Blurring the line between stranger and relation, the artist <a href="http://laurelnakadate.weebly.com/">Laurel Nakadate</a> used DNA testing to connect to hundreds of cousins who she
<div id="attachment_18738" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18738" class="size-medium wp-image-18738" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR-225x300.jpg" alt="Laurel Nakadate. Photo: © Suki Dhanda, 2011, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />Laurel Nakadate. Photo: © Suki Dhanda, 2011, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York</div>
photographed for a series of arresting portraits.
The photos, all taken outdoors, at night with the subjects alone and lit by only a flashlight, convey both intimacy and distance at the same time. We first <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/strangers-and-relations">wrote about</a> the photo series two years ago.
Called <a href="http://www.tonkonow.com/nakadate_relations.html">“Strangers and Relations”</a> the portraits also beg the question of what those two terms really mean.
Would you feel any different standing alone at night in the middle of nowhere with a stranger pointing a camera at you, if that stranger was a relative?
Nakadate, who spoke with us about her project, said the idea for the work came after thinking about the distant cousins she found through 23andMe and another company. This collection of people, who were strangers to her,   shared a common ancestor, and that mix of the familiar and foreign is what spurred her to embark on a what ended up being a 50,000 mile journey around the United States photographing her distant cousins.
Her portraits from Strangers and Relations have been displayed across the country, most recently in her former hometown of Des Moines, Iowa.
Below are just two that are featured in the series.

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				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="200" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Tyler2_MG_0651_LR-300x200.jpg" class="attachment-medium size-medium" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-1-18736" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Tyler2_MG_0651_LR-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Tyler2_MG_0651_LR-768x512.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Tyler2_MG_0651_LR-880x587.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Tyler2_MG_0651_LR.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
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				Tyler, Texas #2, 2013. © Laurel Nakadate, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
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				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="200" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Cleveland_MG_9246_LR-300x200.jpg" class="attachment-medium size-medium" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-1-18731" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Cleveland_MG_9246_LR-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Cleveland_MG_9246_LR-768x512.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Cleveland_MG_9246_LR-880x587.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Relations_Cleveland_MG_9246_LR.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
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				Cleveland, Ohio #1, 2012 © Laurel Nakadate, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
				</dd></dl> 
		</div>

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Strangers No More

When he was 21, Gary Skillings tried to contact his mother through a nun at the Catholic orphanage from which he was adopted in the 1950s, but she didn’t want to see him.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_22818" style="width: 168px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22818" class="size-full wp-image-22818" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/safe_image.php_.jpg" alt="Gary Skillings' Photo" width="158" height="158" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/safe_image.php_.jpg 158w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/safe_image.php_-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 158px) 100vw, 158px" />Gary Skillings&#8217; Photo</div>
“That was kind of a heartbreaker,” Skilling told <a href="http://www.sunjournal.com/news/lewiston-auburn/2015/08/30/dna-test-brings-florida-man-home-maine/1771495">the Sun Journal newspape</a>r in Maine. “But I honored her wish.”


Although he longed to know more about his background and who his mother was, Gary didn’t search any further after that failed attempt to make a connection. But he was left with at least one bit of information, his mother’s first name, Aline. Fast-forward a few decades, Gary was able to use 23andMe and genealogical records to learn more about his mother, and connect with cousins he never knew he had.


His story, nicely told by the local paper in Lewiston Maine, includes meeting more than 50 relatives, cousins, aunt and uncles who welcomed him into the family.


“They had this reception for me and all these people showed up,” he told the newspaper. “They were all total strangers to me, yet all related.”


They shared photos and family stories with him. He learned more about his now deceased mother, Aline Mary Cotes, and his out-of-wedlock birth. He found a close cousin, who knew about his birth and actually knew about Gary’s effort to contact his mother so long ago. She had vowed to keep it all a secret.


Check out the story <a href="http://www.sunjournal.com/news/lewiston-auburn/2015/08/30/dna-test-brings-florida-man-home-maine/1771495">here</a>.

