Sandi had 50 years to prepare for this moment, but as she walked off a plane in Sacramento she felt the anxiety and doubt well-up inside.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_23917" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23917" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-23917" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Candance-Christine-Sandra-Sandi-200x200.jpg" alt="From left Candace, Christine, Sandra and Sandi, having lunch the day Sandi met them for the first time." width="200" height="200" />From left Candace, Christine, Sandra and Sandi.</div>
“It was like the night before you get married and you get cold feet or jitters,” said the 50 year-old mother from New Hampshire. “You just know that in a moment your life is going to change, and you worry that maybe you’re not ready.”


Adopted at birth in Florida, Sandi had spent her whole life looking for her biological mother, wondering if she was out there somewhere.
Then after decades of searching without success, she found her after discovering a second cousin named Steve on 23andMe. Her cousin, who is about ten years older, had remembered when his aunt, Sandi’s mom, was pregnant with her. 
<div id="attachment_23916" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23916" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-23916" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ChristineSandi-200x200.jpg" alt="Christine, left, and her sister Sandi." width="200" height="200" />Christine, left, and her sister Sandi.</div>
It was through Steve that Sandi was able to connect with her mother and sister. Sandi’s trip across the country – just two weeks before Mother’s Day – was her chance to meet her mom for the first time. It was a meeting she’d fanaticized about her whole life, but as Sandi got closer to meeting her mother, she became more and more nervous.
While she splashed water on her face in the airport bathroom and ratcheted up her courage, her mother Sandra Freeland and Sandi’s sisters, Christine Herrera and Candace Campbell – who she was also meeting for the first time – had their own anxious moments as they waited for her in the terminal.
Christine had already bonded with Sandi through Facebook and several phone calls, but seeing Sandi in person for the first time triggered all sorts of emotions.
“There was so much going on inside me it’s hard to describe what I was feeling,” said Christine, who is Sandi’s full sister.


All her life, Christine felt like something or someone was missing. She had known most of her life that she had a sister out there, who’d been given up for adoption by her mother. Now after finding Sandi she felt like she was uncovering a missing part of herself.
For their mother, Sandra, meeting her daughter Sandi instantly brought her back to the few days she had with her as a newborn just before giving her up. At the time she’d been an out-of-work single mother trying to raise another another young daughter. County social workers in Florida had encouraged Sandra to give up the newborn for adoption, telling Sandra that if she kept Sandi there was a chance she’d lose both of her girls. It was an awful choice, but Sandra thought that giving up Sandi would offer her a better life than she could give her. But it was agony letting her go.
“I never stopped thinking about her,” Sandra said more than 50 years later. “Never. She was constantly on my mind.”


Each of the women were wound tight with emotion as Sandi walked into the terminal and into her mother’s arms for the first time in 50 years. As they held each other Christine stood next to them with tears in her eyes and her hands over her mouth.
They held each other for a very long time, and then Sandra whispered into her daughter’s ear.


“I told her it felt so good to hold her again and that I never wanted to let her go,” Sandra said. “And then I told her that I always loved her and I never stopped loving her.”


As she looked into her daughter&#8217;s eyes she instantly remembered holding her as an infant and the staring into her young eyes then, she said.
Almost weak in the knees with her own emotion, Sandi said none of the millions of meetings she’d imagined having with her mother over the years was quite as good as what really happened.
Sandi had been raised by a couple who’d been unable to have children. They were older when they adopted her, and they both passed away by the time Sandi was just 25. Although she adored her adopted father, she said her relationship with her adopted mother was more difficult. Still Sandi is thankful they provided her a stable upbringing. But Sandi never stopped looking for her biological mother, and over the years she’d fantasized about meeting her.


“To be held like that was something I’d dreamed about my whole life,” Sandi said. “I mean, it was my own mom holding me in her arms telling me she loved me, telling me how much she loved and missed me my whole life. It was amazing.”


For Christine, too, the moment was a bit surreal and overwhelming.
<div id="attachment_23918" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23918" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-23918" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Candance-Sandra-Sandi-Christine-200x200.jpg" alt="From left Candace, Sandra, Sandi and Christine." width="200" height="200" />From left Candace, Sandra, Sandi and Christine.</div>
“I’m still in awe, still dumbfounded by it,” she said.


