Libby is a geneticist for NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for the management and conservation of living marine resources. One of her responsibilities is to genotype endangered species of fish, tracking generations of families. That’s right, fish have families. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20356" alt="Libby_Amsterdam" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Libby_Amsterdam-225x300.jpg" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Libby_Amsterdam-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Libby_Amsterdam-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Libby_Amsterdam-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Libby_Amsterdam-885x1180.jpg 885w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Libby_Amsterdam.jpg 1578w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />They have pedigrees. The irony is, Libby does not.
She turned to 23andMe to help her explore the health and family history she couldn’t learn about any other way. 
Adopted in 1963, Libby never knew a biological relative until her children were born. She had scant information regarding her birth parents. She knew her birth mother was born in Rupert, Idaho, but no names of immediate family members.
“I would search for clues, maybe find a name, but would not really know if I was on the right path because I had nothing to go on,” she said. “It was disappointing”
Libby only had a cursory family health history. Like many adoptees, Libby has never had a family medical history to share with a doctor to help guide her care.
Several years ago, Libby was able to get her original birth certificate with her birth mother’s name and birthplace.
“I kind of sat on that for a while, did some searches and nothing came up so I thought it was just another dead end.”
Then Libby became a mom.
The search for answers was not just about her but for her children as well. She has a “family”, the loving couple that raised her. What she is looking for is “history”.
“I guess it happened when I had kids of my own and I could see the resemblance when I look at them. And other people will say ’Oh, yes. She IS your daughter.’ But then I would look in the mirror and say, “Who do I look like?”
Libby had no family photos. No faces to look at and compare.
A colleague told Libby about 23andMe. She immediately sent in a test kit for herself. The information she received amazed her. Soon, she ordered test kits for her husband and children.
On the ancestry side, 23andMe matched her with a predicted third or fourth cousin.
“One of the family locations she listed was Rupert. The hair on the back of my neck stood up: this could not be a coincidence,” Libby said. “ It is difficult to convey the heady feeling of finally discovering a biological relative after all these years of searching and wondering.”
Not long after, an even closer match, a woman named Dianne who turned out to be Libby’s birth mother&#8217;s second cousin.
“She was kind and welcoming enough to help me fill in many of the names that she knew, and pointed me to a wealth of published family histories to fill in names of my other ancestors.” Libby said, who learned she had nine first cousins from Dianne.
Libby knew that her mother’s pregnancy had been kept secret from the families of her birth parents. Libby learned that her mother had gone to great lengths to conceal the pregnancy by attending college in Hawaii while pregnant and then giving birth in Oregon. Her birth parents were college students at the time and this was after all, 1963.
“My existence came as a surprise to Dianne – she had really only been searching for information about her father&#8217;s side of the family and did not expect to uncover a new cousin,” Libby said. “I am a secret no more.”
Libby has now started sketching out her biological family tree. She only has a few branches but it is growing. She can now trace her maternal line back five generations!
“What 23andMe has done for me personally is nothing short of a breakthrough, and the best part is that my story just keeps growing.”