Mending a Broken Heart

Several media stories in the last few months have highlighted the potential of 23andMe to help adoptees.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-6586 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg" alt="An image of 23andMe's logo." width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog.jpg 350w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
One of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/nyregion/a-son-given-up-for-adoption-is-found-after-half-a-century-and-then-lost-again.html">more touching pieces</a> highlighted a woman’s 50-year search for the son she’d given up for adoption at 19. She was able to find him using 23andMe, only to lose him again to cancer. Another interesting <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-21/korean-adoptees-are-using-dna-kits-get-glimpse-their-ancestry">story on PRI</a> looked at Korean born adoptees using DNA to learn more about their ancestry.
Inventor and scientist Thomas Park Clement, who was among the first wave of Korean adoptees to come to the United States in the 1950s, set aside a million dollars of his own money to cover the cost of other Korean adoptees who want to get tested.
&#8220;Everyone on the planet has the right to know who their relatives are,&#8221; Clement is quoted as saying.
Those stories and others highlight that while it’s not designed with adoptees in mind, 23andMe has become a resource for many wanting to fill in the gaps in what they know about their ancestry, their inherited traits or family history. 
For many of us we take for granted knowing this basic information about ourselves, but for many adoptees using a DNA test is the only way they could find out this kind of information.
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 650px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;"><a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/more-than-just-luck">More Than Just Luck</a> 
With the help of a genetic genealogist and her 23andMe results, a woman abandoned behind a grocery store as an infant is able to identify her biological mother.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-22519 size-thumbnail" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-150x150.jpg" alt="A photo of brothers who found each other using 23andMe with a quote that says &quot;Stories of this kind, they are hard to believe…”" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> 
Not an adoption story, but this story tracks some of the same kind of ordeals adoptees have to go through to find out about their biological families. In this case, half brothers– one who lives in Brazil, the other in the United States – connected through 23andMe. Their story, which spans over several decades and includes some harrowing childhood trauma, ends with the two brothers meeting for the first time.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/goodnight-son/">Goodnight Son</a> 
Not every reunion between an adoptee and his or her biological parent or sibling is a happy one, but for Mike Reed the meeting with his biological father couldn&#8217;t have gone better. His biological father welcomed into the family and introduced him to his nine half siblings.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-21929 size-thumbnail" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-150x150.jpg" alt="A photo of Liz with the quote: “To site and talk with someone who is your sibling, or your biological parent … who you have never met… incredible.” " width="150" height="150" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> 
Abandoned in a laundry mat as an infant, Liz Kellner used 23andMe and ultimately found her sisters and biological parents.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/an-unexpected-discovery">An Unexpected Discovery</a> 
Cody tested to find out more about his health, but in the process he found his biological parents and half siblings. He also learned that he&#8217;d been conceived when his mother was a young teen and that&#8217;s why he&#8217;d been put up for adoption.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/its-a-girl">It’s A Girl</a> 
Although not an adoptee story, Kelli&#8217;s story highlights some of the anxiety many go through when trying to connect with a biological parent. They simply don&#8217;t know how it will play out. For Kelli the experience was a good one. She used 23andMe to help her find her biological father. Once she made the connection her biological father, who hadn’t known of her birth, welcomed her into the family.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-21348 size-thumbnail" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-small-quote-150x150.jpg" alt="A photo of an adult son who found his biological father using 23andMe and how the two later became friends: “I am awed by how this happened.” " width="150" height="150" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-small-quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-small-quote.jpg 200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> 
An adult son connects with his biological father and they become friends.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/a-siblings-story-from-23andme">A Siblings Story</a> 
Using 23andMe Tricia found her half brother and half sister. They were able to tell her more about her biological father and the three of them met and became friends.
</div>

Searching With 23andMe

If it’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then Jimmy Cygler and Paul Leventhal are plenty tough.
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<div id="attachment_22516" style="width: 278px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22516" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg" alt="Jimmy, left, and his brother Paul." class="size-medium wp-image-22516" height="300" width="268" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg 268w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1.jpg 449w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 268px) 100vw, 268px" />Jimmy, left, and his brother Paul.</div>
When both were infants, they were taken from their mother, Rebecca Kaufman, and raised worlds apart without knowing of the others’ existence.
With the help of 23andMe, the brothers recently found each other and were able to meet in person in early 2015.
Jimmy traveled from his home in Sao Paulo, Brazil to spend a week with Paul in Florida.
There the two men got to talk about their lives. Paul shared with Jimmy the little he knew about their mother, a brilliant but troubled woman. Jimmy was able to share with Paul a little about his improbable life.


“Stories of this kind, they are hard to believe,” Jimmy says. “Do you know the book ‘Life of Pi?’ A fantastical story, but it is nothing compared to my life.”

Paul downplays the drama in his own life – the separation from his mother, spending his first five years in a foster home, and growing up in a house where his father and stepmother were distant.
Paul has one fleeting memory of sitting on his mother’s knee – almost everything else he knows about her comes from what he’s gleaned from relatives. It wasn’t until Paul turned 18, after his father’s death, that he learned he’d been the product of an affair.
At first Paul pushed this information out of his head, but a few years later as a young man, a relative confirmed it was true.
“My life was turned upside down,” Paul said.


He had to live with not only his mother abandoning him but her family cutting ties with him as well. Jimmy thinks that Paul having to endure their mother’s abandonment and rejection may have been harder than the physical abuse he suffered.
Paul’s not so sure, but he knows that it affected him.


“I was angered by the fact that her brothers – two doctors and two lawyers – didn&#8217;t step up to the plate and save me from going to a foster home,” Paul said. “I must have been quite an embarrassment to them and my maternal grandmother, who was still living at the time.”


Rejected by his mother and her family, Paul spent years trying to find his biological father. That’s part of why he eventually got his DNA results with 23andMe. While he hasn’t yet found the identity of his biological father, Paul did find his brother Jimmy.
“My father had no idea who his mother was and finding his brother finally helped us solve that puzzle,” Jimmy’s daughter, Orly, said. “Now we know who she was.”


Her father agrees that it has helped.
“You know Nietzsche, ’that which does not kill us makes us stronger?’” Jimmy asks from his office in Sao Paulo. “Well, it is true for me.”


Paul disagrees with his brother on this point. What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger or it may damage you for the rest of your life.


Jimmy survived years of abuse as a child, life at a kibbutz, four wars, and three marriages. But he doesn’t feel damaged.