Just 11 months younger than Sandi, Christine said meeting her sister – their older sister had passed away more than a decade ago – was also something she’d dreamed about. Deep down Christine always thought she’d been a twin, and that missing twin sister was out there somewhere. Finally meeting Sandi and spending time with her she felt like reconnecting a missing part of herself. The connection she has had with her sister is like nothing she experienced before.
After meeting at the airport, Sandi spent a few days with Christine, and then met her extended family at a dinner in Sacramento – including her cousin Steve with whom she connected on 23andMe and who helped her find her mother. Sandi also got some more one-on-one time with her mother. She had a week on the coast before having to return home to her own kids.


“It’s crazy to have spent my whole life looking and then to finally find her,” she said. “It’s been amazing. It’s something I’ve yearned for my whole life, and that yearning never went away. It was important to hear that I wasn’t some kind of mistake. That I was loved and missed.”


And now she has someone she can wish Happy Mother’s Day.

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Mother’s Day Delayed

<div id="attachment_23893" style="width: 209px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23893" class="wp-image-23893 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-199x300.jpg" alt="David.Poznik-preferred copy" width="199" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-199x300.jpg 199w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-768x1156.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-680x1024.jpg 680w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-585x880.jpg 585w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-784x1180.jpg 784w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/David.Poznik-preferred-copy-scaled.jpg 1701w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" />David Poznik</div>
In the largest study of genetic variation within the human Y chromosome, an international team of scientists has traced back branches of the male line almost 200,000 years, revealing points in history of major population expansions that appear to correspond to eras of innovation and human migration.
David Poznik, a Computational Biologist and Population Geneticist here at 23andMe and the lead author of<a href="https://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3559.html"> the paper</a>, worked on the study while completing his graduate research in <a href="http://bmi.stanford.edu/">Stanford’s Program in Biomedical Informatics</a>. Scientists from the <a href="http://www.sanger.ac.uk/">Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute</a> in the UK and from more than a dozen other institutions also contributed to the study.


Because the Y chromosome is passed in whole from fathers to sons through the generations, it offers a unique opportunity to reconstruct migrations that have taken millennia to manifest. By analyzing changes that have slowly accumulated over time, the 42 scientists were able to uncover a hidden history within the DNA sequences of 1,244 men representing 26 populations from around the world. The team used more than 60,000 Y-chromosome SNVs (positions at which at least one sequence differs from the others) to construct a tree that indicates how all the Y chromosomes are related to one another. Using the tree, they were able to follow modern male lines backward, ultimately tracing back almost 200,000 years to the most recent common paternal-line ancestor of almost all men currently living today.
<div id="attachment_23892" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23892" class="wp-image-23892 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1000y-300x243.jpg" alt="1000y" width="300" height="243" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1000y-300x243.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1000y.jpg 584w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Tracing back in time paternal-lines from 26 different populations worldwide.</div>
One notable feature of the Y-chromosome tree is that the different male lines naturally cluster into what are known as “paternal haplogroups” or “clades.” These groupings often correspond to different continental populations and can distinguish, for example, someone with Native American paternal ancestry from someone whose paternal line traces to Western Europe.


As a working group of the <a href="http://www.1000genomes.org/">1000 Genomes Project</a>, the researchers had access to full sequences, which they compared to one another to measure distances between different groupings or clades. Since mutations steadily accumulate, these sequence distances correspond to temporal distances, with greater dissimilarities between sequences corresponding to longer separation times between their respective groups. Using published estimates of the Y-chromosome mutation rate, they estimated the timings of divergences between different haplogroups.
At certain points in history, particularly around 50,000 years ago and again approximately 15,000 years ago, several different lineages branched off from one another at the same time, marking major bursts in population growth. The times of these bursts overlap with human migrations into Eurasia and into the Americas, respectively. Between approximately 8,000 years ago and 4,000 years ago, there were other distinct periods of expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Western Europe.
While the specific causes of those expansions are less clear, Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith, from the Sanger Institute believes that “the best explanation is that they may have resulted from advances in technology that could be controlled by small groups of men. Wheeled transport, metal working, and organized warfare are all candidate explanations that can now be investigated further.”


