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.”

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

An Extraordinary Turn

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


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


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


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


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


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

More Deserving

David was 17 when a few words change him forever.
His mother and father were having a bad patch and his mom had had a little bit too much to drink when she let something slip.
<div id="attachment_21151" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21151" class="size-medium wp-image-21151" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/David-Kevin.002-300x225.jpg" alt="David, left, in his graduation picture. His biological half brother Kevin at around the same age. The two only recently met." width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/David-Kevin.002-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/David-Kevin.002-768x576.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/David-Kevin.002-880x660.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/David-Kevin.002.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />David, left, at 17. His half brother Kevin at around the same age.</div>
She told David he was her favorite child and then slipped in something that it was “because she wasn’t sure if I was my father’s child,” David said.
The next day she tried to backpedal, chalking her to having too much to drink.
“But you can’t take something like that back,” David said.
Now 54, David, who owns a small construction company in Colorado, said he could never shake what his mother said.
“This was the most devastating news I had ever heard in my young life,” he said. “I had a very loving dad who would do anything for his children. He is my hero. My mom, she did the best she could.”
But what his mother told him triggered a flood of questions. If it was true, David wanted to know who his biological father really was. He felt he needed to know so he could make sense of some of the differences he could already see that set him apart from his siblings, but for 20 years his mom wouldn’t discuss it, leaving him with one question:
“Who am I?”
<h6>Finding Out</h6>
It wasn’t until he tested with 23andMe last year that David got closer to answering some of those questions. The experience changed him for the better, he said.
“The biggest thing I learned is that distance, time and environment cannot change the traits you were born with,” said David.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21157" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Taz-Tattoos-300x214.jpg" alt="Taz Tattoo's" width="300" height="214" />
But David’s journey to get to that point was a long one. His mother’s revelation changed how he saw himself. Even though what she said also seemed to explain a lot, it also set him apart from his family. And it left him feeling angry.
It took David another 20 years before he could confront his mother about what she’d said. But even then, she gave him a false lead and until the day she died ten years later, told him nothing more about it.
“I gave up all hope of ever finding out the truth,” he said.
Then late last year he tested with 23andMe, and he was matched with a first cousin named John. Then one of David’s brothers tested. The results showed that the two were actually half brothers, confirming what his mother told him so many years before.
“I wasn’t really shocked,” David said.
But seeing that result helped David identify that he and his first cousin, John, were related paternally. Now David knew that he was on the right path to identify his biological father. But he needed more information.
<h6>A Hunch</h6>
David grew up near the border between Michigan and Wisconsin where hunting is a big deal and where out-of-towners often came during hunting season. David knew he was conceived around that time, so on a hunch, he asked John whether any of his uncles were hunters.
“He had an uncle who was,” said David. “The problem was, his uncle was married at the time of my conception.”
It would be a delicate thing to ask about, but John talked to one of his uncle’s sons, who agreed to test. Waiting to learn the results were “the longest of my life,” David said.
“I had to prepare myself for the possibility that I may of found out who my father was or that I had a brother I never knew of!” David said.
He also had to prepare himself to be disappointed or rejected, he said.
Meanwhile, John wanted to make sure his cousin understood what it might reveal.
For David the days of waiting were unbearable. He fretted that maybe he’d pushed too hard.
But then he got a late-night text from John.
“David, let me be the first to welcome you to the family,” it said.
David couldn&#8217;t believe his luck: “I can’t describe the emotions that were flooding through me.”
<h6>So Much In Common</h6>
He learned that his biological father was still alive and that he had two brothers and they wanted to meet him.
“I was thankful that they didn’t “kick me to the curb,”” David said.
When he first talked to his brother Gregory, he was dumbfounded.
“NEVER did I expect to be speaking to my brother,” David said. “We spoke to each other for over an hour and a half. We had so many things in common! We liked the same things. We thought the same way.”
And after sharing some photos they saw that they also looked alike. David then talked to his other brother Kevin. Kevin and Greg invited him to visit them in Chicago and meet their dad, David’s biological dad. Excited David made arrangements to travel to Chicago from his home in Colorado.
<h6>Talking to His Dad</h6>
But before he went to Chicago to meet his biological dad, David traveled back home to Michigan to talk in person to his father, the man who raised him.
“I told him that I have always loved him and always will but, he was not my biological father,” said David. “He immediately hugged me and said ‘I knew that David. I was never going to say anything because I don’t want to hurt you.’”
It was as if a huge weight was lifted from David&#8217;s shoulders. His father told him he was happy that he was able to learn the truth.
“He is an amazing man,” David said of his father. “The love and respect I feel for my Dad is immeasurable!”
<h6>Brothers Meet</h6>
When David arrived in Chicago he first met with his brothers.
“I felt from the moment I met my brothers an immediate connection to them and they said the same thing,” he said.
<div id="attachment_21152" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21152" class="size-medium wp-image-21152" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Peterson-Group-300x168.jpg" alt="From left David, John, David's 1st cousin, his half-brothers Kevin and Gregory, and Harry, David's biological father. " width="300" height="168" />From left David, John, David&#8217;s 1st cousin, his half-brothers Kevin and Gregory, and Harry, David&#8217;s biological father.</div>
They noted not just the physical likenesses but other things. They shared some of the same personality traits and oddly both David and one of his brothers had a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on one of their arms.
<h6>Call Me Anything You Want</h6>
Meeting his biological father also proved to be beyond words, David said.
His biological father told him: 
‘Wow, this is something. Now I got three sons. Can I call you son?’”
“You’re my father,” David told him. “You can call me anything you want.”
His biological father was most distraught that he had a son for all these years who he knew nothing about. And he was upset that he couldn’t remember David’s mother. But it didn’t hold him back from welcoming David into the family.
“I was welcomed with open arms by my father’s family,” he said. “I can’t remember ever feeling the love that I had felt those four short days I was visiting.”
<h6>Making Up For Lost Time</h6>
One of his brothers soon came to Colorado for a visit and now they plan on making up for the lost time.
For his part, David is still shocked that this mystery that nagged at him for most of his life has been solved. But he’s also fascinated by how even without ever meeting his brothers or his father, that he can still be so much like them.
“How does one explain how much a person has in common with a sibling or father they have never met?” asked David. “I have always wondered why I did the things I did, who I looked like… now I have my answers.”