“I’m a rebuilt human being,” Jimmy says. “Really all the conditions of my life were anything but normal or positive, but the art of my life was to become a good human being.”


But it wasn’t easy.
When Jimmy first went to Israel at the age of 13, he began getting psychological help to work through his childhood trauma.
<div id="attachment_22476" style="width: 265px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22476" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg" alt="Jimmy as a young man on a kibbutz in Israel." class="size-medium wp-image-22476" height="300" width="255" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg 255w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-768x905.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-869x1024.jpg 869w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-747x880.jpg 747w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-1001x1180.jpg 1001w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz.jpg 1640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 255px) 100vw, 255px" />Jimmy as a young man on a kibbutz in Israel.</div>
“When I came to Israel I was a pile of wreckage, and I had to do something to these broken pieces to reassemble a human being,” Jimmy said.
But not having all the pieces about his life made that “reassembling” a life-long process.
“The story with Paul is part of it, but just one part of it,” said Jimmy. “I’m one of nine brothers and sisters. I’m the only brother (related to) all of them and I spent my whole life searching for those missing pieces.”
Jimmy mentions connecting this process with what psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote about in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
“He says a person who has meaning can bear almost anything,” Jimmy said. “So this search for meaning became important to me.”
Part of that search has included trying to learn more about who he was, where he came from and to whom he is connected.
“First I had to gather all the pieces and then you start putting the puzzle together and you try to find meaning in the picture that emerges,” Jimmy said. “You might have the whole picture or, like me, just parts of it.”
Jimmy said he also learned that one small piece of information could change everything. Recently a relative in London found a travel document Jimmy’s father had used when Jimmy was a baby. On it was the name James Maurice Goldberg.
“That’s my name (from his birth certificate, before his father changed his last name), but I’d never known it before,” he said.
The name also helped him find out more about his father, Izrael Aron Goldberg. Jimmy’s father fled Poland before the start of World War II and settled in Peru. There he married a woman and had two children, a son Lucho and a daughter Alina, and converted to Christianity. He would later say that all the family he had in Poland died in the Holocaust. After experiencing financial troubles, Izrael left his family in Peru and moved to New York City.
“I do have a business card of his from his time in New York,” Jimmy said. “It says ‘I. Aron Goldberg, specialist in furs.’”
<div id="attachment_22477" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22477" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg" alt="Jimmy's father's business card when he lived in New York." class="size-medium wp-image-22477" height="123" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-768x314.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1024x419.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-880x360.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1180x483.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116.jpg 1581w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jimmy&#8217;s father&#8217;s business card when he lived in New York.</div>
It was in New York that he met Rebecca Kaufman, who already had two sons, Paul and Jay, who were several years older than Jimmy.
Paul ended up in foster care and Jay was taken by Rebecca’s first husband. Rebecca was unable to care for Jimmy when he was born in 1949, and she was subsequently placed in an institution. Izrael, alone with his infant son, asked his estranged wife in Peru to come to New York with their two children.
“The interesting part of the story is that he didn’t tell her that he had a baby, me,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy’s half-sister, Alina, was almost 10 years old at the time. His half-brother, Lucho, was about eight. His sister remembers holding Jimmy as an infant, and falling in love with him. But it would be the last she’d see him for almost 55 years because the family quickly fell apart.
<div id="attachment_22478" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22478" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg" alt="Jimmy with his father and his half sister Alina before he was taken to Brazil." class="size-medium wp-image-22478" height="282" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951.jpg 408w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jimmy with his father and his half sister Alina before he was taken to Brazil.</div>
Jimmy doesn’t know all the details but is aware that his father fought with his wife. She stayed just a few months before returning to Peru with her two children, leaving Jimmy and his father in New York. Izrael took Jimmy to Brazil shortly thereafter. Jimmy thinks his father suffered from survivor’s guilt and wanted to somehow reconstruct the family he lost in the Holocaust, which might explain why Izrael had three children from two different mothers. Jimmy’s father took the name Israel Cygler when they moved to Brazil. He also quickly remarried and that’s when Jimmy’s life turned into a nightmare.
