Kelle said.

A Most Amazing Gift

<div id="attachment_23295" style="width: 250px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23295" class="wp-image-23295 size-full" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/JohnBrian.jpg" alt="John&#038;Brian" width="240" height="294" />John, standing, with his sister Kathy and their half-brother Brian, who they found through 23andMe.</div>
Brothers from different mothers, John and Brian came together because of 23andMe.
For John, 68, finding a half-brother was the last thing he expected.
“I was shocked,” he said.
John used 23andMe because he’s interested in science. Since his days in high school biology class, John has always been curious about genetics. He wasn’t looking for family.
“Imagine my surprise when I found a half-brother,” he said.
Actually his results initially listed Brian as a predicted grandson – half siblings share about 20 percent of their DNA, the same percentage shared by a grandfather and grandson. There is also an 18-year difference in age between the two, so John had some tense moments trying to figure out his relationship with Brian.
But when Brian first contacted him by email, the message jarred loose a memory for John. He – and the rest of his immediate family – all knew that his Dad, who ran a photo studio in a coal-mining town in West Virginia, had had an affair with a woman who worked for him and that the woman got pregnant.
“We knew there was a child out there but that’s it,” said John, who eventually took over the family business.
<div id="attachment_23296" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23296" class="size-medium wp-image-23296" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Francis-John-Brians-Dad-225x300.jpg" alt="John and Brian's father." width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Francis-John-Brians-Dad-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Francis-John-Brians-Dad.jpg 240w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />John and Brian&#8217;s father.</div>
Brian knew none of this.
He actually had no information at all about his biological family apart from some basic non-identifying facts about his mother – her religion and age for example.
Brian, a 49 year-old CPA living in Florida, often wondered about where he came from, but when he tested with 23andMe back in 2014 it was just to get some very basic information about his ancestry. He didn’t expect to find family.
When Brian first got his results he looked through his DNA Relative matches and among the long list of distant cousins, he saw one very close match, a relative with whom he shared 20 percent of his DNA.
“That’s close,” Brian said.
He just didn’t know how close. Looking at a 23andMe video Brian figured out that he and his close match were likely half siblings. For someone who’d never knew any biological relatives, this was a big deal. So Brian sent a message to his match and waited.
When John looked through the message from Brian and some of the facts he provided, he quickly figured out that Brian was his half brother. They began exchanging messages.
“I was a little leery about how he’d handle it,” said Brian. “It had to be shocking for him.”
Brian’s sister, who is also an adoptee, encouraged him to go forward with meeting John and his wife Jennie along with John’s sister Kathy and her husband Paul.
Brian didn’t just worry about how his existence would impact John and his family; he was also concerned about whether he’d be accepted. John and his family are religious and relatively conservative. His wife has a doctorate in theology and is a Christian counselor.
Brian was raised in a not very religious Jewish household, and he’s gay. He didn’t know what to expect.
“Over the years I imagined many different scenarios, so I went in with my eyes wide open,” Brian said.
John and his family welcomed him with open arms.
&#8220;I could not have asked for a nicer experience,” said Brian. “They were cordial, polite and respectful.&#8221;
John felt the same.
“It meant a lot to meet him,” said John. “I’m extremely impressed with Brian, his maturity and intelligence. He’s a good caring person.”
John also offered something to Brian that was invaluable, a vast collection of photos and even film of their biological father. Their father had run a photo studio business and was always taking pictures and filming.
Brian got to see his biological father at all these different stages of his life and even see how he moved, his mannerism and how he talked.
“It was more than I could have asked for,” Brian said.
Sharing that gave John his own sense of joy, he said.
Their father had a lot of flaws, John said, but everyone liked him. He had a big personality and John tried to share some of that with Brian.
“It meant a lot to me because it meant a lot to Brian,” John said.

