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 Blog

23andMe Blog Team

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

Editor&#8217;s note: Alice dropped us a line to update us on her story. 
&#8220;23andme has helped me AGAIN with my ongoing search! If you&#8217;ll remember I&#8217;m adopted and found my bio mom via information I got from the 23andme test &#8211; but when I found my bio dad, it turns out HE was adopted too! Now I am on the trail of my father&#8217;s biological father.&#8221; 
Alice Toler is an accomplished artist and writer, but she calls herself a nerd of sorts. 
Really more than that – for most of her life Alice has felt disconnected from others, more like “an alien.”
“My mind doesn&#8217;t seem to work like other people&#8217;s,” Alice said. “Throughout my life I felt a little bit like I’d been beamed down from some other place. I later learned that a lot of adoptees feel like that – disconnected from others in some way.”
<div id="attachment_19163" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-19163" class="size-medium wp-image-19163" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alice-T-at-7-w-her-dad-at-7-300x224.jpg" alt="Alice at 7 with a photo of her biological dad at the same age." width="300" height="224" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alice-T-at-7-w-her-dad-at-7-300x224.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alice-T-at-7-w-her-dad-at-7-768x574.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alice-T-at-7-w-her-dad-at-7-1024x765.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alice-T-at-7-w-her-dad-at-7-880x657.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Alice-T-at-7-w-her-dad-at-7-1180x881.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Alice at 7 with a photo of her biological dad at the same age.</div>
That feeling changed a bit recently when she met her birth mother for the first time with the help of 23andMe and a lot of detective work of her own.
So perhaps it was appropriate that Alice met her mother for the first time in the otherworldly landscape of the Black Rock desert in Nevada. For a week each year, this wasteland hosts an “ephemeral city” of tens of thousands of unconventional thinkers at the annual Burning Man festival, where West-coast tech gurus and professional engineers meet hippies and alien abductees to create some of the most ambitious interactive art on the planet. Though off-season and empty of revelers during their day spent there, the open desert provided a fittingly uncanny backdrop for the first intense exchange of information between a woman and her child, separated at birth.
“The experience was surreal,” Alice said. “She was so happy to meet me, and she has a friendly dorkiness to her that suddenly opened a window of understanding onto my own dorky personality. We are nerds together!”
The story of how Alice found her mother is long and complicated, involving decades of on-again and off-again searching. But her big break came after finding a distant cousin through 23andMe.
Although she was adopted by a British couple in the Bahamas, she turns out to have genetic family roots in New Mexico and also discovered she has Native American ancestry. Finding her birth mother and then her birth father, and learning about her ancestry, grounded her in a way she never thought possible.
“I went from having no information at all, to finding out that I have extensive recorded family lines on my mother&#8217;s side–in fact, my grandmother&#8217;s family is recorded all the way back to the Spanish conquistadors,” Alice said.
And her life is richer, she said.
“Most people only have two parents and two ancestral lines,” she said. “I have four parents, more cousins (both adoptive and genetic) than I can count, ancestral lines documented back hundreds of years, AND the challenge of a new mystery to solve. I am truly lucky.”