“I thought I had a ‘normal life,’” Jimmy said about what things were like after his father remarried. “I had a father, a woman whom I thought was my mother, and four younger brothers. I was raised Christian, studied with the nuns at school and went to mass on Sunday. Had a first communion. That was my life. But what I thought was normal at the time was not normal at all. “I was maltreated and tortured as a kid.”
His stepmother once punished him by putting him in a hole under the house for a week without food. Another time she smeared hot pepper juice “on all the holes of my body.” And after getting caught playing with matches as a seven-year-old, his mother placed his hand into a gas fire to punish him. He was burnt so badly that it took years of surgeries and skin grafts before he could properly open and close his hand.
“My mother did that to me,” Jimmy said. “She was the real villain in this, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know she wasn’t my mother, if I had known I could have dealt with that. But the only conclusion I could draw from those punishments was that I was a monster, that I deserved that because I was a monster. That was me at 13.”
Then the trajectory of his life changed when his father became critically ill and a stranger shared with him some surprising news.
“Out of the blue this young lad appears, speaks with me for half an hour and tore down the basis of my life,” Jimmy said. “He tells me ‘I’m your brother from another marriage. I’m from Lima, Peru. You also have an older sister, and your mother is not your mother. You were born to a woman in New York.’”
Jimmy was stunned. His father then told him it was all true.
“’Well son, now that you know you are a Jew, you are going to the land of the Jews, which is called Israel,’” Jimmy recalled his father saying. “I didn’t know anything about that country or those people. I didn’t know anything about the Jewish people. ”
He arrived in Israel in October 1962, and stayed for the next 27 years. “The country embraced me,” Jimmy said.
He lived in a special area of a kibbutz for teenagers who didn’t have parents. They were from 30 to 40 different countries and many had been orphaned or displaced by World War II. Jimmy received good care, including intensive psychological treatment to help deal with the emotional wounds from his stepmother’s abuse.
“That’s why I say I’m a rebuilt human being,” Jimmy said.
He served as a soldier in four wars, was married, has two sons and a daughter, divorced, married again, and had another daughter, and then divorced again.
“And then I met a Brazilian girl and fell in love and went to Brazil,” he said.
Jimmy reinvented himself &#8211; the twice divorced veteran who was a father of four went to college, married again, started another family, and now he runs a very successful business. But he was always looking, “desperately looking,” he says, for the pieces to the puzzle of his life. He was able to find his four half-brothers from his father’s family in Brazil. His stepmother told them he died in the war. With the help of a Peruvian businessman, Jimmy tracked down the phone number of a woman in Lima he thought might be his sister, Alina. He called her, said his name was Jimmy and that he was from Brazil.
“My dear little brother Jimmy, I have been looking for you all my life!” she replied. Jimmy pauses to control his emotion as he recounts meeting his sister.
“From this moment I felt love for her,” he said.
Jimmy traveled to Peru to get to know his sister, and she shared a blurry old photo she had of him being held by his biological mother. She also told him her own memory of holding him as an infant. She never forgot that and spent her life looking for him, never knowing how she could find him.
<div id="attachment_22479" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22479" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg" alt="A blurry photo of Jimmy being held by his mother Rebecca. The only photo he has of his mother." class="size-medium wp-image-22479" height="300" width="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-886x1180.jpg 886w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />A blurry photo of Jimmy being held by his mother Rebecca. The only photo he has of his mother.</div>
“She kept that memory her whole life, always wondering what had happened to me,” Jimmy said.
She also told him about their father, his financial problems in Peru, some of his history fleeing Poland and losing all of his family in the Holocaust. And he learned about being born in New York, but he still didn’t know anything about his biological mother. Jimmy says he and Alina became very close.
In 2013, his sister was diagnosed with cancer, a year later she died.
“Alina was a wonderful woman,” he said.
Losing her so soon was a huge blow to Jimmy. Jimmy’s story took another turn in early 2015 when his daughter, Orly, got her 23andMe results. She saw a match with Paul, thinking he was a cousin. But when she shared with Jimmy Paul’s date of birth and how much DNA he shared with Paul, they concluded that Paul and Jimmy were brothers.
In that first meeting, both men were overcome as they hugged and shed tears.
“It was very emotional,” Jimmy said. “We’re kind of old guys and I could see in his eyes how much he had suffered. I know what I went through and I came out a real strong person – a leader, a teacher and a family man. We both survived.”

