The ashes of the Holocaust left very little for Peter Istvan Kovacs to sift through in his search for his ancestors. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20406" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter-Kovacs-Photo-300x282.jpg" alt="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" width="300" height="282" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter-Kovacs-Photo-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter-Kovacs-Photo-768x722.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter-Kovacs-Photo-880x828.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Peter-Kovacs-Photo.jpg 991w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> 
There were very few Hungarian Jews who survived the war and exterminations. Among those murdered was Peter’s great grandfather, beaten to death in 1941 for refusing to convert to Christianity. Also lost to extermination camps and violence were innumerable relatives, he said.
<h6>“My grandmother had 11 brothers and sisters, and they all had many children,” he said. “We were a big family once.”Lost to War and Genocide</h6>
That family is gone now.
“I didn’t have any siblings and thought I had only two real cousins,” said Peter, who is a college student with an interest in anthropology and genetics. “We’re not a big family anymore.”
Wanting to know more about his ancestors Peter decided to get tested with 23andMe. He was interested in his ancestry and there just wasn’t anyone to ask.
“I’m interested in my roots,” he said.
<h6>Using DNA Testing to Explore Ancestry</h6>
Peter had heard about 23andMe and thought he might learn more about his ancestors.
On both his father’s and his mother’s side of the family, the war and Holocaust left very few survivors. It was much the same for all the Jews of Hungary, where the number of Jews before the war totaled about 6 percent of the country’s total population. After the war number of Jews there only amounted to about .1 percent of the total population.
For many people like Peter, who lost ancestors in the Holocaust it’s very difficult to piece together their family’s past. Over the years organizations have formed to help both survivors and their descendants piece together those missing pieces of their family history.
Those are important resources, but Peter also wanted to make connections using 23andMe.
“The day when I got my results has become a very important event for my life,” he said. “I just got a &#8220;family&#8221; back. At least that&#8217;s how I feel now and I&#8217;m so happy.”
<h6>Connecting to Cousins</h6>
He learned more about his ancestry, which includes both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish roots.  And he found more than 1,000 23andMe DNA Relative matches – third and fourth cousins. More recently Peter found second cousins and one first cousin, using 23andMe. Those connections helped him find whole branches of his family that he didn’t know still existed. He was able to connect with many of his closest connections, learning that some of his relatives had escaped Hungary before and after the war, and immigrated to both Israel and the United States.
“They are very nice,” Peter said. “ Seeing their success and meeting them gives me new hope in life. And me who never had any siblings now has so many cousins.”
He also learned that one of his great grandfathers on his father’s side, Henrik RosenblÃ¼th, survived the death camps. Those relatives were able to fill him in on family history he would never have learned otherwise.
“It makes my heart warm. They survived,&#8221; Peter said. &#8221; I really cannot express my feelings, but it&#8217;s just beautiful.&#8221;
23andMe provides genetic testing services for informational purposes; your results may or may not help you to search for or identify relatives or family members.

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Out Of The Ashes

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.

Amy’s Story

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

23andMe Helps Man Find Family

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

The Keeper Of Memory

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

The New Yorker recently described the artist Laurel Nakadate as an “unpredictable, sometimes infuriating young photographer.”
Perhaps. But whatever description you use, the images she creates are singularly arresting.
In her latest series of portraits – called “Strangers and Relations”  – she turned to her 23andMe DNA relative matches for inspiration.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR-225x300.jpg" alt="Laurel Nakadate. Photo: © Suki Dhanda, 2011, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York" class="size-medium wp-image-18738" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LN_Suki_Dhanda_Portrait_LR.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" /> Laurel Nakadate. Photo: © Suki Dhanda, 2011, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
Laurel, who was born in Texas but raised in Iowa, is of primarily Japanese and European ancestry. But what that meant didn’t really come to life for her until she opened her  23andMe results and saw  the melange of ancestry among her relatives not only on her mother&#8217;s side, but with all the distant relations she found through 23andMe.
“It did surprise me,” she said. &#8220;My mom&#8217;s family always said we were primarily English, Irish and Scottish, but I was delighted to learn that we are also part African.&#8221;
Laurel was struck by the idea that these people who were strangers to her were also connected to her by a common distant relative. And it was that incongruous mix of the familiar and foreign that spurred Laurel on her project to document these people to whom she was related. It turned into a 37,000-mile journey in which she crisscrossed the United States to photograph those distant cousins.
<div style="float: right; text-align: justified; width: 275px; background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; margin-left: 10px;">An Upcoming solo exhibit of Laurel Nakadate work: &#8211; Laurel Nakadate: Strangers and Relations University Art Gallery, Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, TN February &#8211; April 2014 Upcoming group exhibits that include Laurel’s work: &#8211; Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. October 24, 2013 — February 9, 2014 &#8211; Dis-semblance: Perceiving and Projecting Identity Today 21c Museum, Cincinnati, OH July &#8211; December, 2013</div>
These were all relatives she found on her maternal line. In each case she connected with them through 23andMe, which allows you to connect to your relative “matches” if both parties wish to make that connection. In Laurel’s case she made contact and sent messages explaining what she was doing and asked the people who were matched with her if they would be interested in participating. Quite a few welcomed the opportunity. As she fanned out across the United States, Laurel not only got to take photographs she also learned a little bit about their shared family history.
The portraits – all outdoors, all at night with people standing alone and lit-up by a flashlight – are all taken from a distance. The photos feel both distant and intimate – with the subjects wearing everything from what looks like a fake fur coat, to camouflage hunting gear, to a doctor’s white coat. One reviewer described the mix of photos as &#8220;a collected portrait of America.&#8221;
If you have the chance, you should check out the exhibit.
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.