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

A Secret No More

When he was seven years old, Francisco Caravayo’s Puerto Rican grandmother told him a secret that he didn’t really grasp until decades later when he tested with 23andMe.
“I’m so grateful for the opportunity to finally have confirmation of my history,” Francisco said.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20313 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Francisco-Photo-1-248x300.jpg" alt="" width="248" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Francisco-Photo-1-248x300.jpg 248w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Francisco-Photo-1.jpg 411w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 248px) 100vw, 248px" />
<h6>Hidden Ancestry</h6>
When he tested with 23andMe, Francisco had wanted to contribute to research while exploring a little of his family’s Portuguese ancestry.
“My brother and I always felt as if there was a culture of secrets in our family,” said Francisco.  “When my grandmother said to all my cousins, ‘Never forget, you are of God’s chosen people,’ I knew what she meant, but didn’t understand why we couldn’t talk about it.”
In telling his story, Francisco goes back to his childhood, growing up in a Latino neighborhood. Most of his friends were Catholic, and although his family was  Lutheran and went to church regularly, something didn’t feel quite right to him.
“We went to church, but my father was always saying things like ‘Remember, Jesus was a Jew,’” Francisco said.
<h6>Conversos</h6>
After Francisco went away to college, he had a discussion one day with a Portuguese professor about his last name.  She told him that his surname was taken by Portuguese Jews many of whom had been forced to convert to Catholicism by the Inquisition, and many of these <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20316" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-180x300.jpg" alt="Star of David" width="180" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-180x300.jpg 180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-768x1280.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-614x1024.jpg 614w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-528x880.jpg 528w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-708x1180.jpg 708w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Star-of-David-scaled.jpg 1536w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px" />
There were other clues.  His grandmother lit candles on Friday nights.  She taught the family that dairy and meat were not to be mixed and that shellfish were to be avoided.  Pork was eaten apologetically.  Christmas and Easter were not celebrated with joy, but with what can only be described as an obligation, as if performing a chore.  And when Francisco’s father died, Francisco followed family tradition: no clergy were present at the funeral and no Christian iconography was put on the gravestone.
<h6>Exploring His Jewish Ancestry</h6>
He began to explore his Portuguese roots and studying more about Judaism.  Shortly afterward, he saw an article in OUT Magazine about 23andMe’s research.  Francisco decided to get tested as a way to not just contribute to research, but also explore his own ancestry.
His results indicated Iberian ancestry, but also he saw that his paternal haplotype was shared by 20-to-30 percent of Sephardic Jews.
“That information was so grounding,” said Francisco. “I didn’t expect to find that I was 100 percent Jewish, because my ancestors tried to blend in and marry non-Jews, but I finally had evidence.”
He traced his haplogroup’s migration, and it matched up with the diaspora’s migratory patterns.  He was one of the thousands of families whose ancestors had escaped persecution by hiding their religion.
“I was sitting at the computer crying,” said Francisco
Not only did Francisco find answers to his past, but he also found a community of people on the 23andMe message boards that shared the same haplotype.  Through the online community, he’s been able to meet others like him and trade stories and information.
Francisco has now completed his conversion process to Judaism.  While he was going through the conversion, he met his current partner, who is Jewish too.
“I finally felt whole,” he said.

