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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				A news story about Liz being found.
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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

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

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.
<iframe loading="lazy" width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/655c9tW6fwI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Sharing Her Story

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

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.

Who Would Believe It?

In her 30 years of searching, Perline Porter had to chase down rumors, uncover lies and overcome false assumptions, but in the end she discovered the truth.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20880" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo-278x300.jpg" alt="Perline's Photo" width="278" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo-278x300.jpg 278w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo-768x828.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo-950x1024.jpg 950w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo-817x880.jpg 817w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo-1095x1180.jpg 1095w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Perlines-Photo.jpg 1493w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 278px) 100vw, 278px" />
“I finally know where I came from,” said Perline, a 58-year-old retired computer tech. “I found my biological father and family.”
The searching – dizzying in its twists and turns– finally ended last year when Perline found her half-brother using 23andMe. Her decade’s long search and ultimate success in finding her lost biological family became the fodder of her book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/My-DNA-Search-my-Roots/dp/098962000X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&#038;qid=1396908948&#038;sr=8-2&#038;keywords=my+dna+roots" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“My DNA Search for My Roots.”</a>
The pages of her story track the years of disappointment Perline endured during her search. Through it all she never lost hope, a hope fueled by a feeling that ever since she was young she knew there was something about her that set her apart from her family.
“When I was around 10 years old I suspected something was different,” she said.
Her older brother and sister used to tease her saying she had a different father. On her own, she also found evidence that all the stories she’d heard about who her father was didn’t add up.
At the same time, Perline felt proud of who she thought was her dad, a man named Harry Holbert. But she looked nothing like her two older siblings who were fathered by Harry.
Perline had a tough childhood. Her mother drank, and she grew up in an alcoholic dysfunctional family. At 16, Perline got pregnant and married her boyfriend. She lived with his family and worked in the kitchen of a rest home.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20884" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/My-DNA-Search-Book-Cover-200x300.jpg" alt="My DNA Search -- Book Cover" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/My-DNA-Search-Book-Cover-200x300.jpg 200w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/My-DNA-Search-Book-Cover.jpg 231w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />
When Perline was 17, her mother, in a drunken stupor, finally told her the truth about Harry. He wasn’t her father he had died before she was born. Her mother said Perline’s father was a man named Buck Casper, a close friend of Harry’s but it turned out to be a false lead that took decades to unravel and it wasn’t the only one. Perline learned that her mother had somehow changed the name of her father on her birth certificate.
As she searched through the years, Perline got very good at tracking down names and addresses and using public records. She also went back into her mother’s history. Harry ran a bar in Kelso, in California’s Mojave Desert where they lived. Kelso was a train depot not far from Barstow.  Perline realized that although she was born in Utah, she must have been conceived it Kelso, so she knew that learning more about her mother’s time in Kelso might help her find her biological father.
Over the years she got close to who she thought was her biological family only to learn she was wrong. All that experience taught her something too. Much is said about being able to track public records and people to learn the truth. But Perline asks: “What about when people and paperwork lie?”
Perline eventually turned to 23andMe to get tested because she knew that at least, “DNA doesn’t lie.”
When she tested in 2011, she got a match with a second cousin and his daughter. But she was still fixated on finding “Buck” and she ignored the match. She did find Buck, and although Buck was not well, his son tested. Perline was sure they were related, but it turned out what her mother told her was not true, Buck was not her father.
That’s when she went back to her second cousin match on 23andMe.Using the help of genetic genealogists, Kathryn Johnston and CeCe Moore, Perline zeroed her search for her father to three brothers John Collins, Edward Woodrow (Woody) Collins and Hugh Collins. Because of their ages, Perline thought for sure it was “Woody” or “Hugh.” She didn’t consider John Sr., who would have been 17 at the time of her conception. Her mom had been 25 at the time, was a widow with two small children.
It turned out Perline was wrong. As she was contacting relatives of the brothers, they all seemed to be saying the same thing – the younger brother John Sr. was the lady’s man. They thought he was her father.
Eventually, Perline contacted John’s son, John Jr.
He wanted to know more about who she was and because Perline had already met relatives of his through 23andMe, she recommended he contact them about her. Eventually, he did and decided that Perline wasn’t trying to scam him and he agreed to test with 23andMe. Perline traveled to California and met John Jr. She immediately noticed their similarities in John Jr., and her and saw pictures of John Sr. that resembled her two sons.
“I was totally amazed at how much he looked like my two boys,” she said.
They were able to confirm the connection using 23andMe.
John saw in Perline his father’s mannerisms and even the way she told a story or liked to drop one-liners. It all seemed uncannily similar to his dad.
“It is truly amazing how you can inherit traits from your father without even knowing who he is,” John said in a newspaper article about their reunion.
He also introduced Perline to her half-sister Carey, and they all got together in person in Fallon, Nevada.
For her part, Perline marvels at ultimately finding who her father was. There were many times that she was so discouraged that she wanted to abandon her search. Indeed she’d sometimes stop and focus on her life, but she never gave up entirely, she said. She was driven to find out the truth about herself.
&#8220;When you don&#8217;t know who your other half is, you&#8217;re just missing something,&#8221; 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.

