As a wedding planner, Wendy Wojcik pays close attention to even the smallest of details, yet in her own life she always ignored one big one – the identity of her biological father.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-24251" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-300x300.jpg" alt="Wendy W Quote" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Wendy-W-Quote.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />


That all changed recently. Upon reaching her 50th birthday and mourning the loss of her mother, Wendy realized she wanted to know who her father was, what he may have passed on to her, and what it might mean for her now.
“When I turned 50, I wanted to know those details,” she said. “Then I got 23andMe as a gift, and I’ve learned so much. It’s been the gift that keeps on giving. All of this stems out of doing 23andMe.” 

<h6>Different Dads</h6>

What she learned changed her, her two sisters and her brother. Wendy and her siblings grew up in the Pacific Northwest knowing that their dad wasn’t their biological father. Their mom was always pretty frank about it, letting them know that they each had different fathers, but never telling them who those men were.


“We all look different,” said Wendy.

Their mom, who’d been a nurse, shared a few details of her rough years when as a teenager she had her kids, but it wasn&#8217;t much. The details were a few names that meant very little, as well as some dates and cities, but it wasn’t enough to identify their fathers. And over time, Wendy and her siblings just stopped asking. They didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. And, according to Wendy, they were fine with not knowing, or at least they thought they were.
“When you don’t know, it’s always in the back of your head, but we’d tried to forget about it,” she said.

<h6>Turning 50</h6>

And in a way Wendy, her two sisters and her brother did forget about it. But then two things happened – Wendy turned 50; and her mother died. Suddenly Wendy felt she had permission to start her search.
In early 2016, a friend gave Wendy a 23andMe kit as a gift. Wendy sent her sample back to the lab and waited. Her results came in and that’s when things started happening, really fast. She connected right away with someone who was listed as a close cousin.
“I recognized the last name,” said Wendy. “It was one of the last names of the men my mom dated when I was young.”


She thought that   it was more than just a coincidence, and her cousin must be related to the man her mother once dated and that he, “must be my dad.”

<h6>A Big Surprise</h6>

Her other surprise was that her younger sister Elena was not her half sister, as she’d been lead to believe, but her full sister. They share the same biological father.
Through her cousin found on 23andMe, Wendy and her sister were able to find the man they believed was their biological father. He was still alive, so they reached out and he immediately wanted to meet. They eventually were able to confirm he was their father, their mother’s former high school boyfriend.
Wendy immediately realized how much this search and information could help the rest of her family.


“It was so fast and as soon as I found my father, I said, ‘we’re all going to get a kit, and we’re all going to find out who our fathers were,’” Wendy said.

<h6>Narrowing Down the Possibilities</h6>

One by one over a few months, Wendy’s other sister, Tamara, and her brother Paul, tested with 23andMe. They each found cousins who were able to help them in their search. One of their cousins, well-versed in using genetic genealogy, helped Wendy quickly sort through matches and identify the most likely candidates.
And they used the bits of information they had from their mother like dates, names, and cities to narrow the search.
And then they found who they had been looking for. Wendy’s oldest sister’s biological father turned out to be a former race car driver, and their brother’s father was their mom’s former square dancing teacher. They were all still alive and Wendy and her siblings, who range in age from 49 to 55, each got to meet their fathers. They all welcomed the news.  Wendy and her siblings got a chance to meet their extended families and other half siblings for the first time.


“The best part about this is that even though our mom is gone, we’re gaining a whole new family, some of whom were even looking for us and all seem happy to know us,” Wendy said. “It’s kind of cool that even though we lost a parent we gained a new one.”

