Liz Kellner loves puzzles, but piecing together the hardest one of her life required a little help from 23andMe.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-169x300.jpg" alt="2014-10-15 09.17.15" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21930" width="169" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-169x300.jpg 169w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-577x1024.jpg 577w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-496x880.jpg 496w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15.jpg 640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 169px) 100vw, 169px" />
“This was the first time I was one of the pieces,” said the 48 year-old entrepreneurship specialist.
Abandoned as an infant, Liz said her origins were always a mystery to her.
She’d been found on a cold December day in Minneapolis almost 50 years ago. She was only a few days old when a rookie cop discovered her in an apartment laundry room wrapped in a kimono.
Looking back now, Liz doesn’t see her story as a tragedy – quite the opposite.
“I was lucky enough to have a birth mother who, when she realized that she couldn&#8217;t take care of me, left me somewhere safe, and warm, given that it was in December and in Minnesota.”
Then there was the young cop who found her, the nurses who cared for her at the hospital, the foster mother who took her in, and the loving parents who ultimately adopted her.
Liz says she was fortunate. If she hadn’t been abandoned she never would have had the wonderful parents who raised her, or the younger sister who was born nine years after her adoption. Her family, she said, is the “best gift ever.” 

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				Liz with her parents.
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Liz wouldn’t want to change any of that even if she could. But that never altered her desire to know more about herself. It never changed wanting to know about where she came from or why she’d been abandoned as a baby.
Over the years, Liz searched for answers. She always knew she’d been adopted. As she was able to piece together the story of how she was found, she also did her best to find and thank those who’d been so good to her.
“Sort of paying it forward, you know,” she said.
Liz found and thanked Officer Jannsen, one of the police officers who found her. She also tracked down the foster mom who cared for her until her adoption and thanked her for taking such good care of her and being a part of the system.
They all remembered Liz.
“I guess I made an impression,” she said.
But the trail ended there, until, that is, she tested with 23andMe.
Initially the most important part of her results had to do with her ancestry. Liz quickly found out that despite being raised a Catholic, her heritage was 100 percent Ashkenazi Jew. Surprising for Liz, but the real surprised didn’t come until the summer of 2014 when Liz signed into her 23andMe account after not looking at it for awhile. She immediately saw something she’d never seen before.
“”I log in and …(the) screen says I have a cousin, and an aunt, and a half-sister.”
Stunned and thinking it was a mistake, she quickly logged out. She waited and then logged back in.
“Yup, still there,” Liz said.
It was the first time she’d ever been able to identify close biological relatives, in this case using 23andMe’s DNA Relatives tool.
This alone was huge, and Liz didn’t dare hope that she’d be able to answer the questions that have been there her whole life about who her mother or father was.
But she was also skeptical. Her first thought was that it was a mistake, so she emailed her sister, and her best friend, who is a bit of a genetics buff. Then she sent a message with her data to a friend who is a genetics professor. She wanted to know what they thought. Was it correct? Did she really just find her first close blood relatives?
Her sister’s response was immediate: “Oh My God!”
Then the professor weighed in.
“Congratulations, you have more family.”
Liz felt her head spinning.
Then things got really interesting.
Liz connected with her newly identified aunt, Abbieann. Abbieann had also been adopted. As they talked they realized that rather than Abbie being her aunt, they were actually half-sisters and they shared one other sister, who was also adopted. Because Liz’s two new-found biological sisters had been adopted in a more traditional way, they had birth certificates with names on them.
The two had used that to find their biological mother, who is also Liz’s mother and who was still alive. Liz’s full sister had also tested. So in a short time Liz went from having one sister to eight siblings, and identifying her birth parents, who were both still alive.
“So unreal,” she said. “There’s no way to describe my emotions. I think my heart stopped.”
While this was way more than Liz had ever hoped to learn, the new connections brought up difficult questions and histories. Her birth mother is still alive but has dementia. Liz’s siblings who share her father worried about the impact meeting Liz would have on their mom. Cautiously Liz moved forward and introduced herself to her new found cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings, most who seemed to welcome her into the family, even though “they didn&#8217;t even know I existed,” she said.
Liz also met her father, who had also been unaware of her birth. When they finally met, Liz saw in him some of her own quirks and habits.
Sitting across from him, she had the same strange sensation she had when she sat with her sisters. Here she was looking at someone who shared features and mannerisms with her, someone who looked totally familiar, but who was also a stranger.
“To sit and talk with someone who is your sibling, or your biological parent, at age 48, who you have never met &#8230; incredible,” Liz said.
This had all been more than she’d hoped for, but the encounters also left her with some lingering questions that may never get answered. She couldn’t ask her biological mother about what happened. Even if she’d been able to ask her mother those questions, she’s not sure she would be able to tell her why she’d been left in a laundry room, what day she was actually born or whether through all those years, her mother ever thought about the child she abandoned.
Liz’s biological family’s story is a complicated one, filled with emotional landmines. Her biological parents ultimately got married, but that was almost 19 years after Liz’s birth. Her biological father said he didn’t know of her existence or that of her two sisters who share the same mother. He had raised another family during that time, and only married Liz’s biological mother after his first wife passed away. As Liz figured all this out, she felt compelled to protect some of those family members who didn’t know about her and this complicated history. But that also meant that she didn’t get the opportunity to ask some of the questions she wanted to ask.
“At least I was conceived out of love,” she said.
She felt lucky to have made these connections. They’ve triggered all this thought about nature and nurture, she said. She found that she could see many of her traits in her new found siblings and birth father. Making all these connections helped her explain a little bit more about herself as well, she said.
Liz said she doesn’t know what will come from all this, but learning this history and meeting her biological family has helped her. Liz doesn’t know if the relationships with her biological family will endure, the bond she has with her family hasn’t changed and only become stronger.
Liz said she shared her story, in part, because she and her new found sisters believe that there may be at least one other sibling out there who Liz wants to find. She believes her sibling would have been adopted in the Chicago area through Jewish Services in late 1954 or early 1955.
Liz is still trying grapple with what these new connections have meant to her.
“So unreal,” she said. “(There is) no way to describe the emotions.”