It will be interesting for scientists to use this DNA history in conjunction with archeological evidence to reconstruct the history of human migration across the globe.
It will be interesting for scientists to use this DNA history in conjunction with archeological evidence to reconstruct the history of human migration across the globe.

Why Study the Y?

The National Institutes of Health has funded a promising new study by scientists here at 23andMe that could help alleviate some of the existing disparities in genetics research between people of European and non-European ancestry.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-21956 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kasia1-197x300.jpg" alt="" width="197" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kasia1-197x300.jpg 197w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kasia1.jpg 369w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px" />
Some estimates show that <a href="https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7355/full/475163a.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">more than 90 percent</a> of the research into the genetics underlying disease is on individuals of European descent alone. There are several reasons for this  – historical, cultural, economic, and social. The lack of diversity has meant that non-Europeans have not benefited from the huge advances in genetic research. Still, by leveraging 23andMe’s large and ethnically mixed customer base, researchers here think they can change that.
“This could help reduce the genetics research disparities among groups in the United States and elsewhere,” said Kasia Bryc, the senior scientist and population geneticist at 23andMe who will lead the research. “The scientific impact of findings from this research may be significant.”

Instead of using traditional genome-wide association studies to identify genetic variants associated with disease, this approach, called mapping by admixture linkage disequilibrium, or admixture mapping, takes advantage of the history of population mixing in the United States. Although admixture mapping was first suggested decades ago, leveraging 23andMe’s database would take it to a larger scale. 23andMe has more than 1.2 million customers, 80 percent of whom have consented to participate in research.
Although most of our customers are of European ancestry, our customer base includes large numbers of African Americans and Latinos. 23andMe has also gotten very good at estimating ancestry along the genome, which is crucial for detecting associations with disease via admixture mapping.
Mapping by admixture linkage disequilibrium works by tapping into variants or sets of variants found more frequently <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-23763" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Pattern-of-Ancestry.jpg" alt="Pattern of Ancestry" width="188" height="449" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Pattern-of-Ancestry.jpg 188w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Pattern-of-Ancestry-126x300.jpg 126w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 188px) 100vw, 188px" />within one ancestral group. In admixed populations – such as African Americans and Latinos who have mixed European, African, and Native American ancestry – using this method may be a way to more easily identify disease-causing variants.
Looking at individuals with specific diseases and where there is “enrichment” for one ancestry should highlight genetic regions associated with that disease, or so researchers hope. This is because the disease-causing variants occur more frequently in segments inherited from ancestral populations with a higher frequency of disease-associated variants.
23andMe’s research will determine whether admixture mapping could become a powerful tool complementary to large-scale genome-wide association studies.
Our researchers believe this work could help uncover genetic variants associated with disease in both people of European and non-European ancestry. However, because much of the genetic variation in Europeans has already been discovered, we expect this study to be most valuable in providing insights into biological variation for non-Europeans.
Beyond what the study could do to alleviate some of the huge disparities in health research among non-Europeans, the work could also help point the way in other areas, including guiding the development of drug targets.