Searching For Her Roots

Anyone with a brother or sister doesn’t need a national holiday to remind them how special bonds between siblings can be, but in recognition of<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblings_Day"> National Sibling Day</a> we bring you another in a long list of stories of siblings who found each other through 23andMe.


Tricia had a few details, but never enough to find her father.
John and Charlene, her brother and sister, never knew Tricia even existed. Apparently neither did their dad. It wasn’t until Tricia tested with 23andMe that they found each other and learned that they were all related.
<div id="attachment_20717" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20717" class="size-medium wp-image-20717" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Siblings-on-dads-bench-selfie-300x232.jpg" alt="Trish, center, and her brother John and sister Charlene." height="232" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Siblings-on-dads-bench-selfie-300x232.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Siblings-on-dads-bench-selfie.jpg 574w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Trish, center, and her brother John and sister Charlene.</div>
Tricia first started searching for information about her biological parents more than a decade ago. With the help of her adopted brother, Tricia had tracked down the name of her biological mother, who’d passed away.
She was also able to find the town where her mother had lived, even the old school she attended. When she visited the old school building she saw for the first time a photo of her biological mother hanging on the wall. It was a striking moment for her to see some of herself reflected in the face of a person she’d never met.
“That was a kick in the pants,” Tricia said. “To see her face and that ‘Oh yeah, I got all things from her.’”
Later she tracked down her biological mother’s sister, who helped her cobble together a few more details around her birth. Her aunt told her that her parents were college students, when she was conceived. Her mom at Oregon State University, and her dad was a basketball star at a nearby college.
“In my head I thought maybe it was one of those spring break flings,” Tricia said.
According to her aunt, once the family learned of the pregnancy they took her mom out of school. The family moved to another town, and Tricia was put up for adoption and given to a new family on Christmas Day in 1957 a few days after her birth.
Those were all details Tricia had never had before. She learned a little about her mother, saw some more photos and learned that she had Irish and Norwegian ancestry.

<div style="float: right; text-align: justified; width: 300px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
More Stories About Siblings
&#8211; <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20609 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg" alt="Mike &#038; Leslie smiling" height="219" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling.jpg 697w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
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Hey Bro&#8217;
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</div>

But in all those details there was nothing about her father. And she left it at that, until she tested with 23andMe in late 2013.
Tricia said she signed up for 23andMe to find out a little bit more about where in Europe her ancestors came from.


“I was tickled to find out how much Cro-magnon (Neanderthal) I was,” she said.


But a match with a first cousin named Randy was a total surprise, she said.
“I did not expect that,” Tricia said.


She and Randy began exchanging messages and Tricia’s surprises kept coming. He wanted to figure out how they were related and began asking her about her background. Tricia told him what little she knew. A few of those details stuck out, basketball, a small college town in Oregon and the date of her birth. Randy connected the dots.


“I think my Uncle Ralph was your dad,” he said.


Tricia was stunned. Randy explained that his uncle had died a few years ago, but he added a happy surprise.
Ralph had two children, a son and a daughter. Tricia had a brother and a sister.
She didn’t know what to say.
In Texas, a woman Tricia had never met soon got a surprise of her own. When Charlene’s cousin Randy called, he started the conversation by asking if she was sitting down.
“My first thought naturally was, “Who died?” Charlene said.


Randy quickly explained that he’d tested with 23andMe, gave her a short description of DNA testing for ancestry and said he told Charlene that when he tested he’d connected not just to third and fourth cousins but to a single first cousin, who he didn’t know. He tried to explain how overlapping genetic segments are used to calculate “relatedness.” That the closer a relation the longer the overlapping segments. Charlene wasn’t following all of what he was saying until he got to the punch line.
You’ve got an older sister Charlene, he told her.
She said she was thankful that she was sitting down.
Charlene then talked to her brother. Randy helped connect them to Tricia and after exchanging messages, photos and family details, it was clear that they were indeed siblings.
“I’d always wanted a sister,” Charlene said.


Around Christmas time 2013 Tricia flew to San Diego where her half brother lived and her biological father was buried. She met him and Charlene. They spent the holidays together. They visited their father’s grave. They bonded. They learned of some uncanny shared family traits – an interest in painting, the sea and oddly dragonflies.
For Tricia the connection to family couldn’t have happened at a better time. Over the last few years she’d endured some difficult health problems and a divorce.
Now she feels blessed and finds herself, &#8220;smiling like a Cheshire cat all day long.&#8221;
She recently spent a week in Texas with Charlene and her family.


“Life is good thanks to 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.

A Siblings Story From 23andMe

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.”

A Secret No More

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.

Adoption — Page 6