Eyes Wide Open

Of course he knew he was adopted but that only made Tony Mercer wonder more <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-23002" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-300x300.jpg" alt="Tony Mercer Quote" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-Mercer-Quote.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />about what made him so tall, what made his thumbs so stubby, and where he got his passion for playing the piano.
“My adoptive family was very caring and supportive as I was growing up, but I never felt completely …integrated,” said Tony, a professional pianist and church music director. “My personality and interests and theirs were just not quite the same.”
He loves his family, but he also knows that there are differences that can only be explained by genetics. So, Tony decided to use 23andMe to learn a little bit more about himself – information he said he didn’t think he could learn any other way, he said. He was interested in learning more about his health, the genetics behind some of his traits, and where in the world his ancestors came from. Even though he was adopted and curious about his biological parents, he was still wary about connecting with biological relatives, however.
“Actually, I had no desire to find my biological family,” Tony said. “I had a lot of fear of rejection. I assumed they gave me up for a good reason, and I was afraid of what that reason might be.”
<div id="attachment_23007" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23007" class="size-medium wp-image-23007" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom-300x169.jpg" alt="Tony Mercer, right, with his adoptive dad Lindy Mercer, and his biological mother, Lydia Raska. " width="300" height="169" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom-880x495.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tony-his-dad-and-bio-mom.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Tony Mercer, right, with his adoptive dad Lindy Mercer, and his biological mother, Lydia Raska.</div>
He’d seen his adoptive brother go through being rejected when he tried to connect to his biological family, and Tony didn’t want to go through the same thing.
“I didn’t want to face that kind of emotional pain,” he said.
It’s a fear that a lot of adoptees go through – the possibility of being doubly rejected by their biological families. (Once when they were given up for adoption, and a second time when they try to connect later in life.) At the same time, there is often an overpowering need to know. Tony skated along that border between simply wanting to know who his mother and father were and the fear of being rejected by them.
So, when he first got his results, he focused on health information, his traits, and his ancestry. He did look at his DNA Relatives, but they were all very distant.
“I hadn’t really expected to find any close relatives,” he said.
But in 2015, all that changed when Tony connected with a first cousin named Melanie. They exchanged some information. Tony figured out they were connected on his maternal side, and he asked if perhaps she had an aunt who had given up a child for adoption in Alaska in 1984.
Yes, she did.
Melanie knew a family secret about her aunt Lydia giving up a baby boy born on the same day,  in the same year, and the same city in Alaska as Tony.
“Besides my mother, she was the only person who knew about me,” said Tony.
He marvels at the luck that the one person who knew about him, besides his biological mother, had also tested with 23andMe.
“I know how lucky I am,” he said.
Things happened very quickly after that. Melanie connected Tony with her aunt Lydia, his biological mother. First, Tony and Lydia had a few email exchanges, then they talked on the phone, and finally she came to Florida to meet him in person.
“As far as Lydia is concerned, just meeting her and seeing that connection … it was very positive and stabilizing for me,” he said.
He saw in her traits he had in himself, and felt connected in a way that he hadn’t ever felt before. It’s not just that he’s tall, has stubby thumbs, and plays the piano, he said.
“Watching her interact with my friends, I immediately noticed that all their positive traits, and the reasons I love all of them, are traits that she has,” said Tony.
He wondered if perhaps his friends were representative of his own search for finding a deep connection to who he was.
“I think it’s just the most awesome thing in the world,” he said.
Tony also was able to learn a bit about his birth and eventually connect to his biological father. He learned that both his biological mother and father came from musical families, which explained a lot.
“Although I was inspired by my adoptive family in North Carolina and Tennessee who were musicians, I think a lot of that inborn talent is genetic,” said Tony, who first started playing piano as a six year old.
Tony’s adoptive father supported his search. His adoptive mother died when he was 16. That also made connecting with his biological mother that much more important, he said. It wasn’t so much that she filled a void he had with losing his mother, but that she is giving him another chance to have a maternal presence in his life.
He also got more context about himself. He’s 6’5” and he learned that all the men in his mom’s family are tall. He learned musical talent and red hair runs in the family. Even how he’s gravitated to work that involves helping others seems to be genetic, he said.
From his mother, Tony was also able to learn more about why he was put up for adoption. That gave him the ability to finally get an answer to the question he always had growing up.
“I have so much closure and peace about my adoption now, and I’ve got an awesome mom back in my life from all this,” he said.
His mother also helped Tony connect to his biological father, and the two have talked on the phone and hope to meet each other in person soon. More recently he met with his biological mother, his aunt, and his biological brother in Las Vegas.
“I know this might not happen for everyone, but I am so thankful to 23andme for making this experience even possible. Technology and science is so crazy these days, and I thank you guys for being on the cutting edge and making this accessible to the public.”