23andMe Scientists Improving Diversity in Genetic Research

On Mother’s Day last year, Robin Butler’s children gave her 23andMe as a gift, not knowing it would change all their lives.
“I thought it would be fun to learn about my genome,” Robin said.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-23673" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Robin-Quote.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="200" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Robin-Quote.jpg 200w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Robin-Quote-150x150.jpg 150w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
But testing ultimately revealed something no one knew – the man she thought was her biological father wasn’t.
“I was in total shock for three days, and I am still dealing with the aftershocks,” Robin said. “My whole family was shocked. My mother was shocked, and so was the man we believed was my (biological) father for 49 years.”
23andMe allows people to explore what their genetics tell them about traits they might share with family, or about their health and ancestry. But doing the test can also reveal the unexpected. Sometimes those surprises can be fun, but, as in Robin’s case, they also have the potential to have profound implications.
For Robin, learning that her father wasn’t her biological father sent a shockwave through her family, but it didn’t tear them apart.
Robin had a unique relationship with the man she had known as her father. He and her mother had lived apart almost all of Robin’s life, and she had only lived with him briefly when she was 13. Although their relationship was distant, she embraced him as her father, just as any daughter would. Robin’s own children also knew him as their grandfather.
When her kids gave Robin 23andMe for Mother’s Day, she turned around and got a kit for her mother. When she got her results, she saw her connection to her mother in the DNA Relative feature and a third cousin she didn’t recognize. The two connected, trying to figure out how they were related. The cousin didn’t show up in her mother’s results, so Robin knew she had to be connected to the cousin on her father’s side, but she didn’t recognize any of the woman’s family names.
Robin had also gotten a kit for her dad for Father’s Day. When his results came back, they quickly realized he didn’t share any DNA with this third cousin or with Robin.
“I thought it was a mistake,” she said. “I even called 23andMe to confirm that the results were correct.”
But she also noticed that her father shared DNA with cousins who had names Robin knew.
“That’s when I knew that this was his DNA and he wasn’t my father,” she said. “That’s when I was thrown into shock.”
While the news was hard to accept, it didn’t devastate the family. Instead, it triggered many new questions for Robin about her family and herself.
It also propelled her on a new search.
“I knew I had to find my biological father,” Robin said.
Robin talked to her dad about it.
It wasn’t easy, but his response wasn’t anger or sadness but encouragement. He told her she needed answers that he didn’t have.
“I know you need to know,” he told her.
He understood how important it was to her.
“My dad helped in the search, too,” Robin said.
Looking at her 23andMe results, Robin returned to the third cousin with whom she first connected and noticed other second and third cousins. This prompted her to search for their surnames, which were unfamiliar to her. She got additional information from her mother, who had the first name of a man who was the only other likely person who could be Robin’s father. Pooling all this information together helped narrow her search. When she connected again with her third cousin and shared some of this information, they identified who they thought her father was. Her cousin even provided Robin with a picture, which Robin then showed to her parents. They recognized him immediately and said that was who they believed was her father.
“Remarkably, through my 23andme DNA relatives (and other information), I was able to find the man who I truly believe is my biological father, all within a matter of days,” Robin said.
But her cousin thought that Robin’s biological father had passed away. It wasn’t until Robin tracked down another cousin that she learned he was still alive. Using additional information, she was able to find an address. She took the next difficult step of sending him a carefully worded letter filled with details about her mother and her own connections through 23andMe with several of his relatives.
“I mailed the letter off on August 31, 2015, (and) I prayed to Jesus,” she said.
A few days later, Robin got an early morning phone call. It was him.
“Of course, this was a great shock to him and his family, but he called,” Robin said. “Thank God he called, and he remembered my mother. Like me, he just wanted to know the truth, and so did his wife of 47 years.”
He asked to do a DNA test, and Robin sent him a 23andMe kit. A few weeks later, the results confirmed what Robin thought – she’d found her biological father.
“His response was brief, and that&#8217;s the last I&#8217;ve heard from him,” Robin said. “I&#8217;m still waiting, but I have hope. I know I will have a relationship with my father.”
Robin is his only biological child. She doesn’t know how this news impacted him, but finding him was important in understanding herself.
It made her wonder what part of herself she inherited from her biological father and what was from her upbringing.
“I thought that knowing him would help me to better understand myself,” she said.
Making the connection gave her insight into where she came from.
“I not only found my biological father but I was introduced to extended family and ancestors that I hadn’t known of before,” said Robin. “Finding him and knowing about his family tree through our cousins made me feel complete and whole.”

A Need To Know

An accomplished scientist and businessman, Stephen Levine has spent his whole life <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-23645" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Stephen-Levine-200x200.jpg" alt="Stephen Levine" width="200" height="200" />searching.


That restlessness is driven by a quest that is both emotional and intellectual, a desire to learn more about the world around him and himself. It was also driven by what he calls a deep emotional trauma. But that intense curiosity about who he was and where he came from was recently rewarded with a family connection he could have only made with the help of 23andMe.
“There is a lovely tender, tear rendering story here,” said Stephen, a Ph.D., who lives in Northern Washington and works in nutritional medicine.