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Putting It Together

We’ve heard some incredible stories from 23andMe’s customers, but Menachem Bodner’s brought us to the edge of our seats.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents-259x300.jpeg" alt="Menachem's parents" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21940" width="259" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents-259x300.jpeg 259w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents.jpeg 408w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px" />
A Holocaust survivor, Menachem has been searching for his twin brother, ever since the two were separated in Auschwitz when they both were only four.


Although his search is not yet over, thanks to some incredible detective work by the genealogist Ayana KimRon and testing with 23andMe, Menachem is a step closer having found first cousins in California who were able to give him more details about his mother and even share with him a photo of his parents. The first picture he’d ever seen of them.
The story of his search is documented <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4589762,00.html">here</a>. (Some of the details of how Ayana used Menachem’s 23andMe results can help anyone doing genealogy with 23andMe.)
Ayana first spoke with us early this year, telling us about Menachem&#8217;s search after 23andMe contacted her with an offer to help.
She had already done an incredible amount of work, using Nazi archives, immigration records, documents from Auschwitz and other sources to piece together as much as she could about Menachem. She found his name at birth – Elias Gottesman, his brother’s name Jeno Gottesman, their place of birth in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary, and the names of their parents, Roza and Ignatz Gottesman.
Ayana also tracked down what happened to Menachem’s mother, Roza, who survived Auschwitz only to die at the hands of anti-Semitic rioters in her hometown in 1946. But from there the trail ran cold.
Menachem, who was adopted by a couple who survived Au
<div id="attachment_21943" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21943" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachem-and-Ayana-300x249.jpg" alt="Menachem, with Ayana, seeing a photo of his parents for the first time." class="size-medium wp-image-21943" width="300" height="249" />Menachem, with Ayana, seeing a photo of his parents for the first time.</div>schwitz and then immigrated to Israel, has never given up and he has found someone who is equally committed in Ayana.
Using 23andMe results, Ayana was able to help Menachem connect to three first cousins in California.
&nbsp;

“I knew about their existence but DNA was a miraculous short cut,” Ayana said.


Their mother, Menachem’s mother’s sister who immigrated to the United States before the war, had told them about the family and sister she left behind. They in turn were able to tell Menachim about his mother, and share with him a photo of his parents, giving him the first opportunity to see an image of them.
Ayana shared with us a photo of him seeing his parents for the first time.
Menachem is still searching for his brother. To help in his search Ayana has set up a Facebook page <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/A7734/499971010060858" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.