23andMe Helps Uncover Hidden Jewish Ancestry

Not long before his grandmother died, DeSean Stokes sat with her as she shared stories of her life.
<div id="attachment_20206" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20206" class="size-medium wp-image-20206" alt="DeSean with his grandparents Evelyn and Isham Brown." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DeSean_Stokes_Evelyn_Brown_Isham_Brown-300x221.jpg" width="300" height="221" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DeSean_Stokes_Evelyn_Brown_Isham_Brown-300x221.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DeSean_Stokes_Evelyn_Brown_Isham_Brown-768x567.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DeSean_Stokes_Evelyn_Brown_Isham_Brown-880x649.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DeSean_Stokes_Evelyn_Brown_Isham_Brown.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />DeSean with his grandparents Evelyn and Isham Brown.</div>
One of 15 children brought up in the segregated south, his grandmother, Evelyn, was the first in her family to go to college – Alabama State University, Class of 1954. She became an elementary school teacher, working for 50 years in the classroom. Evelyn was happily married to Isham Brown for 56 years and the couple raised three bright and successful kids.
When she died in early 2013, DeSean said it was the stories she told him that kept running through his mind. He wanted to know more, not just about her but where she came from and the generations that came before.
That’s where 23andMe came in.  It helped him delve into parts of his ancestry that he wouldn’t have been able to find just from the stories his grandmother told him.
“23andMe opened up even more doors to my ancestral story,” he said.
<h6>Stories Become Songs</h6>
An actor and musician, DeSean said much of his work involves telling or even inhabiting the stories of others.
“As a musician and actor, my job is to tell interesting stories,” he said.
But after his grandmother’s death, it was his own family’s story that he wanted to tell.
“There is so much history you can learn about yourself and family just from sitting down and talking with your oldest living relatives,” DeSean said.
Those conversations with his grandmother also inspired him to write a<a href="https://youtu.be/nEW9m5VGHVw"> song for Evelyn</a>.
“Music is in my DNA &#8212; I live it, breath it and feel it in everything I do,” DeSean said.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20207" alt="DeSean_Stokes_Photo_By_Jeffrey_Hornstein" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/DeSean_Stokes_Photo_By_Jeffrey_Hornstein-256x300.jpg" width="256" height="300" />
<h6>Sharing with Evelyn</h6>
He played the music for her just before her death in early 2013. After she died he felt a need to learn more, not just about her but about her ancestors. His grandmother’s stories could only take him back so far.
An African-American, he knows the history of slavery and what that meant – mixed-ancestry and very little information about where in Africa his ancestors came. Looking at family photos he also couldn’t help but notice the different shades of color in his family. It left him wondering. He’d heard from Evelyn and his grandparents about their families, but not much more.
“They only knew the details of a couple generations before and the rest was unknown,” he said.
<h6>DNA Testing</h6>
Using DNA testing, DeSean could peer into the past that was locked away by time.
From his 23andMe results, he learned that his ancestry, was, not surprisingly, mostly from West Africa. But DeSean also learned that about a quarter of his ancestry was from Europe and included connections to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, and Poland. He even found that his ancestry included Jamaican ancestry, Native American ancestry, and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
Using 23andMe, DeSean has connected with newly discovered relatives from around the world.
“I am so thankful for the time I had with my grandmother,” he said. “She will always be a part of me. The freckles on my face remind me of her every time I look in the mirror.  I am thankful for everything she passed down to me.  I am also grateful to 23andMe for opening up even more doors to my ancestral story.  It is the music I&#8217;ve been longing to hear.&#8221;
23andMe provides genetic testing services for informational purposes; your results may or may not help you to search for or identify relatives or family members.