How Lucky I Am

<div id="attachment_22956" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22956" class="wp-image-22956 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-300x203.jpg" alt="IMG_2762" width="300" height="203" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-300x203.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-768x518.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-1024x691.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-880x594.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-1180x797.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762.jpg 1988w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Barbara Weir, right, with her daughter Casey.</div>
Not everyone who tries 23andMe has the same sort of reaction to his or her results as Barbara Weir.


“It’s mind boggling,” said the 87 year-old who lives in San Diego. “Next to marrying my husband and having my children it’s the most exciting thing in my life. It explains so much about me – who and what I am.”
With the help of her daughter, Casey Spaccarelli, a doctor who lives in Chicago, Barbara not only found out that she’d been adopted – something she’d never known – but she also connected with and then met her half brother in person.
“One of the big things for me is that it explains so much,” she said. “Looking back I was nothing like my family. We had different aptitudes and interests. I remember my sister once telling me ‘we’re not alike at all.’ I wanted to be like her and my family, but I just wasn’t.”
<div id="attachment_22955" style="width: 269px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22955" class="wp-image-22955 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-259x300.jpg" alt="IMG_4728-1" width="259" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-259x300.jpg 259w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-883x1024.jpg 883w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-768x891.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-758x880.jpg 758w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-1017x1180.jpg 1017w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px" />Barbara and her brother Marvin soon after meeting for the first time.</div>
The revelation that she’d been adopted and that she had biological family, including a half brother, who had lived in the Boston area, didn’t happen all at once. It started with a lot less drama, with Casey deciding to create a family tree and look at her ancestry. She tested first with another company.
“I did it for fun,” she said.
But very quickly she discovered a lot about herself that didn’t match what she had always been told. For one, she has about a quarter Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
“No one in the family knew of any Jewish heritage, only German,” Casey said.
Eventually Barbara tested and it turned out that she has about 50 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Casey tested with 23andMe thinking that perhaps the result was a mistake. It wasn’t. So she had her mother and her mother’s sister, Nancy, test on 23andMe. Her mother’s results confirmed the Ashkenazi ancestry, but her mother and Nancy didn’t have any overlapping DNA. They weren’t biologically related, according to the test.


“So I told my mom, ‘I think you may have been adopted?’” Casey said. “And she just said, ‘Oh I don’t know, maybe,’ and left it at that.”


But Casey wanted to figure this out. Fortunately she found a close relative connection in her 23andMe results with a name she didn’t recognize. So Casey contacted him. His name is Steve and she told him a little bit about herself and asked if he had any family in the Boston area, where Barbara had been born in the late 1920s.


“He said ‘my whole family is from Boston,’” Casey said.


He was open and helpful. Steve also had a lot of family history that he was willing to share with Casey, names and dates. That all became very important for Casey, who, by triangulating information, figured out that Steve’s grandfather Karl was also likely to be her grandfather, and Barbara’s father. Fortunately Steve’s uncle Marvin was still alive and they decided to talk to him.


“That got the ball rolling,” Casey said.


She knew they were close to solving this mystery. After looking at a few high school photos of Marvin and his sisters, Casey was pretty sure she’d found her mother’s biological family. A few weeks later Marvin, who grew up in Boston but now lived very close to Barbara in California, tested with 23andMe.
Bingo.
He turned out to be Barbara’s half brother.
The two arranged to finally meet. In photos they look remarkably similar with the same slim build and smiles.
“I’d never seen anyone who looked like me before,” said Barbara, surprised to be able to see family resemblances in her new-found brother and in photos of her sister.
Marvin’s father, Karl, had been a successful business owner in Boston, who had emigrated from Russia. He had a big family – Marvin, who is a year younger than Barbara, was the last of the family’s six children.
Casey still doesn’t know the circumstances of Barbara’s conception, only that she and Marvin have the same biological father, but different mothers. Barbara’s parents lived in Boston at the time she was adopted but later moved to Nashville where she grew up.