Auschwitz Survivor Finding Family

A few weeks ago Vox did a piece about a 23andMe customer, who at 50 found his biological sister and his mother using the service. He’d been adopted. His sister never knew her mother had had a son that she<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000015521781Small-300x199.jpg" alt="Troubled Water" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21718" width="300" height="199" /> put up for adoption. Their initial meeting was joyous, which we wrote about, but in the ensuing years their relationship soured. For adoptees using 23andMe – as well as the biological family who they may connect with – these reunions can be either joyous or fraught with anxiety. After the story in Vox ran, one of our customers wrote about her own experience complete with both the good and the bad. Her story includes the promise and pitfalls of connecting with lost family. 
By Anonymous
A year and half ago, 23andMe connected me with my maternal half-sister. This connection began as the stuff of fairytales but quickly devolved into something akin to an episode of “Mean Girls.”
We had formed an immediate bond over Facebook, Skype, texting, phone calls, and emails, communicating at a pace that over ran every other aspect of our lives.
It was beautiful and exhilarating and fun, but everything is at 100 miles per hour. Until you crash. Within two months of our connection, she had cast me out of her life, showing me the rage on the flip side of her love. You rarely end up where you started, though. 
<h6>A Ending and a Beginning</h6>
While my bond with her came to a heartbreaking end, I now embrace that separation as the catalyst for the amazing turn of events over the last year.
Like many adoptees, my identity has been a queasy dysphoria, a sense of separateness where connectedness was supposed to be. I grew up with a family in which no one looked, sounded, and thought like me. My identity was pockmarked with isolation and a knowledge that part of me existed in the shadows.
My 30-year search for biological family was not so much a search for “family,” as a search for myself. I wondered if I would die without knowing this part of myself. I was even more terrified that, when I did find her and other family, they would dislike me. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small-300x223.jpg" alt="Old photos" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21717" width="300" height="223" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small-300x223.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small-768x572.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small.jpg 803w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<h6>Burdened by History</h6>
Everyone has a story. I did, and so did my sister. She grew up with our mother, who was controlling and destructive. Although our mother had plenty when she died, my sister inherited nothing but a box of old pictures and a fear of abandonment.
Our mother told my sister about me two decades earlier. She told me that, by the time we met, she had a vivid fantasy of the kind of person I would be. The problem was, her fantasy did not resemble who I am.
Neither of us was really prepared for reality.
<h6>Virtual Connections v. Real Ones</h6>
Cyberspace offers distance and deniability, even when the conversation seems never-ending. I still smile when I remember the first night we connected on Facebook, a six-hour chat with her, her husband, and my original family, while I accepted friend requests from total strangers and carried on open conversations between all of us on our pages. For five weeks, the pace was breathless. One of our aunts privately warned me later to slow down and be cautious, but I paid her no heed.
I was like Sally Field clutching her Oscar — I found my sister, and she liked me. She really liked me!
<h6>I Love You</h6>
When we finally met, I think I lost her at “hello.” I just was not what she expected, and the scars left behind by life with our mother became too much for her to overcome. During the week, I repeatedly begged her to open up about what was bothering her . After I returned home in another state, I called to tell her I had arrived safely. Despite the tension of the week, she told me, “I love you,” and hung up.
Within a week, I received an email from her telling me that me that we were not compatible. I begged her to give us more time, time to become family. I received two more emails, each written with blades more sharp than the last. My worst fear had been realized. I found my sister, and she hated me.
She really hated me.
<h6>Grieving </h6>
I grieved for my sister like she died. There was a time I would have done anything to repair the rift, but that time is long passed. There is a saying that everyone who comes into your life is there for a reason, but not everyone is supposed to stay. She may not have stayed in my life, but she did introduce me to our aunts and uncles with whom I have wonderful relationships.
She also went on the painful journey of digging through that box of pictures our mother left to find some idea of who my father was. During those wonderful weeks before we met, she found his picture and name.
<h6>One Search Leads to Another</h6>
Heartbroken after our tragic week, I turned my attention to finding the one person I had never intended to find. I found my father in a day, and I talked to him the next night.
In the last year, I have fallen in love with my father, the man who I grew up believing was heartless and cruel. Growing up, I never once pictured his face my head, but I only needed to look in the mirror. I look just like him. I have a wonderful stepmom and two younger paternal siblings, a brother who will one day conquer the world and a sister who is a rock. I traveled to meet them for the first time this summer.
<h6>It Was All Worth It</h6>
Being with them is home for me. I am forming an especially unique bond with my paternal sister. She is a young’un, 18 years my junior. During our hilarious talks in her living room that week, however, her old soul and my younger spirit found a common resting place in the middle somewhere.  She has asked me to come back for Christmas, and I am going. I found my sister, after all, and she likes me. She really likes me!
As adoptees, we wait so long to fill this gap in our lives. It is natural for us to believe that the first relative we meet is the destination, rather than one more step in the journey. Despite how things ended with my maternal sister, I would not trade those first happy weeks for anything.
And, without them, I never would have found my paternal family. In the end, it was all worth it, after all.