This Is My Story

Amy’s story begins: “Once upon a dime…”
And then, as she says, “It just gets weirder.”<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-19797 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Amy_K_Marshall_2012-300x277.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="277" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Amy_K_Marshall_2012-300x277.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Amy_K_Marshall_2012-768x708.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Amy_K_Marshall_2012-880x811.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Amy_K_Marshall_2012.jpg 1022w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Amy, a writer and director of a small library in an Alaskan fishing village, always knew she’d been adopted. That wasn’t news. But her birth story certainly was.
Amy came into this world on November 16, 1964. Mr. and Mrs. A.T. House found her before dawn lying on the floor of the “Grover Bungalow Launderette” at Baker and 19th Street in Lawrence, Kansas. Amy had been left on an old white blanket. Near her was a pay phone with a dime left on top.
“Apparently so somebody could call the minute the child was found,&#8221; Police Lt. Dick Stanwich told the local paper at the time.
All this was news to Amy. She shared with us her unbelievable story and how she is using 23andMe to help fill in some of the blank pages in her life.
Now with children of her own, she peeked into this chapter for the first time on Christmas Eve of 2012 when she opened up a parcel that arrived that day from the Kansas State Department of Vital Statistics. This early Christmas gift was her original birth certificate.
“I had been adopted in 1965 by two wonderful people, but I had always wondered about my &#8220;real&#8221; name,” Amy said. “We stared at that envelope for quite awhile. Then I opened it. And, what I found broke my heart.”
Like a lot of adoptees, she had fantasies about her birth parents and how they might have reluctantly given up their child at the hospital with a kiss to the forehead. But seeing the birth certificate, with parents listed as “unknown,” and learning she’d been abandoned at a Laundromat pained her greatly. She immediately wanted to know more.
“I telephoned the launderette, which still exists, and left a message that began with: ‘Hi, this is going to be the weirdest phone call you&#8217;ve ever received&#8230;’&#8221;
Amy also called the local newspaper, the small but well-respected Lawrence World-Journal. She was lucky to find a helpful reporter who looked through the newspapers archive and found a few old clips that documented her arrival into this world.
A photo of one of the nurses holding her was on the front page with the headline:<a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=CUMyAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=PuYFAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=3884%2C4105340"> “New Infant Found At Launderette.”</a> The next day she was again page one with the story:<a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=CkMyAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=PuYFAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=5020%2C4207773"> “Amy Getting Plenty of Care.”</a>
Everything in those articles was news to Amy. She never knew.
“On Christmas Day, I called my parents and told them I&#8217;d received my pre-adoption birth certificate,” Amy said. “There was a prolonged silence followed by my mom&#8217;s voice. ‘Oh.’ Then, there was more silence. Then: ’And what did you find out?’”
She told her mom what she learned. There was more silence on the line.
“‘But, you knew that story,’” Amy told her mom.
Yes, her mom protested but: “I didn&#8217;t know THE NAME of the launderette!&#8221;
&#8220;’Mom!’&#8221; Amy said laughing.
“Then, I could tell she was crying,” Amy said.
Her parents had kept the name the nurses had given her and then she told Amy:
“‘We didn&#8217;t care where you came from! We never wanted you to feel unloved or unwanted because we loved you and wanted you so badly!’”
Amy knew how lucky she’d been to be adopted by her mom and dad, but she still had questions. The Lawrence World Journal reporter Chad Lawhorn had forwarded her the old articles and then wrote up her story. She hoped someone would come forward with information about her birth parents.
But the stories of her birth also gave her comfort too. She’d been surrounded by love and cared for by strangers.
“My world became a little warmer, and tragic,” she said.
Amy learned the name of the attending physician that night, Dr. Godwin, and found out he was still alive. The reporter called him. Dr. Godwin remembered Amy.
“Just a couple of months ago, I was thinking of her,” Godwin told the reporter. “I wondered what ever became of that baby. This is good because that has sort of hung over me for a while.”
Although the couple who found her had passed away, their children were still alive and they knew her story. She talked to their daughter, Debbie House. Debbie told Amy more details that left her speechless.
Amy had been found on the exact one-year anniversary of Debbie’s grandfather Wallace Grover’s death. He died in the morning of a heart attack in the exact spot where Amy was found.
“A year to the day. Maybe even to the hour,” said Amy. “And here, Wallace&#8217;s daughter walks into the Laundromat on the anniversary of her father&#8217;s death in the place and finds &#8230; a crying baby.”
The details she’d gleaned up to that point told her so much, but she decided to test for 23andMe to learn health and ancestry information that couldn’t be found in paper records.
One of her<a href="https://www.23andme.com/ancestry/relfinder/"> DNA Relative</a> matches sent her an enigmatic note “nice to meet you. I may have the answer to your Lawrence connection.&#8221; That helped her find a surname that she believes will help in finding out more.
“I think I&#8217;m closer than ever to figuring out who the people in the earliest moments of my life were,” said Amy.
She also feels closer to the woman who was her birth mother.
“I would love to say thank you to her. That’s the gist of it. She had choices. The mother always has choices, and she made a great choice. I hope it got better for her. I really hope she found peace. I wouldn’t want her to go through life thinking something bad happened, because it didn’t.”
Not long ago, Amy went back to Lawrence Kansas. She met with Dr. Godwin. She wanted to see the spot where she’d been found. The laundry was closed up, but she put her hand up to the glass door and it swung open. So she went in.
“It was rundown and pretty well trashed,” Amy said. “The sign on the door states that the place is being re-plumbed and will re-open &#8220;soon.&#8221; I have my doubts … but I got to see where the phone had been … and, I know this is going to sound cheesy as all get-out, but I left a note to ‘Amy&#8217;s Mom’ and taped a dime to it. It&#8217;s just a ‘Hi, I stopped by’ kind of note, but also that I wanted to leave the offer of communication open. Yeah. And then I stuck it to the bulletin board and pulled the door shut behind me.”
23andMe provides genetic testing services for informational purposes; your results may or may not help you to search for or identify relatives or family members.