Our Three Fathers

Fast and sure on the ice, Olympic gold medalist <a href="http://apoloantonohno.com/">Apolo Anton Ohno</a> was less sure about his ancestral background.
<div id="attachment_23315" style="width: 295px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-23315" class="size-medium wp-image-23315" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Apolo-Ono-C-fixed-B-285x300-285x300.jpg" alt="Olympic gold medalist Apolo Ohno and Extreme Genes radio host Scott Fischer." width="285" height="300" />Olympic gold medalist Apolo Ohno and Extreme Genes radio host Scott Fischer.</div>
Raised by a single father, who’d immigrated to the United States from Japan, Apolo didn’t know much about his mother’s side of the family. On a recent episode of the syndicated family history radio show <a href="http://extremegenes.com/ep-115-olympic-gold-medalist-apolo-anton-ohno-dr-robin-smith-on-dna-week/">Extreme Genes</a>, Apolo said he turned to 23andMe to find out more about his ancestry. Along with the eight time Olympic medalist, the show featured 23andMe product scientist Robin Smith, PhD, who highlighted some of the company’s ancestry features and tools.
During his segment, Apolo explained that growing up outside of Seattle, he was sometimes asked about his nationality. “What are you?” is how the question was often asked.
“I’m half Japanese, but they’d ask what’s the other half,” Apolo told the show host Scott Fischer.
He didn’t know much about the other half of his ancestry.
His mother and father had divorced when he was very young and he stayed with his dad. He didn’t have much contact with his mother and because she’d been adopted she really didn’t know much about her family history.
But he was always curious about his ancestors, he said during the show.
On his Japanese side, he had a rich source of family lore not just from his grandmother, but because it is custom to carefully catalog the family going back generations. There are extensive household registries called koseki, as well as death records and records compiled by families themselves that helped Apolo trace back his Japanese family history. 
On his mother’s side, he had very little to go on. That’s why he turned to 23andMe. He learned the other half of his ancestry was rooted in England and Ireland, which might explain that even though his hair is black, his sideburns and goatee are red. He also learned that he has a little North African ancestry.
Apolo said his curiosity wasn’t just about learning about himself, but learning more generally about the human story. He mentioned reading about the discovery of 120,000 year old bones in China that change our understanding about the timing of human migration.
“It’s awesome,” he said of the science.
Before Apolo’s segment on the show, 23andMe scientist Robin Smith discussed some of 23andMe’s tools customers can use to explore not just their ancestry, but also their own connection to the human story.
Robin, who started his career as a geneticist focused on spinal cord regeneration, works on writing health and trait reports for 23andMe along with helping the company’s ancestry team develop features. One of the projects Robin worked on is 23andMe’s new Neanderthal report.
All humans outside of Africa carry DNA signatures of Neanderthals, a sister species to modern humans that went extinct about 35,000 years ago. Using new sequencing data, 23andMe can pinpoint where those Neanderthal variants show up in your genome, Robin said.
The report also looks at the different traits some of those variants are associated with – back hair and height, for instance.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-23316" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Neanderthal-Report-640x397.jpg" alt="Neanderthal Report" width="640" height="397" />

Olympic Search

Selma Spieler wished she knew more about her father.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_22922" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22922" class="size-medium wp-image-22922" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Avram-and-family-225x300.jpg" alt="Selma's father Abraham and her mother Gisha &quot;Gussie&quot; and her sister Aida." width="225" height="300" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Avram-and-family-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Avram-and-family.jpg 480w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />Selma&#8217;s father Abraham and her mother Gisha &#8220;Gussie&#8221; and her sister Aida.</div>
She knew he came from Russia, was generous – regularly bringing food to neighbors and sending money to a cousin in Israel who was studying to be a doctor. And she knew her father worked hard, toiling at night in a bagel factory in Brooklyn after he immigrated to New York in the 1920s.
But there was a lot she didn’t know about him.
Before she could learn more, her father, Abraham “Avram” Leib Greenberg, died. Selma was 14. It was 1946 and at that moment it sunk in that she’d never be able to ask him about his past, about the seven siblings he left behind in Russia and Poland, or how his family was able to survive pogroms, the violence of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
Selma thought she lost all that family history with her father, a man born in the 1800s, who survived world-shattering changes that swept through Europe before he came to America. She was sure that the history of his life vanished with him. She thought that all the family he left behind was gone too, swept away in the violence that came after her father immigrated. Now in her 80s, she’d long ago given up on finding out anything more about her father and his family.
“My mother just assumed that they had all died in the Holocaust,” her daughter Risa Rubin said.


It’s an experience many Jews with family roots in Eastern Europe can relate to – large parts of their family history erased by the Holocaust and the upheaval of the Second World War.
But more than seventy years after her father died, Selma learned with the help of 23andMe bits about her father’s history that she never knew before. She and her daughter Risa discovered the fate of his siblings. Some were indeed lost in the Holocaust but others survived. And most astounding of all, for Selma and her daughter, is that using 23andMe they were able to find some of her father’s family in Israel and travel to meet them in person including meeting Selma’s first cousin Fania.


“If my mother and I had not done this we would have never known,” Risa said. “She was so emotional, she cried when she found all this out… this has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.”