Not Everyone is Expected to Stay

By A.J. Jacobs
I’d always wanted a big family. A few years ago, I got a huge one. After receiving my results back from 23andMe, I discovered I had more than a thousand genetic cousins in their database.
This prompted the question: What could I do with all these new relatives? My answer: Maybe it’d be interesting to meet my whole family. Throw a party for them.
So that’s exactly what I’m doing: Next summer, I’m hosting what I hope will be the largest, most inclusive and most entertaining <a href="http://globalfamilyreunion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">family reunion</a>, ever.
There will be talks from scientists and entertainers about every aspect of the family, including DNA, genealogy and personal stories. There will be music, comedy, games, exhibits, food — and the world’s largest family photo. And there’s a good chance you’re one of the cousins on my invitation list.
To back up: I’m an editor at Esquire magazine and <a href="http://ajjacobs.com/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">author of several books</a>. My books usually involve projects that overwhelm my life and test the patience of my lovely wife. I wrote a book called <a href="http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Year of Living Biblically</a> where I tried to follow all of the rules of the Bible, from the 10 commandments to growing a ridiculously bushy beard. I <a href="http://ajjacobs.com/books/drop-dead-healthy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote another</a> where I tried to become as healthy as possible by following all the medical advice in the world (results varied).
I’d always been interested in family history. My father was an amateur genealogist, and, when I was a kid, he traced our line back to the 17th century, thanks to the records kept about our ancestor, a famous rabbi named the Vilna Gaon.
I got hooked again as an adult after I got my 23andMe results, as well as another thought-provoking email. That email was from a man who claimed to have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including me, his 12th cousin. At first, I didn’t believe him. I thought he was going to ask me to wire him $10,000 to a Nigerian bank account. 
<iframe loading="lazy" width="560" height="315" src="https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/aj_jacobs_the_world_s_largest_family_reunion_we_re_all_invited.html" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
But it turns out it’s for real. He’s part of a new breed of genealogists who are creating monster mega family trees. These trees are built using both DNA test results combined with a crowdsourced collaborative Wikipedia-like model of family history. You have thousands of people working on the same tree all over the world using websites such as Geni, WikiTree and FamilySearch.
Right now, the biggest family tree on the Internet — and one I happen to be part of &#8212; is mind-bogglingly huge. It’s got 79 million people in 160 countries. This tree has every U.S. president. It has everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Albert Einstein. The links are often lengthy and sometimes through marriage, but it’s fun to figure them out. (Abraham Lincoln is my aunt’s first cousin 8 times removed’s wife’s second great nephew!)
And that’s when I decided to see if we could gather all these relatives together, at least the living ones. I want to remind people that we are, in fact, one big family; that we do share 99.9 percent of our DNA, and that we need to treat each other with a little more kindness.
The event will be on the grounds of the World’s Fair in New York on June 6, 2015. It will be a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s (I chose Alzheimer’s because 60 million members of our human family suffer from it). It will be the subject of a documentary by Morgan Spurlock, the man who did Supersize Me. And it will cost $20 or less.
The good folks at 23andMe will be participating. (In fact, 23andMe lists me as genetic cousins with the company’s co-founder Anne Wojcicki and public relations director Catherine Afarian).
A Global Family Tree isn’t just a neat parlor trick — it’s got important repercussions. In a few years, we will likely have almost all seven billion members of the human family on a single tree. This will have huge scientific benefits. In fact, there’s a team of scientists at MIT studying the tree right now to see how traits and diseases are passed down. It’s also the best learning tool I’ve ever come across. When my kids realize they’re cousins with Albert Einstein, they want to know about him. It enmeshes us in history.
I’ve reached out to some of my cousins on 23andMe already to tell them about the Global Family Reunion. Admittedly, there have been some skeptics. “Is this a scam?” wrote a fifth cousin.
But I’ve also received tons of some enthusiastic RSVP’s. At one point, I sent an email to a cousin whose name was hidden only to discover he was a friend of mine from college.
If you can’t make it to New York, there will be branch parties around the world. Go to GlobalFamilyReunion.com to find out more. And, for 23andMe customers, please share your ancestry data with me on 23andMe. I want you in the family. 
A.J. Jacobs is an editor at large at Esquire magazine, a commentator on NPR and columnist for Mental Floss magazine. The author of several books, including &#8220;Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection,” AJ is currently helping to build a family tree of the entire world and holding the biggest family reunion ever in 2015.

A.J. Jacobs

All In The Family

Jayne Berry’s adoptive parents let her know she was special. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg" alt="23andMe_Logo_blog" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-6586" 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" /> 
As a child, her parents told her: “Most children are just given to their parents, but you were chosen to be our daughter.”
Jayne felt lucky to have the parents she had, but because she never wanted to hurt them, she waited to ask more about where she came from. Who was her biological mother and why she’d been put up for adoption?
After testing with 23andMe and connecting with a niece, she finally got answers, met three full brothers and one half brother and learned about her now deceased mother. Her story was featured on Lexington, Kentucky television station and the local paper.
We asked if we could share her story with our readers.
“I would be honored,” Jayne said. “My goal is to help those who are still searching.”
Check it out.
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Sharing Her Story