Amy’s Story

23andMe’s popular Ancestry Composition just got a little better.
The feature estimates what percentage of your DNA comes from populations around the world, breaking down the Asian, African or European ancestry to give you insight into the <a href="https://www.23andme.com/ancestry/">geographic origins of your ancestors</a> going back many generations.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-19805 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/African-American-Example1-300x220.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="220" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/African-American-Example1-300x220.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/African-American-Example1.jpg 661w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Customers should start seeing the update to their Ancestry Composition over the next several weeks. It will offer people with African or Asian ancestry greater detail than they had before. We added several additional reference populations – for a total of 31.
Customer’s ancestry results are broken down by region, and then subregions and then even finer detail. So for example, we may breakdown the results of someone of African Ancestry by first identifying the percentage of “Sub-Saharan African Ancestry.”
That in turn might be broken down between percentages of west, African, central and south African.
The update allows 23andMe to offer individuals with African ancestry more detail into whether their ancestors came from eastern Africa, western Africa, southern Africa or central Africa. This is similar to how 23andMe reports out data for people of European ancestry, but 23andMe is not yet able to break down African ancestry by country or tribe. We are currently working on an <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/23andmes-african-ancestry-project/">African Ancestry Project</a>, which we hope will ultimately improve results for people with African ancestry.
<div id="attachment_19787" style="width: 291px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19787" class=" wp-image-19787 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Asian-Ancestry-281x300.jpg" alt="" width="281" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Asian-Ancestry-281x300.jpg 281w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Asian-Ancestry.jpg 500w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 281px) 100vw, 281px" />An example of an Asian American&#8217;s ancestry results.</div>
Customers with Asian ancestry will get much more detail into their ancestry, breaking ancestry between eastern Asia, southeastern Asia and south Asia.
In addition the update will now provide much more detail for customers with East Asian ancestry by breaking down that ancestry among five countries – China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia and eastern Russia (people with Yakut ancestry).
23andMe is conservative in making ancestry assignments, so in many cases we may list a certain percentage of a customer’s results as “non-specific” to a particular region. A customer’s results may include a certain percent of “Non-Specific Northern European” ancestry, for example.
That simply means that while 23andMe has identified the broader region of their ancestry, we do not have enough information to be able to predict the country of origin for that ancestry. We do offer customers the opportunity to select a more “speculative estimate,” which can sometimes give them more detail.