“So my mother found out she was adopted at 87 years of age,” Casey said. “It had been this huge family secret only known to her adoptive mother and the secret had died with her, until now. Until 23andMe.”


Even learning this so late in life was hugely important for Barbara. Things she wasn’t sure about in the past suddenly made sense.
“It’s amazing to learn this all at my age,” said Barbara. “I finally found out who I am.”

Who I Am

To teach his students a powerful lesson in genetics, Bryant McAllister, an associate professor of biology at the University of Iowa, poses a simple question.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-23169" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BFM_computer-225x300.jpg" alt="BFM_computer" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BFM_computer-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BFM_computer-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BFM_computer-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BFM_computer-885x1180.jpg 885w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BFM_computer.jpg 1536w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />


“Who are you?” Dr. McAllister asks.


The answer, and the genetic tools to explore it, offer an opportunity for students to learn, not just about themselves and biology, but also a little about the scientific revolution of personal genomics.


“My idea was to utilize personal genomics to provide an opportunity for students to investigate their relationships with others through DNA analysis,” Dr. McAllister said. “I thought it would provide an unique and engaging perspective for them.”


After researching a number of personal genome testing options, he concluded that 23andMe was the best choice for his course:
“Who are you? Revelations from the Personal Genome,” which he first taught in the fall of 2014 to a small class of first-year students.
The course was open to all &#8212; without any science prerequisites or restrictions on students’ majors — and designed to be relevant for all types of students.
The 23andMe DNA kits are free to the students (costs are covered by a university budget for first-year seminars), but Dr. McAlister makes it very clear to his class that participation in genotyping is completely optional.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-23170" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ed-logo-245x300.jpg" alt="ed logo" width="245" height="300" />


“We spend the first class discussing the possible surprises that may come from doing a genetic test &#8212; such as a half sibling students never knew about or discovering unexpected ancestry composition. I feel it is my responsibility to clearly inform the students,” Dr. McAllister insisted.


He encourages students to speak with their families before deciding if they will get genotyped, and he explains the controls students have when viewing their data, such as the ability to turn off relative matching. Students have a week to decide if they would like to participate in 23andMe genotyping.
The 15-week class is set up so saliva samples are shipped to 23andMe after the second class meeting. This allows enough time for sample processing so class work with the 23andMe results starts no later than mid-way through the course.


Once the 23andMe results are returned, students trace the history of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome and identify their own placement on a haplogroup tree. They study the significance of ancient genetic variants associated with Neanderthal admixture, and relate it to their 23andMe Neanderthal percentage ancestry reports.
In another activity, students consider the comparisons of SNP data against reference populations in order to determine ancestry using M&amp;M  candy.
Learn more about Dr. McAllister’s activity, <a href="https://education.23andme.org/l/where-did-my-mms-come-from/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Where do my M&amp;Ms come from?”</a>
In addition to exploring their  ancestry using 23andMe results, students also study the genotype -phenotype association for traits, such as lactose intolerance and the ability to taste bitter substances. Students also discuss genome-wide association studies focused on habitual coffee consumption, a particularly relevant topic for new undergraduates adjusting to college life.
Now in its second year, this freshman seminar is receiving a lot of interest. The class filled up very quickly, and students are more informed about what they will be participating in.


This growing student awareness of direct-to-consumer genetic testing is aligned with Dr. McAllister’s other ideas on how to further student engagement and understanding of personal genomics at the University of Iowa. For example, he would like to build a community of biology and life science majors who apply their science background to learn the applications of and technology behind personal genomics.


“I think these students could be a very helpful resource for people in our local community, to help people without an academic background in biology navigate their personal genotyping results and understand their implications,” he said.