He’d been adopted and grew up in Brooklyn in a family in which he felt alien and disconnected to his adoptive mother.
Using details from a story his adoptive mother told him about his birth, Stephen tracked down his biological mother when he was in his early 30s.
It wasn’t the kind of reunion he’d hoped for, however.
“She was a broken person, a street person,” he said.
His mother had agreed to meet him at a White Castle fast food restaurant in Brooklyn. It was a strange place for a mother and son reunion, and while he drove to the meeting, Stephen questioned whether he’d really found the right person at all.


“Intellectually I knew it was her, but emotionally I was so shaken up I just didn’t know,” he said.


But he thought to himself:
“If this is really my mom, then when I look at her face, I will know 100 percent,” he said. “And, she’ll have green eyes.”


Just after he parked his car at the restaurant a woman knocked on his window.
“I saw her face and I saw my face within it, with her green eyes,” he said.
Wanting to get to know her and learn more about his biological family, Stephen spent two days with her in a large hotel suite that he’d rented.
“She was obviously mentally imbalanced and depressed,” Stephen said. “I asked her many questions including the name of my biological father. She did give me his last name.”


After that initial meeting, he tried to develop a relationship with her, but it was too painful and difficult for her, he said. She eventually asked him to leave her alone.
His reunion with his mother stopped any additional searching for family for three decades until his own daughter, Ariel, reignited it when she tested with 23andMe.
Ariel’s 23andMe results showed a close connection with a woman she didn’t know. That woman, Marilyn, sent her a message. Marilyn wanted to figure out how they were so closely related. 23andMe showed that Marilyn was either Ariel’s aunt or a close cousin, and Marilyn’s father matched her as a grandfather.
Ariel told Marilyn, who was from Brooklyn, about her dad being adopted and originally being from Brooklyn. Marilyn and Stephen then connected and in an email exchange Marilyn asked Stephen if he knew his biological father’s last name. He told her he didn’t, only that it was a short name and started with “Z.”


“My maiden name is Zwick,” Marilyn emailed back.
“I knew in that instant, that this was the name that my mother had told me, over 30 years ago, and that this was my father’s family,” Stephen said. “I’ll never forget that moment.”
Stephen quickly booked a flight back to New York, renting an apartment where he met his sister Marilyn as well as his biological father and a collection of other relatives
At first his father, a retired sociology teacher, was standoffish, but as they talked it became obvious that Stephen was genuine. The two men looked a lot alike and even have similar mannerisms. At some point, it seemed to dawn on his biological father that Stephen was indeed his son.
He got up and walked over to Stephen, embracing him and saying:


“I have always wanted a son.”


It was more than Stephen could have hoped for, he said. They sat together and talked and Stephen learned that he and his father shared some of the same interests. They both liked doing yoga, meditation, and that they have some of the same sensibilities. For Stephen, who’d been searching for so long, meeting his biological family was a revelation.
“They accepted me,” Stephen said. “In my mind why should they love me, but they do. It’s very deep healing.”

Deep Healing

Listening to Wendy Spencer’s decades-long search for her biological father, the improbability of finding him, and then her shock after learning about the legacy of hatred he inherited from his own father, one would forgive Wendy if she decided to forget she ever found him.



<figure class="wp-block-image alignright wp-image-23624 size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="225" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/wendy-spencer-a-1024-300x225.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-23624" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/wendy-spencer-a-1024-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/wendy-spencer-a-1024-768x576.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/wendy-spencer-a-1024-880x660.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/wendy-spencer-a-1024.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Wendy, right, her father, Bill, and her daughter Cosette.</figcaption></figure>



But Wendy thought perhaps her love and her family could change that legacy.



“I know people can change,&#8221; she said. &#8220;I have witnessed it before. I see it slowly happening.&#8221;



Wendy’s story of connecting with her biological father, Bill Miller, is a testament to using love to conquer hate, confronting the truth about her biological family’s history, and, even more broadly, coming to terms with America’s own history of racism. People magazine recently featured Wendy&#8217;s story and how she&#8217;s attempting to change that family legacy.



“With all the hate in the world and misunderstandings, I wish people could see each other as human beings with similar hopes and desires,” she said.







Wendy, a 50-year-old hair stylist in Sacramento, is Jewish. She married an African American man, and they have four children. One of their sons is married to a Latina, and the other is married to a Filipina. After learning from her mother more than two decades ago that she’d been conceived during an affair, she began searching for her biological father.