Can I Call You Son?

We got a great response from our Google Hangout earlier this month, which focused on some of 23andMe’s basic ancestry tools. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21014" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy-300x75.jpg" alt="05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy" width="300" height="75" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy-300x75.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy-768x192.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy-1024x256.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy-880x220.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy-1180x295.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/05152014_hangout_banner_0002_right_Busy.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />


During the presentation <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com">CeCe Moore</a>, a genetic genealogist and 23andMe Ancestry Ambassador, started with a quick overview of the science behind using DNA for ancestry before diving into the features.
Also joining CeCe were Laurie Kahn, an ancestry Product Manager here at 23andMe and Christine Moschella, our Community Manager.
After the basics the team dove right into some of 23andMe’s features including Ancestry Composition, Ancestral Origins and DNA Relatives.
CeCe covered ways customers can use different settings to get finer detail about their ancestry and how to make the most of your matches. She also covered some of the basics on how to invite DNA Relatives to share information that can help in genealogical searches and how to use information even when those matches don’t choose to share with you.
This is our first Google Hangout to go over 23andMe tools with customers and we hope to do more. It’s a great overview and if you are just starting to explore your ancestry with DNA this is a wonderful way to get oriented with some of ways you can explore using 23andMe. So check it out.
<iframe loading="lazy" width="650" height="366" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kCJr7t2Sbpg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