Dr. McAllister also is interested in determining whether or not the use of 23andMe, along with specific learning activities, could significantly motivate students in an introductory biology course and increase their likelihood of success.


“In my opinion, we are just scratching the surface as to how personal genotyping can be used as an effective educational tool,” he said.


Editor&#8217;s note: This is the first in a series of &#8220;Educator Spotlight&#8221; posts highlighting how educators are incorporating genetics into lesson plans. To find out more check out <a href="https://education.23andme.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">23andMe For Educators</a>.

A Fresh Take on Genetics for Freshmen

Selma Spieler wished she knew more about her father.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_22922" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22922" class="size-medium wp-image-22922" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Avram-and-family-225x300.jpg" alt="Selma's father Abraham and her mother Gisha &quot;Gussie&quot; and her sister Aida." width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Avram-and-family-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Avram-and-family.jpg 480w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />Selma&#8217;s father Abraham and her mother Gisha &#8220;Gussie&#8221; and her sister Aida.</div>
She knew he came from Russia, was generous – regularly bringing food to neighbors and sending money to a cousin in Israel who was studying to be a doctor. And she knew her father worked hard, toiling at night in a bagel factory in Brooklyn after he immigrated to New York in the 1920s.
But there was a lot she didn’t know about him.
Before she could learn more, her father, Abraham “Avram” Leib Greenberg, died. Selma was 14. It was 1946 and at that moment it sunk in that she’d never be able to ask him about his past, about the seven siblings he left behind in Russia and Poland, or how his family was able to survive pogroms, the violence of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Selma thought she lost all that family history with her father, a man born in the 1800s, who survived world-shattering changes that swept through Europe before he came to America. She was sure that the history of his life vanished with him. She thought that all the family he left behind was gone too, swept away in the violence that came after her father immigrated. Now in her 80s, she’d long ago given up on finding out anything more about her father and his family.
“My mother just assumed that they had all died in the Holocaust,” her daughter Risa Rubin said.


It’s an experience many Jews with family roots in Eastern Europe can relate to – large parts of their family history erased by the Holocaust and the upheaval of the Second World War.
But more than seventy years after her father died, Selma learned with the help of 23andMe bits about her father’s history that she never knew before. She and her daughter Risa discovered the fate of his siblings. Some were indeed lost in the Holocaust but others survived. And most astounding of all, for Selma and her daughter, is that using 23andMe they were able to find some of her father’s family in Israel and travel to meet them in person including meeting Selma’s first cousin Fania.


“If my mother and I had not done this we would have never known,” Risa said. “She was so emotional, she cried when she found all this out… this has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.”


This journey of discovery started when Risa and her brother Eric joined 23andMe. Risa was interested in learning more about herself and her ancestry. And then when her mother also used 23andMe, Risa helped her connect with a previously unknown relative named Ayelet, who lives in Israel.
<div id="attachment_22924" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22924" class="size-medium wp-image-22924" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-300x225.jpg" alt="Risa and her cousin Ayet after meeting for the first time in Israel." width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-768x576.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-880x660.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-1180x885.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Risa and her cousin Ayelet after meeting for the first time in Israel.</div>
“I noticed that my mom and Ayelet shared DNA, including a segment that was completely identical,” Risa said.


Before that moment, Risa and her brother had assumed that all of her Grandfather’s family had been killed in the Holocaust. But she quickly learned that she had dozens of living relatives on that side of her family, who mostly live in Israel. Ayelet has a brother who had already done an extensive family tree and it proved to be a goldmine for Risa and her mother. Together with the help of Ayelet, Selma’s cousin Fania and another cousin named Naomi, they began filling in the pieces of their missing tree including finding the children and grandchildren of Selma’s uncles, her father’s brothers as well as the children of her aunt. They also learned more about Abraham’s life before he came to America, and that all but four of his siblings had survived the Holocaust, many of them had immigrated to Palestine before the war or wound up in Israel after it.
Ayelet’s great grandfather was Selma’s father’s brother. Ayelet had even known of Selma’s father – his Uncle Abraham – but he’d been told that Abraham had never made it out of
Russia. Selma’s cousin, Fania, however was told that Abraham had made it out and wound up in America, but she knew little else.
Their relatives in Israel were able to offer documents, photos and family history for Selma – information about her father that she never knew.
The documents had information about where he moved in Russia and then Poland, before he immigrated to America. Her cousin Fania recognized the photo of her grandparents that Risa and Selma had brought with them. Selma also learned more about his siblings, Moshe, Haya, Isaac, Slova, Rachel, Yaakov and Shlomo.
The trip allowed Risa and her mother to connect not just with family in Israel, but others in the US and in Russia, a total of more than 50 relatives in all.
“The process of finding our family has been an amazing experience. It was bashert — meant to be,” Risa said.  
“Thank you 23andMe for finding my family.”