Last year, she tested with 23andMe. In October, when Wendy logged into her account right after her grandson’s brit milah, the Jewish circumcision ceremony, she had a notice that she had a new DNA relative. Thinking maybe she had found a new cousin, she clicked on the file.



“There was a picture of a man, it said ‘Father 50 percent match 24 segments,’” Wendy said. “Then his name, ‘William Miller.’ Needless to say, I was shocked my family heard me shout from the other room!”



She soon was able to connect with Bill. They exchanged email messages and then talked on the phone.



“We talked for an hour and a half,&#8221; Wendy said. &#8220;He cried off and on and seemed so happy.&#8221;



He’d told her that he had seen her twice after she was born but that when her parents moved and then later divorced, he’d lost track of her, although he never stopped looking. Wendy found out that he was in a cancer ward in San Antonio, recovering from surgery. She arranged to go and visit him and then flew to Texas.



He picked her up at the airport after being discharged from the hospital, and took her meet her great aunt, and a cousin.



“After a few family stories and my aunt pulling out pictures, the beginning of a nice connection was being made,” Wendy said.



The next day she went and stayed at her biological father’s house. He lived alone and had never married. The house was a wreck, but the visit allowed for Wendy to learn more about him and his family. It was almost too much for her to bear.



“He told me the reason he had the DNA test was because he was always concerned that he had a little African American in his DNA and he wanted to find out once and for all, (he does not),” she said. “It was very obvious that my dad is a racist!”



The more he talked, the more uncomfortable Wendy became as he put everyone in racial categories or sprinkled his conversation with racist terms.



“It was like a minor stab in the heart every time,” she said.



But she wanted to know “the good, the bad, and the ugly” about her biological family. Her father obliged, telling her about his father, Wendy&#8217;s grandfather, Emmett Elliot Miller.



“He told me his dad had done evil things,” she said.



Emmett Miller had been an organizer in the KKK.



He’d been involved in trying to bomb an all-black college and helped to organize the picket to stop the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.



“I felt sick to my stomach; the thought of getting up and leaving occurred to me,” she said. “At the same time, I felt God&#8217;s presence with me. It was a very gut-wrenching conversation.”



She told him how hurtful his racism was to her and asked that he stop using some of the racist words that were part of his vocabulary.



“I could tell his honesty was mixed with all the emotions he had been feeling,” she said. “This lonely older man was genuinely happy to have a daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, but his emotions were all mixed up, and he needed to share the conflict that was going on in his soul.”



His daughter is Jewish, married to a black man, and his grandchildren were all mixed, his great-grandchildren even more mixed.



Hearing her father&#8217;s stories about his family was almost too much for Wendy to process. She thought that even in her own lifetime as she was growing up in California surrounded by a family known for tolerance, her grandfather had been working so hard to prevent desegregation and the rights of black people to vote. When she eventually came home from Texas, Wendy said she was “an emotional wreck.”



She talked to her husband and her mother-in-law, who’d always had such sage advice about other matters. But on this, her mother-in-law had nothing to offer. Both of her mother-in-law&#8217;s parents had been murdered during the pre-civil rights era in Mississippi because of the color of their skin. Wendy&#8217;s mother in-law just didn&#8217;t have it in her to forgive.



“I’ve never seen my mother-in-law speechless, with no words of comfort or wisdom,” Wendy said. “She tried, but I could tell how shocking my news was to her.”



Still struggling with what she learned, Wendy continued to talk regularly with her biological father, and then he came to California to visit, arriving for Hanukkah. Wendy’s family welcomed him into their home. He stayed for five days, and became the center of attention. He connected particularly with Wendy’s son Michael and her youngest daughter Cosette. But on the fifth day of his visit, he stayed alone at home with Wendy’s husband. It did not go well.



But even after that, Wendy is trying to maintain the connection. Her father has sent Cosette gifts. He regularly emails, sends cards and calls.



From his point of view Bill said in a comment he made to People that although his language is sometime coarse he is not a racist or a bigot. At one point in the early 1960s, he and a friend were considering moving to Mississippi to help register voters, he has close friends who are Jewish and he regrets that there is tension between him and Wendy&#8217;s husband. <img decoding="async" class="ajT" src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif" alt="">



“He says he loves me and does not deserve me,” Wendy said. “I am glad we have found each other.”