23andMe Ancestry Basics

Kathy Fisher’s life journey has taken her far from home, but she’s never been far from family, even if she didn’t know it.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20977" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/KathyMom-251x300.jpeg" alt="KathyMom" width="251" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/KathyMom-251x300.jpeg 251w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/KathyMom.jpeg 725w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 251px) 100vw, 251px" />
In an uncanny coincidence, 23andMe connected Kathy with an unknown cousin whose path had crossed hers multiple times in her life — from South Africa, to Botswana, to California.
Kathy, 54, is originally from South Africa, but for the past 30 years, she’s lived in California.  Kathy works at Stanford University, where a colleague who specializes in personalized medicine first introduced her to 23andMe.
Intrigued by the chance to learn more about their DNA, Kathy and her husband both sent in test kits.  When Kathy reviewed her results, she noticed a familiar last name in the DNA Relative tool.
“This last name was most unusual in the United States,” said Kathy, “it was not even common in South Africa.”
Kathy looked into the person’s background and found out they did indeed share some DNA. She sent an email explaining the connection and asked some questions about where this newfound relative lived.  He answered her email immediately, and together they realized just how small this world can be.
<div id="attachment_20979" style="width: 237px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20979" class="wp-image-20979 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Kathy-Cousin-2-227x300.jpg" alt="Kathy &#038; Cousin 2" width="227" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Kathy-Cousin-2-227x300.jpg 227w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Kathy-Cousin-2.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 227px) 100vw, 227px" />Kathy and her cousin Neville.</div>
Kathy and her third cousin, Neville, met in person soon after connecting through 23andMe. Amazingly, Neville lived just 20 minutes away from her in California.  What’s more, as they shared their life stories, they realized their paths had intersected a number of times since childhood in a series of fantastic coincidences.
It all began when Kathy was 13 in 1971, and her family moved north from South Africa to a remote diamond mine, Orapa, Botswana.  She lived there off and on for the next 10 years.  After she left, her sister, brother-in-law and their two children lived there for about another 15 years.  Kathy moved to Namibia and then to the U.S in 1983.
Unbeknownst to her, from 1992 to 2000, Neville worked for IBM in Gaborone and went to Orapa to service computers a few times a year.  Kathy’s sister, Joan was the general manager’s assistant at the time and would very likely have met Neville.
But that was only the beginning, Kathy lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1983.  Neville married and had a child and moved to the U.S. in 2002, spent two years on the east coast and then moved to Northern California.  From 2007 to 2009, Neville was working at Stanford University.  At the time, Kathy was working at a private school just 10 minutes from Stanford.
Before Neville left Stanford to work at a start-up near the university, Kathy herself began working at Stanford, so they remained mere minutes from each other every day.  Neville’s start-up was eventually bought by eBay, where he works now.
Kathy and Neville both live near each other in the San Francisco Bay Area now.  They’ve most recently come together for a barbeque at Neville’s house, where Kathy met his family.
Kathy has two grown children who are 28 and 36, and she is organizing another get together at her home so her entire family can meet Neville’s.
“I am amazed by how many times our paths have crossed, but we’ve never met until now,” said Kathy. “It is so wonderful to be able to connect with Neville and to bring our families together after so many near-misses over the years.  It’s the beginning of a relationship that’s been a long time in the making.”
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.
&nbsp;

Parallel Lives

Two 23andMe scientists have improved a long-used method for detecting shared DNA segments.
Researchers use this method to study everything from whether two people are related to human demography to the heritability of disease.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20946 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Eric-Cory-300x209.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="209" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Eric-Cory-300x209.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Eric-Cory-768x535.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Eric-Cory-1024x713.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Eric-Cory-880x613.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Eric-Cory-1180x822.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<h2>HaploScore</h2>
The two computational biologists – Eric Durand, Ph.D., and Cory McLean, Ph.D. – recently published their findings in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. The pair also made their algorithm, HaploScore, publicly available.
Previous studies have used computer simulations to determine the accuracy of established methods for determining identity-by-descent (IBD). Still, Eric and Cory are the first to test those methods with actual human data.
When they scrutinized current methods, they found that the algorithms produced many errors.  S0 Eric and Cory created a better and more accurate method for determining IBD. Their now open-source method is called HaploScore.
&#8220;HaploScore will allow all researchers to more accurately identify genetic relationships between distantly related individuals,&#8221; said Cory.
<h2>Identity by Descent</h2>
Researchers use methods for determining IBD to identify shared segments of DNA. They look at IBD in many aspects of genetic research. They used it to determine the “relatedness” of any two individuals. The longer the shared segment, the closer the relationship. Up to now, studies of the accuracy of the methods for determining IBD have been done with simulated data.
When Eric and Cory used the popular IBD detection method GERMLINE on data from about 3,000 biological parent and child &#8220;trios.&#8221; They found a false positive rate of 67 percent for small segments. HaploScore improves the accuracy of short IBD segment detection, allowing researchers to look at much shorter segments of shared DNA to determine relatedness. Segments of DNA are measured in units called centiMorgans.
Eric and Cory’s new method allows for more accurate IBD determination on segments in the range of 2 to 4 centiMorgans. As more people are genotyped or have their DNA sequenced, having an accurate method for determining IBD will be increasingly important.