23andMe Makes More Improvements to Ancestry Features

He may have seen his mother once before, but PJ Holland can’t be sure. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-19680 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-216x300.jpg 216w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-768x1067.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-737x1024.jpg 737w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-633x880.jpg 633w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-849x1180.jpg 849w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182.jpg 1270w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 216px) 100vw, 216px" /> 
It’s a fleeting memory, one of his first. He would have been two or three at the time. He remembers watching two women crying and hugging each other near his room. He thinks one of the women was his mother. He remembers seeing the two women hold each other, and then they were gone.
So the first time PJ Holland saw his mother’s face, it was in a photograph. It was this August. He was 80.
The old black and white image of his mother had been taken long before his birth and he saw it for the first time only after spending decades looking for her. He, and his niece Marilyn Souders, would never have found his mother if it hadn’t been for 23andMe.
“One day I logged into his account and it said, ‘You have a match,’” said Marilyn, whose family took PJ in when he was 19, and made him one of their own.
“We spent so long looking,” said Marilyn.
PJ’s story came to us from<a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/p/about-me.html"> CeCe Moore</a>. CeCe wrote about PJ<a href="http://adoptiondna.blogspot.com/2013/10/pj-hollands-dna-journey-to-find-his.html"> here</a>. A Dallas TV station broadcast his story, and that in turn got picked up nationally. It’s easy to see why.
PJ’s early life reads like a Charles Dickens novel. His mother, Agnes, grew up in South Dakota, got pregnant out of wedlock, and moved to Kentucky to have her son. She didn’t have the means to raise him herself and put him in an orphanage run by nuns. She hoped a good Catholic family would adopt him. She’d gotten a job in the laundry there so she could be near him, and would visit him regularly. But after a while an administrator stopped her from visiting because every time she left he would cry.
PJ and his niece Marilyn pieced some of his story together after years of collecting bits and pieces of information. Many, many years ago Marilyn had even gone so far as to organize a reunion of women who worked at the hospital where he was born. Although they had PJ’s mother’s name and were able to find some of those small details of his early life, Marilyn and PJ never were able to find his mother.
Marilyn even went so far as to send out letters to everyone with his godmother’s name who lived in Ohio, only to find out that she had died in 1935. Marilyn found his godfather, but he turned out to simply be the attending physician at the hospital where PJ was delivered.
“I tried so hard,” said Marilyn.
Then one day she logged onto PJ’s 23andMe account.
&#8220;This big pop-up comes on and said, &#8216;You have a first cousin match,&#8217; and I&#8217;m like, &#8216;Oh my God! I can&#8217;t believe this!'&#8221;
The match was with Cathryn Mudon, a 30-something aspiring actress in New York, who was identified by 23andMe as PJ’s, first or second cousin. (She is a first cousin once removed, meaning her father is PJ’s first cousin.)
Cathryn, who’d tested for health reasons after reading about Angelina Jolie’s breast cancer scare, didn’t quite get that this was a momentous connection for PJ.
<div id="attachment_19681" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19681" class="wp-image-19681 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland.jpg 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />PJ, left, and his new found first cousin John Mudon.</div>
&#8220;I didn&#8217;t understand the magnitude of it.  I was like, &#8216;Oh cool. Neat to meet you.&#8217; It&#8217;s such a distant generation that I didn&#8217;t think much of it,&#8221; Mudon told the Dallas TV station that covered his story. &#8220;And (Marilyn) was like, &#8216;You don&#8217;t understand. We&#8217;ve been searching for Agnes since 1970.&#8221;
It really went back much, much farther than that.
PJ had been looking his whole life. He was one of the few Depression era kids at the orphanage who didn’t get adopted. Many of them had been deposited in the orphanage because their families had fallen on hard times and simply couldn’t afford to care for them, but they sometimes visited.
On what the orphanage called “People’s Day,” relatives would come and see the children.
&#8220;All the orphans had people visit them on &#8216;people’s day&#8217; except me, because there were no relatives,&#8221; PJ said.
By 12, considered too old to be adopted, PJ been sent to work as a farmhand, but he ran away and hid in the convent. They let him work there until he left at 16, when he lied about his age so he could join the Army. When he got out the Army, it was Marilyn’s family who took him in. They helped the then 19 year-old get a high school education and a job.
PJ’s life has been anything but tragic. He did find a family who cared about him. Marilyn knew him as “Uncle PJ.” He traveled the world, met and married a beautiful woman, the artist<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilma_G._Holland"> Vilma Isabel Gonzalez Cordova Holland,</a> and succeeded in his career. But even after he retired and neared his 80s, PJ longed to find his mother.
Within a few hours of connecting with Cathryn through 23andMe, Marilyn talked to her on the phone. PJ eventually connected with Cathryn’s father, John, PJ’s first cousin. Cathryn and her father then made arrangements to visit PJ in Texas, bringing with them photos of his mother, but also of her brothers, sisters, and his grandparents.
<div id="attachment_19677" style="width: 249px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19677" class="wp-image-19677 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-239x300.jpg" alt="" width="239" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-239x300.jpg 239w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-768x962.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-817x1024.jpg 817w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-702x880.jpg 702w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-942x1180.jpg 942w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-scaled.jpg 2043w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 239px) 100vw, 239px" />PJ in his Army uniform in 1949.</div>
When John first saw PJ in the airport he said he immediately saw the family resemblance. PJ saw more photos of his mother, Agnes, most of them for the first time. He also heard a little bit about her from John. The family hadn’t known about the pregnancy, and after leaving South Dakota, Agnes never went back. She became estranged from her family, periodically sending letters to her youngest sister Hazel, John’s mother.
There are still gaps in the story that PJ would like to fill. For one, they know that his mother moved to Cincinnati and may have worked at a school. She died in 1989. They found the apartment where she used to live and the church she attended, but Marilyn said they’ve been unable to find out more.
They still hope that PJ’s story might prompt someone to come forward who remembered Agnes and give them more information about her life.
“But we would have never found her without 23andMe,” she said.
23andMe provides genetic testing services for informational purposes; your results may or may not help you to search for or identify relatives or family members.