But she doesn&#8217;t know how it all will end up.



“I do not regret finding him and learning about the other half of me,” she said. “It has not been easy, but all of the story has been told.”

Ending a Legacy of Hate

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-23616" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Screen-shot-2016-01-22-at-12.33.27-PM.jpg" alt="" width="232" height="288" />
The ability to extract and then sequence ancient DNA, not just from ancient human bones, but also from the bones of our ancient cousins the Neanderthals, is upending old notions of human migration and history.
<h2>Ancient DNA</h2>
The latest in a rapid succession of<a href="https://www.nature.com/news/evidence-mounts-for-interbreeding-bonanza-in-ancient-human-species-1.19394#Early"> new findings</a> suggests that intermixing between Neanderthals and early modern humans happened earlier than we once thought – about <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16544.epdf?referrer_access_token=CMEgDNGJuW7rNIX8-5DetdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MInt_2jYvKBG--7sOqWdGTzUvToNHVvyhzE6mZLLgJJmR7yoinCDiE3vg9Q5AVA-nZquOQOOQnhcfdq9lCTp4TcwdkXstlNRZ7xfdZRcnYB6sIPffF_OSID_rECaKCbx-nDNFAoD9EQPv4N_1WWd-A8l0yEwuBeZ6eFt0-g5i0T9MPLVmGCIKRPC0jEsDeYZxD78jhZvPiTcPMjQJT5jr-&amp;tracking_referrer=www.nature.com">100,000 years ago</a> versus <a href="http://sriramsankararaman.com/publications/sankararaman.pgen.2012.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">50,000 years ago</a> – at a time that challenges long held theories about when humans migrated out of Africa and how far those migrations took them. And by looking at DNA sequences extracted from several different Neanderthal bones, researchers discovered that the gene flow didn’t just go from Neanderthals to humans.
This latest finding illustrates the impact DNA data, specifically data from ancient DNA, has had. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/15/svante-paabo-dna-neanderthal-genetics">Svante Paabo</a> of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology pioneered this innovation for extracting ancient DNA and accurately sequencing, and it radically transformed our understanding of human history.
<h2>New Information About the Past</h2>
Harvard population geneticist David Reich puts this new innovation into context in a long interview he did with<a href="http://edge.org/conversation/david_reich-the-genomic-ancient-dna-revolution"> The Edge</a>. Reich, who studies genetic variation among human populations, said that scientists have gained great new insights into history by comparing ancient DNA sequences to present-day humans’ genetic data.
“It’s a radically new type of information about the past; it’s a great gift to be able to have access to it,” Reich said in the interview. “It’s a great surprise. Who would have thought DNA survived that long?”
Probably the most profound insight from looking at ancient DNA and making comparisons with data from modern humans is that all human populations today are mixed.
<h2>Neanderthals and Modern Humans</h2>
This isn’t just about mixing between humans and Neanderthals, but mixing among early human populations and that data offers great insight into human history. He’s also looked at non-ancient human DNA to garner similar insights. So for example, Reich has looked at populations in India where they found that populations mixed there between 2000 to 4000 years ago. Before that there were unmixed populations.
“Amazingly, what you could see from the genetic data was an event in which you could see cultural change,” he said.
You can see something similar in more recent history by looking at the DNA of African Americans, which includes European ancestry, a clear mark of the slavery in the United States.
“What you’re seeing in the imprint of these populations genetically is the history of power inequality, which is usually males of power from one group having preferential access to local females, and that’s what you see in these groups,” Reich said.
Listen to Reich’s interview below.
The Edge Foundation, also has a video of his interview on its site<a href="http://edge.org/conversation/david_reich-the-genomic-ancient-dna-revolution"> here</a>.
<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/users/65424416&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true" width="100%" height="450" frameborder="no" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Blast from the Past

Total strangers, John and Rhonda have one thing in common, the same father.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-23484 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/JR-quote-300x169.jpg" alt="J$R quote" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/JR-quote-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/JR-quote-768x432.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/JR-quote-880x495.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/JR-quote-980x553.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/JR-quote.jpg 984w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />


The two made that discovery earlier this year after using 23andMe.