23andMe scientists improve method for finding relatives

Leslie grew up with a family secret – somewhere out there she had a big brother named Michael, her father’s illegitimate son from before he married her mother.
<div id="attachment_20604" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20604" class="size-medium wp-image-20604" alt="John Lesley Scott, Jr." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/John-Leslie-Scott-copy-290x300.jpg" width="290" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/John-Leslie-Scott-copy-290x300.jpg 290w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/John-Leslie-Scott-copy.jpg 697w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px" />John Lesley Scott, Jr.</div>
As a child, Leslie made this mysterious brother her imaginary friend. And as she grew older, she became determined that one day, she would find Michael.
Meanwhile, in another part of the country, Michael had struggles of his own.
The man he thought was his father left the family when he was still a baby and married a woman he was having an affair with. Michael grew up fatherless and wondering why.
He had his doubts about the man he thought was his biological father. Then in the early 1990s, as the man he thought was his dad lay dying of cancer, Michael asked him if he was really his father. He didn’t know, so Michael asked him to take a DNA test, even though it upset many people in his family. Michael said he had to know whether the man who left him and his mother, was really his father. It turned out he wasn’t.
“I was glad to know,” he said, “but it left unanswered the question of who was.”
<h6>
Searching for Scotty</h6>

It took years of search by both Michael and Leslie and some help from 23andMe to finally answer those questions.
Back when he first learned the man he thought was his father, wasn’t, Michael went to his mother for answers, but she was little help and even tried to stop him from looking. Although Michael had a name on his birth certificate – the surname Scott – his mother had told him that it was just a friend named “Scotty.”
He took what she said at face value, but in retrospect, Michael admits it was obvious she was hiding the truth.
“People don’t casually put their names on birth certificates.”


Michael tried everything to figure out the mystery, but at some point, he said he gave up. He thought he might simply have to accept that he might never find his father.

“I wasn’t at peace with it, but I sort of had to come to terms with it,” he says.

<h6>Houston</h6>

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Michael someone was looking for him.
Leslie was hard at work. She’d found a birth certificate, which gave her a name – Michael Scott – and a birthplace – Houston, Texas.
So tried calling all the Michael Scotts in the phone book. She hired private investigators but got no leads. When she heard about 23andMe, she decided to take a chance.
“I knew it was a long shot, but I was just hoping that he was in the system,” she says.


He wasn’t.
So Leslie finally confronted her father as he lay dying after a car accident.


“I told him what I knew,” she said.
Her father didn’t remember his illegitimate son’s birth date, but he knew Michael’s mother’s last name.
She also learned that her father had only been 23 when he had the affair with Michael’s mother, then a woman of 43. At the time, he said he’d promised her that he would “stay out of their lives,” so he never tried to find his son.
Armed with a name, Leslie then decided to search for Michael’s mother instead. What she found was her obituary. Among the survivors, it listed a Michael Dougan living in Seattle, Washington.
That was her brother she thought.
“I almost threw up,” Leslie said.

<h6>
Like A Freight Train</h6>

It turned out he was an illustrator, and she was able to find a phone number online. She didn’t wait, calling him right then and there.


“I should have tried to calm down a little,” she says, “but I was like a freight train, out of control.”

&nbsp;

There was no answer, so she left a breathless message.<iframe loading="lazy" width="100%" height="450" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/139432651&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;visual=true" frameborder="no" scrolling="no"></iframe>
Michael had heard the phone ring, and didn’t pick up, but when he listened to the message and heard the words “John Lesly Scott,” the name on his birth certificate, his heart skipped a beat. He rushed to pick up.
“I went to grab the phone, and I’m trying to figure out how to answer it, and then the call gets cut off,” he said.


For an agonizing five minutes, he tried to figure out and then realized he could use automatic redial to call back.
Leslie picked up the line.
“I was shaking,” Leslie said. “We spoke for probably three hours.”