A Fantastical Story

Along with having some very talented scientists and engineers on staff, 23andMe is lucky to have some customers who are equally accomplished.
<div id="attachment_22394" style="width: 297px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22394" class="size-medium wp-image-22394" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ann_cropped_modified-287x300.jpg" alt="Dr. Ann Turner, MD" width="287" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ann_cropped_modified-287x300.jpg 287w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ann_cropped_modified.jpg 355w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 287px) 100vw, 287px" />Dr. Ann Turner, MD</div>
One of those is Dr. Ann Turner, a 23andMe Ancestry Ambassador and physician. Ann was recently listed as a co-author on <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005137" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a paper</a> published by researchers from the University of Iowa about a genetic variant involved in hearing loss. It turned out to be in a gene that was not even known to be important for the sense of hearing.
“My main contribution was recruiting enough cousins to isolate the segment that must of necessity harbor the mutation,” said Ann.
What’s inspiring is that the impetus for this research was Ann’s own quest to learn about the genetics behind her and her family’s hearing impairment.
Her own hearing loss started in childhood and got progressively worse over time. She’s been wearing hearing aids for 40 years now. Worldwide hearing impairment impacts over five percent of the population, or about 360 million people. Although many different genetic mutations are involved in hearing loss, in this case the researchers were able to isolate a single mutation involved in this one family’s loss of hearing.
Ann’s own <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/tracking-down-a-trait" target="_blank" rel="noopener">personal search</a> of the genetics behind the trait included work going back more than 20 years. She used traditional genealogical techniques to trace hearing loss back 200 years in her family to an ancestor named John Riley, who was born in 1813. One of her relatives, James Riley, a Civil War veteran, died from a fall after failing to hear a warning from a co-worker that the scaffolding he was on was not secure.
<div id="attachment_22396" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22396" class="size-medium wp-image-22396" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/HOMER2_pedigree-300x162.jpg" alt="This is a pedigree Ann did of her family showing how tracing the mutation through generations of her family." width="300" height="162" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/HOMER2_pedigree-300x162.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/HOMER2_pedigree.jpg 679w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />This is a pedigree Ann did of her family showing how tracing the mutation through generations of her family.</div>
Beyond paper records and family trees, Ann also used her and her cousins’ 23andMe results to try and track down the genetics behind their hearing condition. She participated in 23andMe’s exome pilot project a few years ago. This allowed her to obtain the sequence data for all the coding regions of all genes, and she was in turn able to use that data to point to candidate mutations possibly involved in her family’s hereditary hearing loss. “Even though this type of testing is not designed to discover rare or novel mutations, I could roughly narrow down the chromosomal region where the mutation must be located,” Ann said. By looking at her and her family member’s data she was able to identify places where only those with hearing loss shared DNA segments.
“It finally boiled down to just one region by the time all of our results were compared. I wrote about this in a blog post for 23andMe,” she said. The candidate mutation is in the HOMER2 gene. Following up on that work, researchers at the University of Iowa did what are called “functional studies” looking at how that specific genetic mutation affected zebrafish and mice in the lab. The researchers initially found that the loss of function of HOMER2 gene caused by this mutation led to changes in hair cells in the lateral line organ of the zebrafish, which detects movement in the surrounding water. In an email Ann sent to the family members who participated in the research she referenced what researchers did next in their study of mice.
“When (the researchers) did a &#8220;knockdown&#8221; of the HOMER2 gene (made it completely non-functional), the mice developed an early onset hearing loss. It was progressive and started in the high frequencies first, just like our family,” she told her family.
“Our data offer novel insights into gene pathways essential for normal auditory function and the maintenance of cochlear hair cells,” according to the paper’s authors. For Ann the finding was both illuminating for her own family’s condition, but also interesting from her point of view as a scientist. “I have a sense of wonder at how this study illustrates the unity of life, with changes in the lateral line organ in fish confirming the functional effect of the mutation,” she said. Ann adds that other families may be able to use 23andMe tests to help identify the cause of some genetic trait or condition.
For Ann the finding was both illuminating for her own family’s condition, but also interesting from her point of view as a scientist.
“I have a sense of wonder at how this study illustrates the unity of life, with changes in the lateral line organ in fish confirming the functional effect of the mutation,” she said. Ann adds that other families may be able to use 23andMe tests to help identify the cause of some genetic trait or condition.
The candidate mutation is in the HOMER2 gene. Following up on that work, researchers at the University of Iowa did what are called “functional studies” looking at how that specific genetic mutation affected zebrafish and mice in the lab. The researchers initially found that the loss of function of HOMER2 gene caused by this mutation led to changes in hair cells in the lateral line organ of the zebrafish, which detects movement in the surrounding water. In an email Ann sent to the family members who participated in the research she referenced what researchers did next in their study of mice.
“When (the researchers) did a &#8220;knockdown&#8221; of the HOMER2 gene (made it completely non-functional), the mice developed an early onset hearing loss. It was progressive and started in the high frequencies first, just like our family,” she told her family.

Citizen Scientist

Earlier this month, we wrote about <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/jesss-story/">Jess</a>, who with the help of her 23andMe results discovered that 100 years ago her grandfather had been accidentally switched at birth with another baby boy and raised by<div id="attachment_22174" style="width: 236px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22174" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22174 size-medium" 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>Jewish immigrant parents while the baby he was switched with by an Irish Catholic family.

The reason Jess was able to figure this out is because for three years, another woman, Alice Plebuch, was working to unravel her own family mystery. It was Alice who ultimately reached out to Jess asking in an email if she’d learned something unexpected about her ancestry. 


Now we get to hear Alice’s side of this amazing story that has been posted on <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/2015/02/switched-at-birth-unravelling-century_27.html">CeCe Moore’s blog</a>.
Alice was raised to believe that she was almost all Irish on both her mother and father’s side, but after testing with several different DNA testing services she learned that she was actually half Jewish. Her quest to figure out why took years of work, and required testing of several different family members as well as document searches and even creating a database to track all of her the relatives she discovered through testing. It’s instructive to see how careful Alice was with information, knowing that it could be difficult for some family members to digest and wanting to make sure she had all the facts first. Alice’s story
<div id="attachment_22272" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22272" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-200x300.jpg" alt="Alice's father, who turned out to be Sam's biological son." class="size-medium wp-image-22272" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-200x300.jpg 200w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-587x880.jpg 587w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-787x1180.jpg 787w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father.jpg 816w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />Alice&#8217;s father, who turned out to be Sam&#8217;s biological son.</div>
is also informative about how a smart and resourceful person can use genetic testing and other records to uncover hidden family history.
What is also stunning, at least for us here at 23andMe, is that none of this would have – or even could have – come to light without genetic testing.


If Alice and Jess hadn’t tested there really wouldn’t have been any other way to uncover this hidden history. Even for CeCe – a genetic genealogists with <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/p/about-me.html">years of experience</a> unraveling countless family stories – that Alice and Jess were able to figure this out was hard to believe.