Meant to Be

We’re returning one more time to the story of Jessica and Alice, and how they used 23andMe to unravel a <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/jesss-story/">century old mystery</a>.
<div id="attachment_22174" style="width: 236px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22174" class="wp-image-22174 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg" alt="Jess's grandfather Phil and her great grandfather Sam. " width="226" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg 226w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-662x880.jpeg 662w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam.jpeg 665w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 226px) 100vw, 226px" />Jess&#8217;s grandfather Phil and her great grandfather Sam.</div>

We first <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/jesss-story/">wrote about the story</a> back in February 2015 and again <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/the-other-side-of-the-story/">a few weeks later</a>, and we aren’t the only ones fascinated by it.


Scott Fisher, the host of the syndicated family history radio program <a href="http://extremegenes.com/ep-104-23andme-dna-day-and-pursuing-a-jail-break/">Extreme Genes</a>, dedicated his most recent show to their story.
Fisher has <a href="http://extremegenes.com/story-and-photos-of-two-men-switched-at-birth-in-1913-with-their-oops-fathers/">a great interview</a> with Jess, Alice, and genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, who each detail how they worked over three years to piece together a mystery that probably couldn’t have been solved any other way, and it all started when Alice tested with 23andMe.


“I took a DNA test and the results came back all the way wrong,” Alice told Fischer.


Or at least that’s what she thought.
Raised to believe she was three-quarters Irish, Alice’s ancestry results came back showing that she had 50 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. This sparked what turned into years of trying to figure out if this was all a mistake or something else. Her mother and father weren’t around to ask anymore, so Alice eventually had all seven of her siblings tested with 23andMe.
They all showed the same result. They were half Ashkenazi.
How that was possible was the mystery to Alice, so she began working to solve it. She enlisted the help of CeCe, no stranger of difficult family mysteries, and the two got to work.
“There are unexpected surprises in pretty much every case I work on,” said CeCe.


This one was no different, and CeCe and Alice dove deeper looking at paper records and came up with some theories. If it was just Alice’s results that were different, perhaps the difference could be explained by a single infidelity, but everyone in her family had the same ancestry profile. Obviously something about their family history was different than they suspected. Alice’s father, James, had had a tough upbringing. He knew his parents but had been raised in an orphanage.
Alice began zeroing in on her father and the possibility that   he was switched at birth. But how could you figure something like that out?

		<style type="text/css">
			#gallery-1 {
				margin: auto;
			}
			#gallery-1 .gallery-item {
				float: left;
				margin-top: 10px;
				text-align: center;
				width: 25%;
			}
			#gallery-1 img {
				border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
			}
			#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {
				margin-left: 0;
			}
			/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */
		</style>
		<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-23091 gallery-columns-4 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>
			<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/john-josef-collins-close_1-150x150.jpg" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-1-23096" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/john-josef-collins-close_1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/john-josef-collins-close_1-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/john-josef-collins-close_1-371x372.jpg 371w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />
			</dt>
				<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-23096'>
				Alice&#8217;s grandfather, John, who is believed to be Jess&#8217;s great-grandfather.
				</dd></dl><dl class='gallery-item'>
			<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/filename-1-150x150.png" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-1-23095" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/filename-1-150x150.png 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/filename-1-271x271.png 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/filename-1-372x372.png 372w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />
			</dt>
				<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-23095'>
				Jess&#8217;s Grandfather, Phil.
				</dd></dl><dl class='gallery-item'>
			<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/img_9061-150x150.jpeg" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-1-23094" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/img_9061-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/img_9061-271x271.jpeg 271w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />
			</dt>
				<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-23094'>
				Jess&#8217;s great-grandfather, Sam, who is believed to be Alice&#8217;s grandfather.
				</dd></dl><dl class='gallery-item'>
			<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>
				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Alices-Father-150x150.jpeg" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-1-23093" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Alices-Father-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Alices-Father-271x271.jpeg 271w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />
			</dt>
				<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-23093'>
				Alice&#8217;s Father, James.
				</dd></dl> 
		</div>