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Strangers and Relations

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-18559 size-full" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1704" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-768x511.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-880x586.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9696-1180x785.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />Greta had given up on ever finding her mother.
From her adoption papers she had a name, Carolyn Palmer, but decades of searching never got her any closer to finding the woman who gave birth to her, or any other blood relative for that matter.
“My missing family history amounted to a million missing pieces that left me feeling vulnerable and disconnected,” she said.
So by the time she joined 23andMe it wasn’t really about finding family members, she just wanted to learn a little bit more about herself.
That all changed earlier this year when Greta got an email from another 23andMe member.
“&#8217;I am new to this <a href="https://www.23andme.com/dna-ancestry/">DNA relative finder</a> website, but it seems we are first cousins! This is a pretty neat discovery,&#8217;” said an email from her new-found cousin Laura Oliver.
Greta was stunned. It was her first contact with a blood relative.
Greta and Laura exchanged emails and then Laura mentioned her grandparents names, Thomas and Sadie Palmer.
“I gasped in disbelief as I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was hearing from such a close relative. In that initial email she also told me that she was the grand-daughter of Thomas and Sadie Palmer. My biological mother’s name was Carolyn Palmer. I began to cry,” Greta said. 
<iframe loading="lazy" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3GXYC5r1H9U?rel=0" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Then the bitter pain of learning that she was just a few months too late to meet her mother, who had died less than a year before.
“But you have a sister who is still alive,” Laura told Greta.
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“The words still take my breath away. Laura went on to tell me that my living sister’s name was Stacy Arena and that she was “so beautiful.”
Unbeknownst to Greta, Stacy had been searching too.   It was just that Stacy didn’t know where to start looking. More than 20 years ago, after Stacy’s older sister died in an accident, her mother told her that she had a sister, whom her mother had given up for adoption at birth.
But her mother had told her nothing more and wouldn&#8217;t speak about it. So for Stacy, all she had were questions. Who was her older sister?   What did she look like? Where was she?
Ever since then Stacy would wonder whether she was passing her sister in the street. Sometimes she’d look out into a crowd and scanning for a women who looked like her. “Could that be her?” she’d ask herself.
It wasn’t until her cousin Laura made the connection through 23andMe, that Stacy could finally answer those questions. A few weeks after connecting online the two sisters met for the first time, hugging in the front yard of Stacy’s home in South Carolina, holding on to each other for a very long time.
Inside the living room the two sisters thumbed through family photo albums. Greta marveling at pictures of people who were strangers to her but who were her relatives. She spent a long time staring at pictures of her mother, looking at her face and eyes.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-18560 size-full" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-scaled.jpg" alt="" width="2560" height="1704" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-300x200.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-768x511.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-880x586.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/RN4_9658-1180x785.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px" />
“I’m connected to all these people I’ve never seen before. This was my family,” Greta said. “It’s quite disorienting.”
With her sister sitting next to her Stacy marveled at the miracle of the two finding each other.
“If it weren’t for 23andMe this never would have happened,” 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.

Sisters Connect with 23andMe

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-18272 size-medium" title="DNA Poster" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster-232x300.jpg" alt="" width="232" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster-232x300.jpg 232w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster-768x994.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster-791x1024.jpg 791w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster-680x880.jpg 680w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster-911x1180.jpg 911w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/DNA-Poster.jpg 1275w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 232px) 100vw, 232px" />With participation by 23andMe and the three other major companies involved in DNA testing for ancestry, as well as talks from some of the most respected names in the field, it’s no wonder organizers are predicting the June 6th “Family History and DNA” conference in Burbank will sell out.
The event, planned in conjunction with the annual Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, will feature Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Spencer Wells, and 23andMe’s own Joanna Mountain to name just a few.
Gates, the author of “Faces of America,” will give the luncheon address. The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, Gates is also the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research. He is known for both his literary and cultural criticism, but more recently has gained popular notice through his shows on PBS that focus on ancestry and genetics.
<a id="docs-internal-guid-6bc9beae-b41b-3dcd-f9c4-6e544487efad" href="http://www.scgsgenealogy.com/Jamboree/2013/Schedule.htm">The line-up</a> for the day will also have representatives from all four of the major consumer genetics companies involved in genetic genealogy –   <a href="https://www.23andme.com/ancestry/">23andMe</a>, Ancestry.com, FamilyTree DNA, and the<a href="https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/"> Genographic Project</a>.
“This is the first genetic genealogy conference ever to bring together speakers from all of the major DNA testing companies that offer services to the genealogy community,” said<a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/"> CeCe Moore</a>, the conference coordinator and co-chair.
CeCe has close working relationships with all the four major testing companies including 23andMe. She is also the Southern California Regional Coordinator for the International Society for Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG). The ISOGG and the Southern California Genealogical Society teamed up to make this inaugural event a reality.
The conference is scheduled for the day before the three-day Genealogy Jamboree, which goes from Friday the 7th through Sunday the 9th.
The Family History and DNA conference is already 85 percent sold out, said CeCe. Beyond the great lineup of speakers, the conference comes just as the use of DNA to learn more about ancestry is becoming more and more a part of the zeitgeist, she said.
“My experience leads me to believe that we are on the brink of widespread interest in and acceptance of personal genomics,” said CeCe.
Some of that interest is because of the work of Prof. Gates and his popular television show<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/"> Finding Your Roots</a>, Dr. Wells’ Genographic Project, and the many stories coming out of 23andMe about people <a href="https://www.23andme.com/stories/2/">who made surprising discoveries</a> about their family history using genetic testing.
All of that has helped open “the public&#8217;s eyes to what can be discovered from DNA testing,” CeCe said. “With the information age upon us, it is simply astounding what we can learn about ourselves and our family history.&#8221;
If you’re interested in going sign up now, tickets are going fast.

DNA Relatives — Page 12