When Kelli read the message, she froze thinking that her next move would likely change her life forever.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-300x300.jpg" alt="KelliODonnell2" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21525" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-1180x1180.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/KelliODonnell2.jpg 1304w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
It was a note from a fellow 23andMe customer, who’d been identified as a second cousin. She had sent Kelli a message asking to share family information. The cousin – who Kelli never knew before – stated that she’d like to connect.
Kelli hesitated.
She was raised as the only child of a single mom and knew nothing about her dad. Once when Kelli was five, she’d asked her mother, “Why don’t I have a father?”
Her mother immediately broke down.
“My mom started crying and said, ‘That’s just the way it is.’”
It was so painful that Kelli simply never asked her mother again. It took 30 years and then, testing with 23andMe for Kelli to answer that long nagging question. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-300x300.jpg" alt="welcome" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21519" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/welcome.jpg 960w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“I never asked again because our relationship was so perfect, and I (wrongly) assumed that either something bad had happened to my mom or when she had told my father she was pregnant he wanted nothing to do with me,” Kelli said.
But then she made a connection to a second cousin using 23andMe, and together they learned the truth.
It all started because Kelli wanted to use 23andMe to learn a little more about herself.
“I never dreamed of what would happen next.”
Kelli decided to go ahead and connect with her second cousin and wrote her back. She told her that she didn’t know anything about her father. That her mother had gotten pregnant as a 19 year-old college freshman, then dropped out of school and moved back in with her parents to have Kelli.
After filling her cousin in on her story, Kelli gave her a way out.
“I gave her the option of ending contact with me,” she said.
But the opposite happened. Her cousin contacted her own parents, who said they wanted to help. They were thrilled that they found Kelli.
“And even if my father didn’t want to know me, they did,” Kelli said.
She also wanted to make sure her own family was OK with what she was doing.
“Probably one of the hardest things I had to do was tell (my mom),” Kelli said.
All the pain of the past was gone. Her mother and her family supported what she was doing.
Kelli had grown up in her grandparents’ home, with her mother and her aunt, who was 14 when Kelli was born. It was a large and loving family, and Kelli had always been close to her mom and her aunt, who was more like a sister.
As she connected with her cousin, the two began what amounted to a game of detective. Her new found cousins got tested, and they were able to see which side the family Kelli was related to. Then using what they knew about where Kelli’s mom had gone to college, they figured out which male cousins may have been at Penn State around that time.
Then they tested who they thought was Kelli’s grandfather. He was and that lead them to Kelli’s biological father.
“His and his family&#8217;s reactions were amazing, they were so excited to know about me,” Kelli said, who received messages from new family members welcoming her into the family.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/DSC_0582-300x201.jpg" alt="DSC_0582" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21518" width="300" height="201" />
When her biological father’s test results came in, his sister got him an “It’s a girl” balloon.
Kelli met her new found family in person in June.
“They even surprised me with presents and a cake for my birthday that was coming up, offering to sing to me 36 times to make up for the years they weren&#8217;t there,” she said.
Besides finding her biological father, she now has a new stepmom, a sister, a brother, a niece, grandparents and new uncles, aunts and cousins.
Her mother encouraged her to make the connections and has supported her all the way. Her mother’s father, her &#8220;Papap,&#8221; had passed away a few years ago. He had always been like a father to her, and for a time she felt pangs of guilt. She didn’t want it to appear that she was trying to replace him, but her family assured her that he would’ve approved.
Since connecting with her new found family, Kelli has moved back home to Pittsburgh from Chicago to get to know them better. She’d grown up just 30 miles from them. She’s learned that she and her biological father share an aptitude for math and a love of pizza, and she’s already grown close to him.
“I’d say right now we have a real father-daughter relationship,” Kelli said. “He insists I call him ‘dad,’ invites me to family vacations and we’re getting to know each other.”
She hesitates for a moment and adds:
“He cries sometimes when he thinks of how much of my life he missed, but we’re going forward now,” she said.