He was born at Fordham hospital in the Bronx in 1913, so CeCe and Alice began looking at birth records for babies born on the same day, in the same hospital. Perhaps, they thought, a nurse accidentally put Alice’s father in another child’s crib. CeCe and Alice even went so far as approaching the descendants of a man born that same day with a similar last name and had him test with 23andMe, but they found no match.


And then last year, Jessica, who lives in North Carolina, signed up for 23andMe. Like Alice she also got a big surprise.


“I knew my mom is Japanese, Filipino and Native American,” Jessica said.


Her dad was a bit of a mystery because he’d died when Jessica was still young, but she knew that he was Jewish. But the results came back and instead of showing she had Jewish ancestry, it showed she was a quarter Irish.
“It didn’t match what I knew,” Jessica said.
That might have been it, but that one of Alice’s nephews also tested with 23andMe. Alice found that she shared no DNA with him, that they in fact were not biologically related. Although that would seem to be another dead end, Alice knew that his results could help her solve the mystery.
When he shared with Alice some of his DNA Relative matches, she saw a name she didn’t recognize, Jessica.


“When I saw her listing, I started shaking,” said Alice.
She knew this could be the key.
So Alice sent her a message.
“Help solve a hundred year-old mystery,” Alice said in her message.
Jessica was intrigued.
When they connected, Alice immediately asked whether Jessica had been surprised by her ancestry results.
And then Alice floated her idea, that Jessica’s grandfather and Alice’s father, who were both born on the same day at the same hospital in the Bronx in 1913, had been switched at birth.
For Jessica, the whole thing sounded intriguing. She wanted to know. For Alice, who’d resigned herself to never solving the mystery, she could hardly contain herself.
When they shared family photos, it seemed even clearer that the mystery had been solved.


“You can’t look and come to any other conclusion,” said Fischer in the show.


For CeCe, the photos illustrate something she’s seen in many cases. Here are these two men, clearly not biologically related to the parents who raised them, and for those men how out of place they sometimes must have felt.
It’s also intriguing to think about how their lives might have been different, said Jessica.
“That might be the strangest part,” Jessica said. “They ended up living different lives.”

Family Mystery Solved with 23andMe

It wasn’t a wish, but on many of his birthdays, Lenny Scovel would take a minute and imagine the thoughts of a woman he’d never met.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22916" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-300x300.jpg" alt="Lenny quote" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-quote.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />


“I would wonder if my mother was out there somewhere thinking about me, perhaps saying, ‘Oh it’s my son’s birthday today,’” said Lenny, 52. 

<h6>Born in Greenville</h6>

Adopted as a baby, he never knew about his biological family, not even his ethnic origins.


“All I knew was that I was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1963 at St. Francis Catholic Hospital,” said Lenny, who runs a wedding business in Colorado.


Whether his mother was wondering about him or not, isn’t known but there were people he didn’t know who were thinking about him.

<h6>Siblings Searching</h6>

For decades, Karen Bumgarner and her brother Terry McCutchen searched for their siblings scattered across the United States. They referred to their lost brothers and sisters as their “family diaspora,” a moniker coined by the first found brother, Richard Frazier.