The Other Side of the Story

Like all good photographers Alan Babbitt sees what’s invisible to most of us.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22262" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-300x300.jpeg" alt="Alan B" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-300x300.jpeg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-150x150.jpeg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-768x768.jpeg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-271x271.jpeg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-372x372.jpeg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B-574x574.jpeg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Alan-B.jpeg 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
With a steady hand and a willingness to go almost anywhere for a good shot, Alan spent decades turning his lens on people and places to create images he thought would draw the viewer in and tell a story.
“I’d call it street photography,” he said. “I wanted to document what’s around me.”
But when his steady hand began to fail him in 2003, he thought he’d lost what defined him as a photographer.
“First my thumb started twitching,” he said.
<h6>Parkinson&#8217;s Photographer</h6>
Then the tremors became more pronounced. After seeing a neurologist, he got a diagnosis that shook him to his core – Alan learned he had Parkinson’s disease.
“It was devastating,” he said.
He was a still photographer, he liked to say, but he couldn’t keep his camera from shaking. Alan drifted into depression, and for a time stopped taking photos all together.

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The difficult news was compounded by a side effect of the disease. Parkinson’s causes chemical changes in the brain that can lead to depression. Ironically when Alan began taking an anti-depressant, it compounded his problem, one of the drug’s side effects included tremors.
“It was hard,” he said.
It felt like the passion of his life – the thing Alan had been doing since he was a kid with his first camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye – was slipping away.
<h6>Seeing Anew</h6>
And then Alan saw something that no one else could see.
“It was almost by accident,” he said.
In Las Vegas, he went out one evening with his camera. He was taking photos in the low light, frustrated by every image being out-of-focus.
“But you know the beauty of digital cameras is you can see things instantly,” Alan said.
As he looked at the photos on the camera, he was suddenly struck by the blurry images his shaky hands were taking. It was one of those a-ha moments.
<h6>Unstill Photography</h6>
He decided to push it one step further, clicking off the flash, slowing the shutter speed down, and turning his small point-and-shoot digital camera back at the neon lit streets of Las Vegas. Instead of trying to deny what was happening to him, Alan made his Parkinson’s part of how he made his images.
“After a couple years of fighting my tremor and trying to work around it, I had the notion to just let go and let it do its thing,” Alan said. “The camera quickly showed me I was onto something.”
Just as he’d always done as a good photographer, Alan captured what was invisible to most of us. And thus the creation of what he now calls his “Un-Still Photography.” Instead of trying to steady his hand, the tremors were part of his creative process, generating the swirls and whirls of light that offered unique and arresting images of the world around him.
<h6>New Possibilities</h6>
His epiphany in Las Vegas energized him and he folded that feeling into how the diagnosis itself had changed him. His priorities changed, so did his goals and his notion of what he wanted out of life.
“The world and everything in it became new and fresh and the possibilities were endless,” Alan said.
From that moment in <a href="http://www.abproductions.com/las_vegas/las_vegas.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Las Vegas</a>, Alan has begun to push his <a href="http://www.abproductions.com/moving_landscapes/moving_landscapes.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Un-Still Photography”</a> into other unexpected arenas including sports photography, particularly <a href="http://www.abproductions.com/ballpark/ballpark_ss.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">baseball</a>. The images he captures including the swirl of a batter’s swing, or the buzzing color of the crowds in the stadium, you can’t see in most sports images.
For Alan, who joined 23andMe’s Parkinson’s research community almost six years ago, his condition has become something that he is embracing.
“It’s turning a negative into a positive,” he said.
That’s what also motivated him to join 23andMe and contribute to research.
“If they can learn something from me about this disease that can help someone else then I’m all for it,” he said.
Check out some of Alan’s images on <a href="http://abproductions.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">his website</a>.

Steady On

Jessica has a black and white photo of her grandfather, Phil, standing next to her great grandfather, Sam.
In the photo, both father and son are staring into the camera and smiling. Now after uncovering something hidden about her ancestry, the photo takes on a new meaning.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22174" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg" alt="Phil and 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" />
Phil, in a white t-shirt with his hair slicked back, towers over his dad and has a pretty distinctive chin dimple and big ears. His dad, Sam, with a gap-toothed grin and his sparse hair sticking up all over, has a very different set to his chin than his son.
The photo is an old one, something Jessica had looked at many times before. But after getting a message from another 23andMe user, Jessica realized something that was staring right at her. The two men – her grandfather and his father – couldn’t look more different.