<h6>
Missing Pages</h6>

There was no doubt in her mind that she’d found her long lost brother.
But Michael was more skeptical.
“She said, ‘you’re my brother.’ And I said, well I think I might not be. I don’t want to get your hopes up because there’s really a chance that we might not be related, and I was always told you were not.’”
To confirm their kinship, they agreed that he should take a DNA test through 23andMe, where Leslie already had tested.
“I thought, at least I’m going to get a chance to prove another negative,” said Michael, who agreed to get tested.
While they waited for the results, Michael and Leslie talked a lot on the phone, they swapped photos and arranged live-video chats.


Leslie saw in Michael’s gestures and expressions her own father. She just knew, she said.
Michael wasn’t so sure.
“No matter how many pictures we showed each other, none of them could provide the smoking gun.”

<h6>Bingo</h6>

Then it was Leslie who started to lose faith.


“I freaked out,” she recalls. “I started crying and went to bed. I thought if this is not right, I’ve destroyed this guy’s life. I just dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of his life.”


Michael finally got his results.


“And bingo, it was right there,” he said. “I realized this was it, that it doesn’t get any clearer than this.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20609" alt="Mike &#038; Leslie smiling" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg" width="300" height="219" 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" />
It was 2 a.m. He texted Leslie, telling her to get up and go to the computer. They talked until 5 a.m.


“It’s like finding the other half of me,” Leslie says on reflection. “We have so much that makes us connect.”


He likes spicy food; so does she. He’s an illustrator; she’s artistic. She sings the blues; he plays blues guitar. She’s a chef; he loves to cook. She has olive skin; so does he.
Leslie had found her big brother, and Michael found a sister. They both answered questions that had eaten away at them all their lives.
Michael said up until the moment the connection was confirmed by 23andMe, his search for his father had been like an unfinished mystery novel.
“You get all the way to the end and the last five pages are missing,” he said.
Now he has the ending.


“It’s like finally finding the last five pages of that novel, and feeling, ‘So that’s how it turns out!’”

23andMe Helps Brother And Sister Connect

In the best children’s stories, the parents are done away with early on.
Mom or dad – sometimes both of them – are dead and gone even before the opening “once upon a time.”
<div id="attachment_20441" style="width: 204px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20441" class="size-medium wp-image-20441" alt="Cover of 1915 edition of J. M. Barrie's novel, first published in 1911, illustrated by F. D. Bedford." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter_Pan_1915_cover-194x300.jpg" width="194" height="300" />Cover of 1915 edition of J. M. Barrie&#8217;s novel, first published in 1911, illustrated by F. D. Bedford.</div>
It’s a plot device that helps the reader make an emotional connection with the characters. It also starts the arch of the protagonist’s transformation from, say, a cinder-covered floor washer to a princess, or from puny sorcerer’s apprentice to King, or from a group of lost children into adventurers in Neverland.

<h6>Learning a Secret</h6>

As a successful children’s book editor, “Marcia Brady,” knows all about this storyteller’s tool. She’s even used it before. But what Marcia didn’t know was that the plot of her own life story had just such a twist.
In her early 30s, while Marcia was busy juggling her career and tending her young kids, she learned that the man who raised her wasn’t her biological father.
Her parents had used a sperm donor when they were told they couldn’t conceive on their own.
“I never even suspected it,” she said. “I look more like my dad than anyone else in my family.”
<h6>
 Donor Conceived Children</h6>

Marcia is not alone.
In a modern twist to the search for roots, donor kids like Marcia are turning to 23andMe for answers about their ancestry. For some the reasons to test often have less to do with finding a biological father and more to do with simply learning basic information about ancestry, medical history or finding out about whether they have siblings. They want information about themselves they can&#8217;t find any other way.
In Marcia’s case the revelation that her parents had turned to a donor to conceive, drove what turned into a years-long search into her background and family history. Even before coming to 23andMe, Marcia used the same kind of pluck and drive seen in the best characters of fiction to track down two half-sisters through a donor registry.
<h6>Turning to 23andMe</h6>
They confirmed their sisterhood with a DNA test. Then a few years later, when 23andme opened for business, she got tested.
<div id="attachment_20438" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20438" class="size-medium wp-image-20438" alt="Cynthia Lund, left, and Kathleen LaBounty." src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen-300x206.jpg" width="300" height="206" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen-300x206.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen.jpg 648w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Cynthia Lund, left, and Kathleen LaBounty.</div>
When Marcia’s results arrived, she was shocked to find a match for a half-brother. Because he was six years younger, Marcia assumed he would be the biological child of the donor, which would lead her to the donor’s identity.
“He didn’t log into his inbox on 23andme for three months. Those were the longest three months of my life!” she said. “When he finally saw my letter he replied that same night. It turned out he was another offspring of the donor. He hadn’t known of anyone else in his situation and was really excited to learn more.”
<h6>
 Connecting with Sisters</h6>