Their mother, Jean Woodward, had had twelve children, but only kept Karen and Terry. Her first husband had served in the Army Air Corps and was killed in Germany during the Second World War, and in the decades that followed she married twice and became pregnant by several different men, and each of those children she gave up for adoption.
Over the years, Karen and Terry had succeeded in finding several of those children, largely thanks to the ceaseless efforts of Terry’s wife Kathy. But sometimes they had little to go on. For one of their brothers all they had was:


“Boy. South Carolina. 1963.&#8221; 
 
<h6>Origins</h6>

They had no idea how to find him. This was long before the advent of direct-to-consumer genetic testing services like 23andMe. There seemed little hope that they’d ever find their brother.
Although Lenny Scovel often wondered about his biological mother, he didn’t feel abandoned. He felt lucky to have been adopted and raised by a loving couple, Don and Mary Scovel. He just always wondered where he came from.
<div id="attachment_22918" style="width: 203px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22918" class="size-full wp-image-22918" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/10356315_10152545668998277_9759572226819466_n.jpg" alt="Lenny and his adoptive father Donald Scovel." width="193" height="253" />Lenny and his adoptive father Donald Scovel.</div>
“I’m eternally grateful to my parents,” he said, “but my biological origins have been my life’s curiosity.”


After seeing the 2013 movie Philomena, a moving story about an Irish Catholic woman’s search for the son she gave up for adoption, Lenny redoubled his interest in finding out more about his origins.
<h6>Using DNA</h6>
But it was his wife who helped push him along, purchasing a 23andMe kit for him as a Christmas gift in 2014. The thought was that at the very least, he would learn definitively what his ethnicity was.
“Even the lack of ethnic identity has been a gaping hole in me for 51 years,” he said.


A few weeks later he did indeed learn about his ancestry – he didn’t just have English and Irish ancestry, but also Norwegian and a little Native American ancestry as well.
Yet it was a connection with another 23andMe customer that sparked the revelation. 23andMe identified someone he initially thought was a cousin, named Tania B. This was the first time he’d ever connected to any biological relative.
“I immediately sent her a message,” he said. “What happened in the next few hours was unbelievable and overwhelming.”


Tania confirmed that she was a relative but they weren’t cousins: Tania was likely his half-niece and her father was Lenny’s half-brother, Randy Bryan.


“Like dominoes, my family began to fall into place,” Lenny said. “I soon had three half-brothers and three half-sisters. As incredible as that is, we believe there are at least four more!”
<div id="attachment_22917" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22917" class="wp-image-22917 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-and-Siblinhgs-300x225.jpg" alt="Lenny and Siblinhgs" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-and-Siblinhgs-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-and-Siblinhgs-768x576.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-and-Siblinhgs-880x660.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lenny-and-Siblinhgs.jpg 960w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Lenny, on the far right, with his siblings. From left to right and in birth order: Terry McCutchen, Karen Bumgarner, Bonnie Frank, Richard Frazier, Randy Bryan, and Becky Nolen. (Photo: Lenny Scovel)</div>
<h6>
 A Blessing</h6>

Their mother, who’d been born in 1922, had died in 2000. She’d married at 19, had two children – Terry and Karen – but her husband was killed during the war. Jean married at least two more times and had several children from several different men.
But a lot of that information her children didn’t piece together until she was diagnosed with cancer. Her daughter Karen sat with her before she died and attempted to get from her a list of those lost children. One of the last things she told them was about a son, born in 1963 in South Carolina.
It would be almost 15 years before they could find him with the help of 23andMe. For Lenny, it was the fulfillment of a life long quest.


“At last, my life’s great mystery finally revealed itself,” he said. “What an incredible blessing.”

<h6>Connecting</h6>

In June of 2015, seven of the twelve siblings met for what they called a “union-reunion” in the town of Sisters, Oregon. It was the first time Lenny was able to meet his brothers and sisters.
&#8220;They were all ready for me,” he said.
At the reunion, the siblings toasted their mother, talked about their lives and family, and pledged to continue to search for the siblings yet to be found.
“There is no way Jean could have ever imagined that moment, with so many of us together,” says Lenny, “but we all owe our lives to her, and in spite of what you might consider her questionable choices, we are all so grateful for our lives, and for each other.”

Stories — Page 14