It’s a Girl

Jeremy Kuykendall grew up in Texas, went to college there and settled down. He has a good job, is happily married and has two daughters. His life is pretty normal.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-300x225.jpg" alt="Jeremy" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21349" width="300" height="225" />
“I’m just a middle class family man,” said the 38 year-old IT worker.
But the regular trajectory of Jeremy’s life took an extraordinary turn after testing with 23andMe. His results connected him for the first time with a guy named Steven, a man he’d never met, who just happened to be his biological father.
“I am awed by how this happened,” Jeremy said. “The chances of us ever meeting and learning about how we are related would have been impossible without a service like 23andMe.”
<h6>Connecting</h6>
Steven is single, 58, and lives in Fort Worth. His life – working dozens of different jobs, serving in the Army and moving around the country before settling into a job with the Veterans Administration in Fort Worth – has been anything but ordinary. Yet even Steven says connecting with Jeremy has been one of the craziest things that’s ever happened to him.
“I remember telling him on the phone once that I don’t know what to say to him or how to feel,” Steven said. “We’re in uncharted territory here. I know I can’t be a father to him. The best I can do is to be his friend.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-Steven-300x169.jpg" alt="Jeremy &#038; Steven" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21352" width="300" height="169" />
And the two men – who are strangers although they are father and son, have gotten to know each other – they’ve started to become friends.
<h6>Creating a Family Connection</h6>
This sudden connection has probably been most jarring for Steven. While Jeremy always knew he’d been adopted, Steven never knew he’d even fathered a child, and long ago given up on the idea of ever having a family.
“I never got married, never thought about having a family a whole lot honestly,” he said. “I just never got to that point. I was engaged once but I got cold feet and called it off.”
So it was a surprise when he got his results from 23andMe. He’d signed up because he wanted to use 23andMe for his genealogy research, but his results were unexpected.
“It said I had a DNA match with someone who is identified as my son,” Steven said. “It was a shock.”
23andMe’s DNA Relative feature matches customers with other 23andMe users who share DNA. Customers can choose not to take part in DNA Relatives, remain anonymous or opt-out of viewing close relatives. Both Jeremy and Steven had opted in. When Steven saw that he and Jeremy shared 47.5 percent of their DNA, he decided to send him a message via 23andMe.
“I didn’t say much, I think I said ‘it appears as though we’re related and I was wondering where you were born.’”
Steven misread Jeremy’s profile and thought Jeremy was ten years younger than he is. Doing the math, Steven knew he lived in California when at the time Jeremy would have been conceived. Thinking back he tried to figure out who the mother might have been and was at a loss, so he wasn’t sure if the match was real.
While Steven anxiously waited for an answer to his message, Jeremy was suspicious about who he was. Jeremy always knew he’d been adopted, but he’d waited until he was in his 30s, when he was having children of his own to try and make any contact with his biological mother, who he did meet. They got to know each other. He learned she’d gotten pregnant in high school. She’d given Jeremy up for adoption because she was just too young to raise him on her own. But she’d watched him grow up from a distance. Occasionally seeing his sports or school achievements in the local paper. Jeremy’s adoptive mother worked as a nurse in the clinic that his biological mother went to for care, although she never identified herself as his biological mother.
“Our relationship has been positive and amicable,” said Jeremy, who has since also met his two half-sisters.
His mother also shared with him as much information about his biological family as she knew, including, he thought, the name of his biological father, a man she identified as Wayne.
“The stories she told me were not very flattering,” Jeremy said.
Based on all that, Jeremy decided not to reach out to him.
“It was enough to have this good interaction with my ‘Bio-Mom,’” he said.
Then all a sudden Jeremy gets a message from a guy named Steven.
Jeremy had tested with 23andMe because he wanted to know more about his ancestors and from where they came. He didn’t expect anything else, so the message from Steven caught him off guard. He was a bit suspicious.
“I responded: ‘What do you want dude?’”
Before getting the response, Steven had almost given up hope of hearing from Jeremy, he said.
“When I didn’t get an answer back I thought, you know, maybe he already knows who I am or maybe he didn’t know his real father was not his real father or a dozen other reasons why he wouldn’t want to talk to me,” Steven said.
He tried to be philosophical about it, telling himself that, “whatever happens, happens.” But that was easier said than done.
“Anyone would be really curious,” he said. “It would drive you crazy wanting to know.”
Although they both were skeptical that they were indeed father and son, they connected through 23andMe nonetheless. Steven had thought he was in California at the time of Jeremy’s birth, which was in Texas. That was until he learned that Jeremy was born in 1976, 10 years earlier than he thought.
Steven explained to Jeremy that when he was 19 he’d lived in Dallas for nine months and during that time spent about a month in Menard, Texas.
“Now you’re freaking me out,” Jeremy told Steven. “I was born in Menard.’”
He sent Steven an old photo of his birth mother. Steven thought he recognized her, but he wasn’t sure. Jeremy’s mother doesn’t remember Steven, but the dates and timing of everything matched up.
“Look I was a product of my time, a real wild child,” said Steven. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s just the way it was.”
Jeremy and Steven have since met in person. Jeremy looks more like his biological mother, but Steven can see some of his brother in Jeremy.
“They have the some of the same mannerisms,” he said. “He’s real gentle and hardworking like my oldest brother.”
Steven said he’s still trying to get his head around meeting a son he didn’t know he had.
“It’s certainly not a bad thing, mainly because he’s such a wonderful person, highly intelligent, very successful and a great family and everything,” Steven said. “You can tell. He had wonderful adoptive parents.”
And while Steven knows he could never be a true father to his son, he said he thinks the two men will be friends, and that he could get to know his family and Jeremy’s two young children.
“I’d like that,” Steven said.
For Jeremy the experience has reminded him how lucky he was to have had such supportive adoptive parents. But the experience has also left him wondering more about what makes him who he is – how much a role genetics plays versus the environment he grew up in.
“It’s been very positive,” he said. “But I’m struggling with this whole nature versus nurture thing and how much of what we are is genetic and how much is you know influenced by our environment. I’m amazed by how much comes from my blood.”