Connecting With The Past

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-17459 size-full" title="richard-with-adoptive-parents-lo-res" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/richard-with-adoptive-parents-lo-res.jpg" alt="" width="768" height="960" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/richard-with-adoptive-parents-lo-res.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/richard-with-adoptive-parents-lo-res-240x300.jpg 240w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/richard-with-adoptive-parents-lo-res-704x880.jpg 704w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" />Richard Hill as a child with his adoptive parents, Harold and Thelma Hill. 
Richard Hill spent his career working in the sciences and in marketing, but hearing about his decades-long search for family you get the sense he would have made a great detective.
While shoe leather helped him unravel much of the mystery of his birth, it wasn’t until the availability of personal genetic testing, including testing through 23andMe, that Richard completed the picture of his biological family.
“My search had lurched ahead and stalled repeatedly over 31 years,” he says in a book he wrote about his quest <a href="http://www.dna-testing-adviser.com/finding-family-book.html">Finding Family: My Search for Roots and Secrets in My DNA</a>. 
The gap in Richard’s history became apparent when he was 18. That’s when his doctor looked through his medical file and let slip that Richard had been adopted. He was stunned.
“My heart skipped a beat,” Richard said in his book.
‘“Excuse me?” I asked. I must have misheard him. Or maybe he had me confused with someone else. I’m Richard Hill, son of Harold and Thelma Hill. Surely, he must have someone else’s file in his hands.’
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-17460 size-full" title="Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="2100" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES.jpg 1500w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES-214x300.jpg 214w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES-768x1075.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES-731x1024.jpg 731w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES-629x880.jpg 629w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Richard-Hill-01-HI-RES-843x1180.jpg 843w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" />
Find Him
Thus begins Richard’s saga, which is part memoir, part detective story. It details his search for family, and how after decades of using paper records and tracking down whoever knew any tidbit of information that could help, Richard finally turned to DNA testing from 23andMe and other services. These tests helped him identify first his late biological father’s surname and later confirmed his exact place in his large biological family.
His search wasn’t fueled by a sense of abandonment. Richard knew his parents loved him, and he in turn loved them. Whenever someone asks him about finding his “real” parents, Richard corrects them, saying his real parents were the couple who adopted him. But the search and the answers he found on the way helped him fill in missing pieces of his history.
“I have a great appreciation of my adoptive parents and how they raised me,” he said. “And this certainly has made me think about the whole nature versus nurture thing and what I got from my biological parents versus what I got from my adoptive parents. But it’s also made me feel more complete.”
Or as he says in the book, “many of us (adoptees) will never know peace until we know all the pieces.”
Richard said that although he learned about being adopted at 18, his career and family all got in the way of seeking out more information about his birth parents. Digging into his adoption didn’t start in earnest until he was in his 30s after his father was bedridden by a stroke. He’d visit his dad often during that time and he would sit at his father’s bedside and talk. At one point, as if freeing a burden that had weighed on him all those years, his father said, ‘Well I guess you know you were adopted?”
His father went on to reveal the first bits of information Richard had ever heard about his biological mother. She was “a cute little Irish girl” and her name was “Jackie.” He added one more fascinating piece: that she had had another son. So Richard learned that somewhere out there he had a brother. His father suggested that Richard should find him.
<div style="float: right; text-align: justified; width: 200px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
Ancestry Tools You Can Use
Not everyone’s family story is cloaked in mystery like Richard Hill’s. Most of us just want to learn a little more about our history and gain insight into the generations from which we descended.
23andMe’s Ancestry tools can help you explore what your genetics says about your ancestry. Some of the insights can only be had through genetics. When used with other information – whether it’s your family’s oral traditions, names of ancestors in a family Bible, or other paper records – your 23andMe results can become even more powerful.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-14613" title="ancestry dashboard" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ancestry-dashboard-200x200.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="200" />
</div>
“Bingo”
When Richard started looking, he almost immediately faced daunting obstacles and dead ends. For instance, although he found the identity of his biological mother, he quickly learned that she’d died a little over a year after his birth. With a lot of work and luck, he was able to connect with her son, his half-brother. The two met for the first time in 1981.
But finding Richard’s biological father seemed impossible: He had no name – the one on his original birth certificate was the name of his birth mother’s ex-husband. In addition, his mother never told anyone who fathered her second child. The pregnancy itself was a secret and she had left town for the delivery. Still, none of that stopped Richard from searching. He did this by painstakingly piecing together his mother’s life at the time of his conception in 1945, and then contacting people who knew her or worked with her at the time and were still alive.
It took years. At one point he thought he’d found his birth father only to learn, after a paternity test, that he was wrong. That didn’t stop him either.
Finally, with the advent of early genetic tests that traced Y-DNA, the paternal line, Richard matched a distant cousin whose surname might also be that of his father. That provided a vital clue. He went back to some of the records he’d accumulated in his search. His mother had worked at a bar called Dann’s Tavern. Looking at old records he noticed that the name of the bar’s owner matched the surname he’d dug up.
“Bingo,” Richard thought.
Correcting a Mistake
Although the bar was long gone, and its owner dead and buried, Richard was able to find a niece of the man. He learned the owner was one of five brothers, and all of them were now deceased. So Richard started contacting sons of each man, asking if they would agree to a DNA test to determine if they were siblings. But unlike 23andMe’s test that now reads more than a million points in your genome, the only test available then looked at just 15 genetic markers to estimate family relationships. That test led him to identify the wrong man as his father and the wrong children as his siblings. It took a few more years, and a test by 23andMe and a test by FTDNA, to figure out that he’d made the mistake.
The two tools he used to correct the mistake were 23andMe’s Relative Finder and FTDNA’s Family Finder. The first test was on a man he thought was a cousin, but after getting the results back from 23andMe, it was clear that this man was actually his half brother.
“DNA testing helped me and it can help others,” Richard said.
His years of searching and his use of DNA testing has also made him a go-to source for others turning to genetic testing for more answers about their ancestry. He set up a website, <a href="http://www.dna-testing-adviser.com">www.dna-testing-adviser.com</a>, to help people make sense of the different tools out there.   And even with the ups and downs of his family search, he doesn’t regret a thing.
&#8220;I did not have to give up anybody in my adopted family. It&#8217;s not an either-or thing. You&#8217;re just adding on. You can&#8217;t have too much family.&#8221;