23andMe Helps Man Find Family

An adoptee, Cody Harden turned to 23andMe to search for medical information. Little did he know that in his search he’d find more than just data about his health, he found family. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-19653 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cody-Hardens-Photo-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cody-Hardens-Photo-200x300.jpg 200w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cody-Hardens-Photo.jpg 427w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" /> 
Cody, a 39-year-old software systems specialist, hadn’t tested with the intent of trying to find his biological family. It just happened.
“I had a great life and my adoptive parents were wonderful,” he said. “I didn’t know the circumstances of my adoption, why I was given up, so I didn’t know if it was good or bad. I   didn’t really care to find my relatives.”
His search had really been about his health and wanting to learn about what, if any, genetic risks he had. So when he discovered that 23andMe had matched him to potential distant cousins, his reaction was lukewarm.
“I thought that was neat, but it was more of a novelty than anything else,” Cody said.
A little later, 23andMe matched him with someone that could be a fourth cousin. That caught his attention. He connected with his fourth cousin through 23andMe. The cousin didn’t know where Cody fit into the family but decided to start digging around.
“That kind of got the ball rolling, and eventually there was a second cousin, and poof! There’s the family,” he said.
His excitement grew as he got closer and closer to tracking down his half-siblings and parents. He learned that his father was fifteen and his mother only fourteen when they’d had him.
“They really didn’t talk about it for the next forty years,” Cody said.
He also grew more apprehensive.
“Are there going to be hard feelings? Did I ruin someone’s life?” he wondered. “Would they resent me?”
Then last spring he talked to his birth father for the first time, who encouraged him to contact his birth mother. It took a bit more work to track her down, but he eventually found and contacted her.
“I could tell she was so nervous and excited,” Cody said. “I felt for her.”
He discovered he’d grown up only 45 minutes away from her and his half brother.
“What a trip,” he said.
Cody says he felt an instant connection when meeting his half brothers and parents for the first time.
“In the last few months I learned a lot about genetics,” he said. “Personalities are just as much inherited as they are how you grew up.”
He looks more like his mother, he says, but he’s inherited his father’s outgoing, prankster personality.
He’s since visited with his half brother on his mother’s side several times, as he lives closer than his father and his father’s son. He keeps in touch with both sides by phone and intends on keeping up with that connection.
Still, it’s amazing to him to think that just last year, he had no idea who any of these people were.
“This is all really new to me,” Cody says. “It’s exciting to know that I’ve got half-brothers here and there, and I’ll try to make the most of it with whatever time I have left.”
Results not typical. Results vary due to unique differences in each individual’s DNA. On average, users receive at least one or two results that may help with proactively managing health.  23andMe’s services are not a substitute for professional medical or diagnostic advice.

An Unexpected Discovery

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-17116" alt="Virginia Hughes" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Virginia-Hughes-300x173.jpg" width="300" height="173" />
As we’ve seen in many of the stories we’ve featured here about customers finding unknown family or uncovering family secrets using DNA testing, it can lead into unexpected territory. Even in the happiest of endings – <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/sister-connect-with-23andme/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">siblings meeting </a>each other for the first time, sons finding their mothers and daughters learning about their real fathers – it’s almost always complicated.
As Tolstoy so long ago said in the opening of his epic Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Virginia writes about Cheryl, a woman in her 60s whose family is equally unique in its sad history. But the story is more than just about Cheryl’s search – along with 23andMe, Cheryl used a number of resources from public records to DNA testing to even “search angels” to assist her– Virginia uses the story as a way to discuss such issues as privacy and even personal identity.
The story called “Uprooted” appears in Matter, an online long-form journalism publication specializing in stories about science, medicine and technology. (It’s 99 cents to see the whole piece.)