They discovered they only lived two hours apart and hit it off from the moment they met. Two years later, a new half-sister joined their 23andme list.
“It’s very exciting!” Marcia says. “I can’t wait to see if anyone else is out there.”
Unlike those great old children’s books, Marcia’s story isn’t fraught with suffering. She loves her father, the man who raised her. In fact, she’s never told him that she now knows that he isn’t her biological father, because she didn’t want to somehow hurt his feelings.
That’s why she wants to remain anonymous.
But still the news that he wasn’t her father changed Marcia’s understanding of who she is and it raised many questions.
Who was her biological father? Would he want to know about his offspring and (ten!) grandchildren? What traits might he have passed onto her that she has in turn passed on to her own children?
She and her newfound half-siblings feel like a family now, although one with a big mystery at the core. A mystery they are determined to solve.
Marcia isn’t alone in trying to fill in the blanks in her family history. Just like adoptees have done before them, the children of parents who used “assisted reproduction” to conceive want to learn more about their biological ancestry.
But this push for more information sometimes pits the desire of the donors to remain anonymous against the rights of their children to know even the most basic facts about their background. 23andMe allows people to contact members with whom they may be related, but keep both parties identities private. It’s up to the individuals whether they want to respond.
This kind of search for ancestry has even woven its way into popular culture.
The plot of 2010’s “The Kids are All Right” and the 2013 comedy “The Delivery Man” revolve around the offspring of donors searching for their biological fathers. Also in 2013 was a documentary on MTV called “Generation Cryo” that followed a teenager’s quest to find her biological father and her half-siblings.
But for many donor kids testing is less about finding a biological father but simply learning basic information about ancestry, medical history or connecting with a biological sister or brother.
<h6>
Finding A Sister</h6>

Cynthia Lund, a 33 year-old massage therapist in Salt Lake City, said that when she signed up for 23andMe in the back of her mind she had the idea of possibly finding her biological father. But for Cynthia, who knew since her 14th birthday that she’d been conceived using a sperm donor, it was also simply a practical decision.
“I had no family health history for one side, and I wanted to know if there was anything I should be concerned about,” Cynthia said.
She subscribed to 23andMe, in part, because she wanted to know about any potential health risks. In the back of her mind she wondered if she’d learn something more about who her father was.
Instead, she found her half-sister.
“I was playing with the site’s Relative Finder when I noticed a link to ‘view your close relatives,’” Cynthia said. “There was a disclaimer that said something like ‘are you sure you want to know’ and my heart started racing, of course I want to know.”
It was overwhelming, she said. She was crying and “freaking out.”
“As soon as I composed myself I started typing a message,” she said. “It probably took me an hour. I checked every five minutes for the next several days until I finally heard back.”
It took a little over two weeks before her half-sister saw the message. Then it was her turn to “freak out,” Cynthia said.

“She and her mom freaked out just like me and my mom did,” she said.
She responded to the email and the two women, who are about two years apart, finally talked on the phone. They spent several hours sharing their life stories with each other, finding that they had more than just DNA in common, but that they had some similar interests and personality traits. A few weeks later, Cynthia took a flight from her home in Utah to see her newly found sister in San Diego.
“It’s ridiculous how much alike we are,” she said. “We definitely pass for full siblings. We look SO much alike!”
Both Cynthia and her sister were raised as a single child, so finding a sister was both exciting and a little surreal for them both.
Since their first meeting, the two have become very close. They went together to Italy for a 10-day vacation, and they now are visiting each other pretty regularly. Cynthia said they’re either exchanging phone calls, texts or emails almost daily.
“It’s so great having a biological sibling, especially when I hadn’t had that experience for my first 30 years,” she said.
“We’re definitely family! “
While Cynthia is still interested in learning about her donor dad if possible, that’s not something that her half-sister is focused on.
“I don’t want anything from him, I just want to see what he looks like and help me understand family medical history,” she said.
“It’s hard to explain but I only have this half picture of myself. 23andMe is perfect service for anyone like me who has this sort of black hole in their history and wants to know more about themselves.”
<h6>
Still Searching</h6>