“Nobody knew about John,” said Rhonda, a 55 year-old marketer in Buffalo New York.


For John, recently retired and 67 who also lives in the Buffalo area, DNA testing was the only way he would have ever found Rhonda and information about his biological father. For both of them the test helped lead them to clues about their father and a tangled history of multiple families and an ongoing search for siblings spread out through generations and geography.
“I now have a printed family tree that  takes three trees to show and is  so long, it covers the top of two long tables,” said John. “(Testing has) been a positive experience for me and a healing experience for the family. I&#8217;ve been welcomed with open arms.”


Being orphaned, along with his half brother, from his single mom when he was just 10 had been so traumatic for John, that he blanked out all the memory of his childhood. He couldn’t even remember his mother’s face until a few years ago when he saw a photo of her for the first time. That had been out of sheer luck, after a mutual acquaintance connected him to his cousin and elderly aunt. John believes it may have been more than luck with a little help from his mother, watching from above.
It was his aunt and cousins who had the photo and tidbits about his mother. John and his family enjoyed a series of reunions in the US and in Italy over the past 5 years. His aunt also shared with John the one bit of information she had about his biological father, his father’s first name.
<div id="attachment_23482" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23482" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-23482" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/John-Vitale-200x200.jpg" alt="John Vitale" width="200" height="200" />John Vitale</div>
“There is no way I could have identified the family on my father&#8217;s side,” he said. “All I had to go on was his name was Marvin, and I only learned that a couple of years ago.”


But for both John and Rhonda using 23andMe to explore their ancestry changed not just what they knew about their families and their background, but their understanding about themselves.
John had thought he was Italian, but was “shocked” to learn he was half Ashkenazi Jew on his father’s side.


“I knew nothing about my father, I assumed he was Italian,” said John. “My mother&#8217;s family is Italian with roots in Sicily and Milan.   I was raised Catholic.”
Learning about his Jewish ancestry, didn’t change his beliefs, but it did change his perceptions.


“It has made me more sensitive and curious of the Jewish faith,” he said.


For Rhonda, who was raised by a Jewish mother, learning about about her biological mother’s Catholic background put certain things about herself in context. It also raised a lot of “nature versus nurture issues” for her.


“I grew up as an only child, in a family that I was very different from,” she said. “I look nothing like, or act nothing like, my adopted mother or father.”


And then there was the connection she made using 23andMe to her biological family for the first time – not just to John, but also to a full sister named Trisha.
That connection with her sister was so strong that Rhonda wonders if there’s a chance that they might actually be twins separated and adopted out to different families.


“When I met Trisha, it felt like I was talking to myself,” Rhonda said. “The similarities were astounding.”


23andMe also helped Rhonda connect with her oldest living half-sibling, who is unrelated to John. She was one of the 2 children born to her mother when her mother was in an internment camp in Germany. It was that woman, Danuta, who gave Rhonda much of what she knows about her mother, including her mother’s history with Marvin and the other children she bore him.
<div id="attachment_23483" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23483" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-23483" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/rhoried-pic-200x200.jpg" alt="Rhonda Ried" width="200" height="200" />Rhonda Ried</div>
All of Rhonda’s full siblings were adopted by other families, she said. At least two of whom she’s connected with through 23andMe. Rhonda discovered she has 5 full siblings and 6 half siblings, including John. And there could be more, she said.
Now both Rhonda and John are hoping that they will be able to connect with other siblings. They are aware of two sisters in Arizona.


“We are becoming acquainted with members of the family living around the country,” John said.


They have scheduled a virtual family reunion on Skype in a few weeks, but their search continues.


“I fully expect we’ll find others,” said John. “We’ll just keep looking.”

Nobody Knew

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


We first <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/putting-it-together/">wrote about Liz</a> two years ago, and a few days ago, ABC News covered Liz and Tammy’s story.
Their story was also recently covered by the <a href="http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_29002587/woman-left-baby-at-st-paul-hospital-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Pioneer Press</a>. You can check out the ABC News piece below.
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Ancestry Service — Page 17