It’s Complicated

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-19265 size-full" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1707" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-768x512.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-880x587.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-02-1180x787.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />
Mike Lattimore felt a mix of anxiety and dread about visiting Africa, so fraught it was with the scars of slavery.
But standing on the shores of what is known as the “Slave River” near the Cape Coast of Ghana, where men and women were once bathed before they were sold into slavery, Mike felt a sense of peace instead of horror.
“We had a ritual,” he said.
In his journey to explore his ancestry, Mike, a 57-year-old who lectures on cyber security, turned to 23andMe’s genetic testing to guide the way.
Using 23andMe’s ancestry tools, Mike learned more about his mixed heritage rooted in both Africa and Russia. The information has filled in big gaps in his family history and helped Mike add more pages to what he likes to call “The One Story” tracing back the lives of his ancestors.
“23and me pointed me in the right direction in terms of knowing which records to sift through, which direction to go,” he said.
Standing there with other African Americans, Mike felt he was answering the prayers of his ancestors, a plea that their children and children’s children would be better off than they were. He saw evidence of that answered prayer in his own life – his family, his job and the things he’d achieved–and in the fact that he was able to return to tell the story of what had happened there.
<div id="attachment_19260" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19260" class="size-medium wp-image-19260" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-08-300x200.jpg" alt="A photo of Mike's mother in front of some art from Africa." width="300" height="200" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-08-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-08-768x512.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-08-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-08-880x587.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Mike-Lattimore-08-1180x787.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />A photo of Mike&#8217;s mother in front of some art from Africa.</div>
“It was a powerful and healing experience,” he said. “Good indeed did come out of that story. Light came out of the darkness of what happened there.”
His results from 23andMe didn’t just point him to Africa, but to his European ancestry and it reminded him of the interconnections of all people.
With his results he knew that his ancestors were likely from West Africa, but here was more than the science pointing him in that direction. When he walked among the Fante people he was overcome with a strong sense of kinship. They had the same orientation toward the water and fishing his own family had.
“I was struck by the people, there was something about the music and the energy it just felt right,” he said.
He knows that his E1a haplogroup points to ancestry in West Africa, but beyond the test results, Mike felt something deeper. He felt he was one of them.
The journey back to Africa capped a more than ten-year quest to discovery his ancestry, a hunt that included finding birth and death certificates in a rural town in Kentucky, contacts in Newfoundland and a convent in Baltimore.
The results from 23andMe also linked him to his mixed ancestry, one that is rooted in Africa, but includes both Jewish and, surprisingly to him, Scandinavian ancestry.
“My ancestors came from disparate places on the planet but all have lived the story of the struggle to seek a better life,” Mike said. “When I think about it, it gives me goose bumps because I am the sum total of all that they were, and now, I am the keeper of the memory.”
Some of that history Mike had heard from his own father. He heard about his great grandfather, Rush Green, who’d been owned by a man named Miller. Upon gaining his freedom his grandfather took the name “Green,” because he liked it.
“He told Papa, ‘a man has got the right to name his-self.’”
In his chronicling of his “One Story,” Mike has found his great grandfather’s grave in Paducah Kentucky, an “Aunt Minnie,” born in Russia whose native language was Yiddish, and records of his mother’s life being raised by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order of black Catholic nuns in Baltimore. He found records of his grandmother, Mary Brace, a white Canadian woman who had to give up his mother for adoption.
Through 23andMe he’s found relatives he didn’t know he had and he continues to fill in more pages of his family history.
“I strongly feel that we should invest in finding our ancestry because it really helps us as human beings not only to have a legacy that we can pass down but also to help with the healing,” Mike said. “Our country has experienced a great rift in that we have never fully investigated what happened. You’ve got to know where you’ve been so that you know where you’re going.”
23andMe provides genetic testing services for informational purposes; your results may or may not help you to search for or identify relatives or family members.

Ancestry Service — Page 23