An Extraordinary Turn

Even as a little girl, Rachel Kilgore wanted to know more about where her ancestors came from, what they looked like, and who they were.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21319" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Rachel-Oslo-300x130.jpg" alt="Rachel-Oslo" width="300" height="130" />
And as she grew, Rachel learned a lot about her family’s past. She learned about her father’s family and their roots in Scotland. But finding the details about her mother’s family eluded her. She knew her great grandmother had come from Norway, but little else.
“For the last ten years I’ve been trying to track my family back to Norway,” Rachel said.


She’d looked at records online, quizzed family members and used genealogical services, but had little luck.
“I thought the best I could hope for was finding some old Census record,” she said.
Then she tried with 23andMe, and connected with a distant cousin who helped her find a living breathing connection to her past.


But before explaining how that all happened, Rachel said she has to go back to just before she tested. She and her boyfriend had planned a vacation in Europe, and Rachel, frustrated because she’d had so little to show for her ancestral search, tagged on a final stop on her trip. She made Oslo, the couple’s last stop in Europe. Maybe, Rachel thought, she couldn’t find out more about her ancestors directly, but at least could see the country.
<div id="attachment_21317" style="width: 212px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21317" class="size-medium wp-image-21317" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Great-grandm_grandpa-202x300.jpg" alt="Rachel's great grandmother and great grandfather." width="202" height="300" />Rachel&#8217;s great grandmother and great grandfather.</div>
While her trip was still a few months off, Rachel had tested with 23andMe. When she got her results, all but one of her DNA Relative matches clustered in different areas of the United States. The one that wasn’t was in Norway.


“So I sent him a message right away,” Rachel said.


Although he was a very distant cousin, he was her only direct living connection to Norway. His name is Henning and although it took some time for him to respond, when he did only two weeks before she was schedule to head to Europe, things happened fast, Rachel said.


“Henning is really into genealogy and had traced his family back to the 1600s so he knew a lot,” Rachel said.
The two exchanged messages. Rachel shared the little information she knew about her family’s roots in Norway and her great grandmother. It was enough for her distant Norwegian cousin to work with. He began tapping his Norwegian genealogical sources.
Within 48 hours the two – with the help of some complete strangers – were able to find the home of her great great grandfather built more than 150 years ago. They found her relatives&#8217; gravesites and she learned that her great grandmother, who had immigrated to the United States so long ago had had seven siblings and not two as she’d always been told. Her Norwegian cousin also helped translate an old document in which her great grandmother had stated why she came to America.
She said she left the bleak prospects in her homeland for the states saying: “I deserve more.”
All of that was amazing to Rachel but what was most thrilling was what her cousin had found out about her living relatives.
In tracking down family grave sites, the two discovered where her great uncle had been buried, and then in a brilliant sleuthing move they found out who had paid for the burial. The answer led Rachel to Eddy, a second cousin once removed.
“He was still living in the home that had been in the family for 150 years,” Rachel said.
She learned all this on the eve of her trip to Europe and made arrangements to visit with him. When she arrived in Oslo, her new found cousins met her. Eddy and Henning took her to the family home in Drabak on the shores of the Oslofjord.
<div id="attachment_21318" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21318" class="size-medium wp-image-21318" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Oslofjord-300x168.jpg" alt="Rachel near the family home on the Oslofjord." width="300" height="168" />Rachel near the family home on the Oslofjord.</div>
Her cousin showed her the pencil drawings her great Aunt Ruth had made in 1910, and Rachel thought of how that connected to her own brother who is an artist. Together she and her cousins stood in the home and looked out at the fjord, the same view her ancestors had. And she walked through the small home – smaller than her one-bedroom apartment – where her great grandmother lived with her seven siblings and parents.
This was all more than she thought she’d ever find.
“I had chills,” she said. “I thought the best thing I would find would be some old Census record but I was talking to a living relative who lives in the very house that was in my family for 150 years.”