Kathleen LaBounty, another donor child searching for information about her biological father, has been searching for years. Oprah and National Public Radio featured her six-year search for her biological roots and her advocacy on behalf of the donor children.
In her Herculean search she’s sent more than 600 letters to prospective fathers, all went to the same medical school in Texas from which donors were used at the fertility clinic her mother used to conceive.
A well-grounded and happy child, Kathleen said that when she was 8 years old her mother told her she’d been conceived with the help of a donor.
The first thing Kathleen did was run downstairs and hug her father, saying she felt so much love for him for making her his own.
The revelation also helped her understand some of the most obvious differences between her and members of her family. She’s short and skinny. They’re tall and burly.
“In family photos I don’t blend in well,” she said.
<h6>
 Family History</h6>

Her search for more information about her ancestry has taken on more import in part because she now has children of her own. She wants to know about her family medical history. Recently she joined 23andMe. She learned that she has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Raised as an agnostic but one who attended a Baptist school, this was news to her.
Many of her closest matches in 23andMe’s Relative Finder are from Russia. She connected with a third cousin, who lived just ten minutes from her home.
“He looks like Ben Stiller,” she said.
She’s been able to communicate with other distant relatives connected through 23andMe’s DNA Relative tool, which she said has helped her get a better picture of the paternal side of her ancestry.
She’s also recommended 23andMe to others who, like her, we&#8217;re looking for family. Two of those who she recommended the service to, turned out to be half-sisters, she said.
“I would love it if close relatives would eventually submit their DNA and I could connect through 23andMe, but if it never happens that’s OK at least now I know my heritage,” Kathleen said.

Lost Girls

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-20419" alt="Genetic Network SXSW" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork.jpg" width="792" height="1224" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork.jpg 792w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-194x300.jpg 194w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-768x1187.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-663x1024.jpg 663w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-569x880.jpg 569w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/03042014_SXSW_Posts_GeneticNetwork-764x1180.jpg 764w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 792px) 100vw, 792px" />For the tens of thousands of people at the <a href="http://sxsw.com/">South by Southwest</a> conference in Austin this week, attending is about more than just seeing new music and hearing about new ideas, it’s about making new connections.
But 23andMe researchers found that just about everybody there is already connected. In fact any two people attending the SXSW conference is connected through just one or two or three other individuals.
<h6>Interconnectedness </h6>
Why is this a revelation?
This isn’t a social connection; it’s a genetic connection. It’s not that you are connected to someone else because of who you know, it’s that you are connected to someone else because of who you are related to.
Previous theories of connectivity focused on social connections; the idea that we are all – all seven billion of us – linked to each other by six degrees of separation. These links were first written about by <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786545?uid=3739256&#038;uid=2&#038;uid=4&#038;sid=56200129733">Stanley Milgram </a>from experiments he did in the late 1960s. It’s a little more complicated than what Milgram theorized but he got the gist right. More recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?_r=3&#038;scp=1&#038;sq=4.74&#038;st=cse">Facebook</a> and LinkedIn have shown that just four social connections could link any two people together.
<h6>Three Degrees of Separation</h6>
This theory of connectivity even spawned the game,  <a href="http://oracleofbacon.org/">“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”</a> Kevin <a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP28467">is talking in Austin</a> this week. But the theory of social connections that spawned the game doesn&#8217;t quite match how close we all really are.   23andMe can connect an attendee at SXSW to any other attendees through three or four genetic connections. To do that we would make the connection by finding someone an attendee is related to, who is related to someone who then connects them to someone else at SXSW. There may be two or three cousins that separate each attendee from someone else at the conference, but the connection the two have is made through genetics.
Looking at the <a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/?conference=interactive">SXSW Interactive</a> portion of the conference, every one of the 30,000 of those people going has a cousin in attendance. A few may have as many as 35 first cousins, meaning that they share a grandparent.  On average everyone there has between one or two second cousins, meaning that that they each share the same great grandparent.
SXSW is about bringing people together, but they are all already closer than they know.

DNA Relatives — Page 11