23andMe’s Tools Help Solve Ancestry Mystery

<div style="width: 435px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/birthcertificate.jpg" alt="birthcertificate.jpg" class="right" width="425" height="282" />Photo by Nancy Catherine Walker/iStockphoto</div>
If you were adopted, conceived through sperm donation or don’t know your parents for some other reason, 23andMe can give you a glimpse into your genetic legacy. Our service can’t help you locate your biological parents or reveal their medical histories — but it can provide some information about their heritage, and maybe even offer a few hints at some of their traits
Click <a href="https://www.23andme.com/dna-health-ancestry/">here</a> to learn more about what 23andMe&#8217;s Personal Genome Service can and can&#8217;t do with regard to unknown parents:
<h6> 
Ancestry</h6>
23andMe’s Personal Genome Service offers a number of different tools for probing your ancestry. The broadest view comes from the Global Similarity feature, which identifies the native populations around the world you most resemble genetically. It is likely the majority of your ancestors came from the one or two regional populations that are most similar to you.
The <a href="https://www.23andme.com/you/haplogroup/maternal/">Maternal Ancestry</a> feature offers a different vantage point, using one specific part of the genome to <a href="https://www.23andme.com/topics/ancestry/family-tree/">trace a single branch of your family tree</a> back in time and space. The results apply to only one branch — your mother’s all-female lineage — but they trace it all the way back to the origin of the human species about 200,000 years ago. As a result, the Maternal Ancestry feature gives you a very good idea of where your mother’s mother’s mother’s … family came from.
The <a href="https://www.23andme.com/you/haplogroup/paternal/">Paternal Ancestry</a> feature provides similar information, except that it provides information about a person’s all-male ancestral line. Because it analyzes DNA on the Y-chromosome, however, it is only available for men.
Finally, 23andMe recently introduced the Ancestry Painting feature, a new component of our service that could be of great interest to people who are uncertain about their heritage. Ancestry Painting examines each stretch of a person’s DNA and determines which of three continents it most likely came from — Africa, Asia or Europe. Because each person gets a complete set of chromosomes from each parent, the Ancestry Painting feature can tell an adopted person what continent each of his or her parents’ ancestors came from. The daughter of an African-American mother and an Asian-American father, for example, could easily see that signature in her Ancestry Painting.
<h6>Family Relationships</h6>
The data produced by 23andMe&#8217;s Personal Genome Serviceâ„¢ is not a tool to locate unknown parents. But it can be useful for determining the relationships between people. If you suspect another person might be related to you, you could test that theory (as long as that person also signs up for 23andMe and agrees to share profiles). For example, if you and a half-sibling compared yourselves to one another you would find that you share substantial stretches of half-identical DNA. 

<h6>
Health and Physical Traits</h6>
Most people make assumptions about some of the genetic variants they have inherited by looking at their parents and grandparents. A family history of heart disease, cancer or diabetes, for example, may indicate that a person has inherited some genetic predisposition for that particular ailment.
Naturally, people who do not know their parents have no idea about any disease-related genetic variants they might have inherited. While 23andMe does reveal some genetic information about genetic variations that have been associated with diseases and conditions, it does not offer a full enough view to establish a family history.
Because genetics is only one among many factors that can influence a person’s health and physical traits (and often only a minor factor!) there is very limited definitive information 23andMe can provide about unknown parents’ physical appearance or medical history. But even at this early stage of research, 23andMe can give you a glimpse at your parents’ DNA simply by showing you your own, along with the results of recent scientific studies that give it context. And over time, we hope to learn much more about how genetic information translates into <a href="https://www.23andme.com/dna-ancestry/">physical traits</a> and health outcomes.

Adoption — Page 7

23andMe Helps Man Find Family

An Unexpected Discovery

Connecting With The Past

23andMe’s Tools Help Solve Ancestry Mystery

Adoption and 23andMe: Filling Gaps in Your Family Tree

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