<h6>Hidden Ancestry</h6>
Jessica’s fascinating post<a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/"> “And Who Would’ve Thought…,”</a> drew us in like few others. We won’t ruin the story for you. You need to read it yourself.
But in a brief exchange about her post, Jessica, who writes the<a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/"> “Strange Kind of Pilgrim”</a> blog, said she learned something that might have remained hidden if she hadn’t tested with 23andMe.
“I&#8217;m really thankful that this all came to light while there was still a chance of finding out what really happened,” she said. “I feel like, very slowly, I&#8217;m gaining some roots, and I&#8217;m grateful that I will have these stories and this information to pass down to my children so they can know where they came from.”
<h6>What Does it Mean?</h6>
Reading her story conjures up all sorts of questions about our upbringing, our ancestry and our identity. Your biology and your upbringing make up who you are, but which is more important? How much of what we are is dependent on our biology and how much on our ancestry?<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22176" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-300x267.jpeg" alt="Jess photo" width="300" height="267" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-300x267.jpeg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-768x683.jpeg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-1024x911.jpeg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-880x783.jpeg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-1180x1050.jpeg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo.jpeg 1861w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“The way you&#8217;re raised and the family who raises you can influence who you are in a big way, but I think the biology is always there,” said Jessica.
Jessica graciously let us post an excerpt of her story below, but you really should read the whole piece on<a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/"> her blog here</a>. Let us know what you think.
<h6>“And Who Would’ve Thought…It Figures”</h6>
 “In October I decided, rather on a whim, to order a genetics test from 23andMe.  It’s a company that compares your DNA to populations all over the world and lets you know where your ancestors likely hailed from.  I didn’t do this because I doubted my parentage at all (did you hear that, Mom?  I believe you.  Maybe other people who see us together assume I’m adopted, but I do not.  ), but I wanted to see my father’s side of the family tree more clearly.
“My dad passed away when I was very young.  His mother passed when he was very young, and his father died almost exactly two years after Dad did.  So while I had a vague idea of the Benson family heritage as communicated to me by my mother and aunt, I still felt a bit rootless.  I knew we were Russian and Polish Jews, but that’s it (and to be honest, I wasn’t even sure how Polish we were.  I came across a family tree partly filled out in my baby book, and it traces my paternal grandfather’s heritage to Russia and my paternal grandmother’s heritage to Turkey, but it went no farther back than that.)
….
“Fast forward to December: The results came in, and they were…surprising.  I was on the phone with my mom at the time, and I think the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m Irish?!” … I wasn’t supposed to be Irish (or British).  Or Western European at all.  I was supposed to be a Russian, Polish Jew.  I was flummoxed.  My mom was flummoxed.  My aunt was flummoxed.  I really like the word “flummoxed.”  So descriptive.
…
“Frustratingly, my search for answers had only turned up another mystery.  Even more infuriating, I couldn’t see a way of solving it.  The pertinent players were all long dead.  I could only figure that someone had fooled around on somebody in my family’s recent history and gotten away with a doozy of a lie.  
…
“One of the features of 23andMe is that they match you up with possible DNA relatives.  I have a whole list of 3rd to 4th and beyond possible cousins who share small segments of my DNA.  But my closest relative in the system was a predicted second cousin, who I only knew as P.  I didn’t contact P because I have nearly crippling social anxiety, and it’s a bit of an awkward conversation to initiate (Hi, I think we might be related.  Do you have any idea how?)  I hate awkward conversations like I hate the Patriots.  The antipathy runs true.
“This is all kind of important because a few days ago (has it really only been a few days?  What a short, strange trip it’s been) I received an email, not from P himself but from his cousin, A.  I’m so grateful that A was brave enough to ask those awkward first questions.  She asked if I had any known connections to the [Name removed]   family, and I answered that I didn’t.  I had never heard of the [family].  And then, interestingly, she asked me if I had expected my genetics results to report a sizable Ashkenazi component.  I had expected it, I told her, but it turns out, I’m not very much Ashkenazi.  Instead, I am unexpectedly Irish.  It’s all very mysterious, I confided.  And that’s when everything started to get a little weird.” 
 (READ THE REST OF THE STORY <a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/and-who-wouldve-thought-it-figures/">HERE</a>)

Jess’s Story

In the fading black-and-white photo Diane Silberman Berger is about four years old and walking next to her mother along a sidewalk in downtown Spokane.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22106" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane-300x216.jpg" alt="Diane" width="300" height="216" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane-300x216.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane-768x554.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane-1024x739.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane-880x635.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane-1180x851.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diane.jpg 1930w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />


Taken by a street photographer in the late 1930s, the picture shows Diane holding tightly to her mother’s hand as they talk. It’s one of the few reminders Diane has of her mom.


“My mother died when I was nine years old,” she says holding the edge of the snapshot.


A profound loss, but it was made that much worse because Diane also lost complete contact with her mother’s family – all the aunts, uncles and cousins who made up some of the happy memories of her early childhood.
Despite decades of trying, Diane was never was able to find her mother’s family and reconnect.
Eventually, Diane gave up looking, thinking that perhaps that connection was lost forever.
Then one day her daughter looked at her 23andMe results, and that 70 years of longing to find her family ended.