More Deserving

If he hadn&#8217;t known his story was true, Phil Silvers said even he would have been skeptical.
“Who would believe it?” said Phil, a 72 year-old retired middle school social studies teacher in New York City.
<div id="attachment_21257" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21257" class="size-medium wp-image-21257" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image-300x225.jpeg" alt="Phil with his grandson Frederick Silvers." width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image-300x225.jpeg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image-768x576.jpeg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image-1024x768.jpeg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image-880x660.jpeg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image-1180x885.jpeg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image.jpeg 1280w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Phil with his grandson.</div>
“If they put something like this in a television show no one would think something like this could happen.”
He grew up in New York City, and although he wouldn’t say so, his early life was tough. He wasn’t particularly close to his parents, and they never told him of his origins.
<h6>“It might have been better if they’d told me when I was young but they didn’t do that back then,” Phil said. “This was the 1940s and they didn’t talk about this sort of stuff then.”</h6>
<h6>
</h6>
<h6>Making His Own Way</h6>
Phil&#8217;s father had always been distant, which Phil thought was just part of his culture.
“I figured it was a European thing. He just didn’t take much interest in me.”
<div id="attachment_21254" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21254" class="size-medium wp-image-21254" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/image_2-300x199.jpeg" alt="Phil on the right with his daughter Katie and his brother William. His biological father Norman Aghassi is in the photo on the right." width="300" height="199" />Phil on the right with his daughter Kate and his brother William. </div>
But nonetheless Phil was thankful for what his parents gave him:
“They did do one thing for me that made up for all that.”
They sent him to college, he said.
Phil became a teacher. His father died of a brain tumor in 1963 and Phil’s mother eventually moved to Florida. Phil married, raised two great kids, who became successful on their own. The closeness he lacked with his own parents he made up for with his wife and kids. He was happy.
<h6>A Surprising Revelation</h6>
But when Phil’s mother died. She left him – her only child – out of his will. She’d said he would know why. He didn’t, and her decision started him asking questions. What Phil learned was that he’d been adopted. Although there had been some hints that maybe he wasn’t his parents’ biological child, Phil hadn’t known. Some of his cousins knew however.
“It was a bit of a soap opera,” he said.
So at 50, Phil started to learn a bit about his history. But what he found out just deepened the mystery.
<h6>Unraveling the Mystery</h6>
He heard from a relative that he’d been adopted from a Jewish agency that took in the children of unwed mothers, but he couldn&#8217;t find out much more. Phil was born in 1942. He did the math and realized he’d been conceived right around the time of Pearl Harbor. Lacking the real story, he’d thought maybe he’d been the product of a liaison with a sailor who was being shipped off to war. It was a nice story, but it wasn’t true, as he would find out much later.
After learning he’d been adopted, Phil soon stopped keep digging for information. He figured his biological parents were possibly already dead or at the very least elderly, so he didn’t pursue it.
“Fast forward 20 years,” his daughter Katie said.
<div id="attachment_21248" style="width: 233px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21248" class="size-medium wp-image-21248" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IMG_6958-223x300.jpg" alt="Phil's biological father Norman Aghassi." width="223" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IMG_6958-223x300.jpg 223w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IMG_6958-655x880.jpg 655w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IMG_6958.jpg 762w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 223px) 100vw, 223px" />Phil&#8217;s biological father Norman Aghassi.</div>
<h6>Breaking Things Open with DNA</h6>
They’d been watching the PBS show Finding Your Roots with Louis Gates Jr. who explores the ancestry of his guests using historical records and DNA testing, including testing done by 23andMe.
“I convinced him that we should use 23andMe to at least find out where we come from,” Katie said. “None of us really thought we’d find actual family. We did the test and were amazed at our results.”
Because he’d been adopted from a Jewish agency in New York, Phil and his family believed he likely had Eastern European ancestry. When they got his results, however, they saw something unexpected.
<h6>23andMe Makes the Connection</h6>
Although Phil’s maternal line showed Eastern European ancestry, his paternal line showed ancestry from Iraq.
“This surprised me,” Phil said.
For a long time, there was a sizable Jewish community with a long and rich history in Iraq dating back to the days of Babylon. But many Jews began leaving Iraq in the 1930s and in the decades that followed. For Phil and his daughter, just learning where they came from was enough, they said.
<h6>Finding Family</h6>
But then a few years after learning this, Phil got a message from a 23andMe customer, who was identified as a possible first cousin.
“I told the person that we didn’t know anything about where our family had come from,” said Katie, who helps maintain her father’s account for him. “The next thing I knew the same person contacts me saying that his father and my father are matching as half brothers.”
Phone calls followed and finally, Phil and his entire family met his half brother and his family.
“I was in shock,” said Phil.
<h6>Connecting with His Brother</h6>
He was taken aback by the similarities. He and his half brother were both teachers in New York City schools. They both have a daughter and a son. Their daughters are both lawyers and their sons were high achieving students. (Phil’s son became an actuary, while his half-brother’s son is an oceanographer.)
His half brother shared photos of their father with Phil and he immediately saw the resemblances. He learned that he’d been a good dad. Phil also learned he’d been conceived before his biological father was married.
<h6>Learning about his Father</h6>
His father came to New York in 1939 and lived in NY before visiting Iraq in 1947 where he met his bride and then returned to New York to raise a family. Phil also learned that one of his family names is Aghassi, and he wonders now if he’s somehow related to the famous tennis player Andre Agassi. There’s a lot for him to learn about the history of his ancestors, he said.
“But much of my life is over now,” he said. “I wish I’d learned some of this when I was younger, but I’m thankful to know. I’m going to read some books and learn about the ancient history of Baghdad.”
He also plans to get to know his half brother better. Phil has visited his brother and his family at their home in upper Manhattan. His brother’s family will also be attending Phil’s grandsons first birthday.
Phil’s daughter Katie is still amazed that the mystery of her family’s ancestry is solved.
“It was truly an incredible experience and would not have happen without 23andme,” she said.

Stories — Page 16