“It’s just a miracle, it’s an absolute miracle,” said Diane. “I cry tears of happiness all the time now.”
<div id="attachment_22104" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22104" class="size-medium wp-image-22104" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barrie-and-Diane-300x200.jpg" alt="Diane and her daughter Barrie." width="300" height="200" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barrie-and-Diane-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barrie-and-Diane-768x513.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barrie-and-Diane-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barrie-and-Diane-880x588.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barrie-and-Diane-1180x789.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Diane and her daughter Barrie.</div>
<h6>The Separation</h6>
Diane’s story starts back in the middle of the Depression, when her mother and father were forced to move the family from their home in Connecticut to Washington State for a job. Diane’s mother had a big family, and Diane remembers visits with her aunts, uncles and cousins.  Her mother was close to her siblings, but when her mother died suddenly in 1941 Diane lost contact.
The reasons were in part because of geography, but also because of the war and because Diane’s father remarried. Diane loved her stepmother and she had a stepbrother with whom she was close, but she said she always felt that something was missing.
“People who have family don’t know what this is like,” Diane said, “(but) I sort of felt like an outsider sometimes.”
<h6>Starting the Search</h6>
As an adult Diane started searching for her mother’s family on her own with the information that she had. It wasn’t much, a name of one of her uncles, Sam Kaplan.
“Over the years we hired detectives and genealogists to try to track the family down but my mom had so little information, we eventually gave up,” said Diane’s daughter, Barrie.
And that would have been it if Barrie hadn’t tested with 23andMe. An early adopter, Barrie had tested out of curiosity. It had been awhile since she’d looked at her results when in 2014 she logged in, and noticed she’d gotten messages from someone inquiring about a close relative match. Sending messages back and forth, Barrie and her close match – Bram Boroson –tried to figure out how they were related.
<div id="attachment_22102" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22102" class="size-medium wp-image-22102" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-300x229.jpg" alt="Bram Boroson" width="300" height="229" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-300x229.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-768x585.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-1024x780.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-880x670.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-1180x899.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram.jpg 1680w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Bram Boroson</div>
<h6>Finding Bram</h6>
Bram, who is a physics professor, said he signed up mostly because he was simply interested in getting a DNA test from a scientific point of view.
“Only later did I find out about this whole social aspect of it,” he said. “That you could be connected with people who are related to you. ”
It fascinated him. And seeing the connection with Barrie, who is a first cousin once removed, made him want to know more.
“I just saw that there was someone out there who was sharing, you know, more chunks of DNA than anyone else,” said Bram.
<h6>Making Connections</h6>
So he reached out. He and Barrie began exchanging bits of information trying to learn more about their family connection. They told each other a little bit about their family histories, where family members had lived over the generations. It’s when they shared some of their family names and Bram mentioned the name Kaplan that Barrie’s heart skipped a beat. She called her mom.
“What was your mother Martha’s last name?” Barrie asked. “Kaplan.”
Barrie didn’t want to jump the gun. She wanted to be sure. She got some more information from Bram and learned from Bram that his mother’s maiden name was the same as her grandmother’s maiden name.  Then she talked to Bram’s mother, Rebecca who remembered her father talking about Barrie’s grandmother, Diane’s mom. That’s when she knew, said Barrie. She called her mom.
“Are you sitting down?” she asked. “I found them.”
<h6>Elation</h6>
Diane was overwhelmed.
“Are you sure?” she asked.

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				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Family-Tree1-150x150.jpg" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-3-22113" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Family-Tree1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Family-Tree1-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Family-Tree1-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Family-Tree1-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Family-Tree1-980x980.jpg 980w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />
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				Filling in the family tree.
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				Diane, second from right, with her cousins from right Marilyn, Rebecca and Miriam on her right.
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				<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Cousins-looking-at-old-photo-150x150.jpg" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="" aria-describedby="gallery-3-22115" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Cousins-looking-at-old-photo-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Cousins-looking-at-old-photo-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Cousins-looking-at-old-photo-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Cousins-looking-at-old-photo-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Cousins-looking-at-old-photo-980x980.jpg 980w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />
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				Cousins, Rebecca, Diane and Miriam at the Kaplan reunion in New York City.
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				Rebecca, Diane and Miriam.
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				Kaplan family photos.
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Barrie was sure, and she walked her mother through the connections. She told her mom what Rebecca, Diane’s first cousin and Bram’s mother, had said. Rebecca had said that her dad described Diane’s mother as his “favorite sister.” And Diane and Barrie learned that during all those years, it wasn’t just Diane who was looking for her mother’s lost family; they were looking for her too. Rebecca’s sister Miriam tears up when she talks about it.
“My sister and I grew up knowing that we had people in Seattle, or in Washington State,” Miriam said. “We only knew that my father told us that his sister Martha had a child before she died.”
<h6>Comfort in Knowing</h6>
But they didn’t know how to find Diane. Hearing all this helped Diane. Diane also learned more about her mother’s family and she got to see photos of her mother and her mother’s siblings. She was so young when her mother died that she actually didn’t know for sure how many aunts and uncles she had. It turns out her mother had six brothers and sisters. And they each had children of their own, who are now spread across the country. The oldest first cousin is 87, just a few years older than Diane – the youngest, a 22 month-old second cousin. Barrie said she’d always thought she had a small family.
“But I guess I was wrong,” she said. The “Kaplan Kin” set up a Facebook page to connect all the branches of the family and then in November of 2014, just before Thanksgiving, they gathered in New York City. They invited Diane and Barrie to come.
“It’s not really a reunion for us, but a union because we were meeting for the first time,” said Barrie. Diane and Barrie met Bram, his mother Rebecca and Miriam, Rebecca’s sister.
The Kaplans welcomed Diane, Barrie and extended Seattle relatives into the family.
“That desire for a connection was there but without the DNA it wouldn’t have happened,” said Bram.
At the cafe in New York where they met, the family members sat and talked about their parents and grandparents who had long ago passed away. They tried to fill in the some of the gaps in the family history, mapped out the family tree and took snapshots of their own. For Diane who had yearned for so long to reconnect with her family, it was a miracle of science.
“We have this family now, this big welcoming family,” she said.

Stories — Page 15