This journey of discovery started when Risa and her brother Eric joined 23andMe. Risa was interested in learning more about herself and her ancestry. And then when her mother also used 23andMe, Risa helped her connect with a previously unknown relative named Ayelet, who lives in Israel.
<div id="attachment_22924" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22924" class="size-medium wp-image-22924" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-300x225.jpg" alt="Risa and her cousin Ayet after meeting for the first time in Israel." width="300" height="225" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-768x576.jpg 768w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-880x660.jpg 880w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IMG_3721-1180x885.jpg 1180w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Risa and her cousin Ayelet after meeting for the first time in Israel.</div>
“I noticed that my mom and Ayelet shared DNA, including a segment that was completely identical,” Risa said.


Before that moment, Risa and her brother had assumed that all of her Grandfather’s family had been killed in the Holocaust. But she quickly learned that she had dozens of living relatives on that side of her family, who mostly live in Israel. Ayelet has a brother who had already done an extensive family tree and it proved to be a goldmine for Risa and her mother. Together with the help of Ayelet, Selma’s cousin Fania and another cousin named Naomi, they began filling in the pieces of their missing tree including finding the children and grandchildren of Selma’s uncles, her father’s brothers as well as the children of her aunt. They also learned more about Abraham’s life before he came to America, and that all but four of his siblings had survived the Holocaust, many of them had immigrated to Palestine before the war or wound up in Israel after it.
Ayelet’s great grandfather was Selma’s father’s brother. Ayelet had even known of Selma’s father – his Uncle Abraham – but he’d been told that Abraham had never made it out of
Russia. Selma’s cousin, Fania, however was told that Abraham had made it out and wound up in America, but she knew little else.
Their relatives in Israel were able to offer documents, photos and family history for Selma – information about her father that she never knew.
The documents had information about where he moved in Russia and then Poland, before he immigrated to America. Her cousin Fania recognized the photo of her grandparents that Risa and Selma had brought with them. Selma also learned more about his siblings, Moshe, Haya, Isaac, Slova, Rachel, Yaakov and Shlomo.
The trip allowed Risa and her mother to connect not just with family in Israel, but others in the US and in Russia, a total of more than 50 relatives in all.
“The process of finding our family has been an amazing experience. It was bashert — meant to be,” Risa said.  
“Thank you 23andMe for finding my family.”

Meant to Be

The amazing <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/p/about-me.html">CeCe Moore</a>, a genetic genealogist and 23andMe Ancestry Ambassador, has done it again, solving a family<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-12939" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/CeCephoto.jpg" alt="CeCephoto" width="114" height="162" /> mystery and helping a woman connect with her biological mother for the first time.
“DNA,” Moore told the Orange County Register, “was the only way to solve this.”
<a href="https://www.ocregister.com/articles/tovo-670236-kayla-baby.html">The story</a>, which appeared in the Orange County Register, generated a lot of questions and some strong reactions. CeCe and her team had helped Kayla Tovo, a 27 year-old mother and US Army veteran, solve the mystery of her birth.
Kayla was just a few hours old when a janitor found her wrapped in a towel in a milk crate left in the back of an Alpha Beta grocery store.
Her story could have ended in tragedy if not for being adopted by a wonderful loving mother and growing up in a supportive home. But after having children of her own, and a brush with death in Afghanistan, Kayla decided to try in earnest to find the woman who abandoned her. She wanted to know why. A friend connected her to CeCe. Kayla then tested with 23andMe and found a first cousin once removed, providing her the pivotal lead to connect her to her biological family.


“I received questions from all over social media on this story,” CeCe told us. “(Kayla) was lucky, and some have complained they don&#8217;t have matches that close.”


But as the database grows, so too does the possibility for new and closer matches, she said.


“New matches are coming in all the time and the newer ones are more likely to respond and share family tree information than the older matches,” CeCe said.
Check out Kayla’s <a href="https://www.ocregister.com/articles/tovo-670236-kayla-baby.html">story</a>.

More Than Just Luck

Last weekend, more than 500 years after dying at the <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/battle_of_bosworth.htm">Battle of Bosworth</a>, the last English monarch to die in combat was put to rest.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-21981" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/richardiiiportrait.jpg" alt="richardiiiportrait" width="200" height="269" />
King Richard III’s funeral ends a fascinating years-long <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/news/king-richards-bones/">scientific investigation</a>, which began when his bones were uncovered under a Leicester parking lot.
The discovery offered a rare chance to take a known historical figure – made infamous by Shakespeare – and use DNA analysis and living relatives to piece together new information about this historical figure.
Simply confirming that the bones were Richard III’s was part of the process, and scientists <a href="https://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141202/ncomms6631/full/ncomms6631.html">published findings</a> to show how that was done.

RIP Richard III

Earlier this month, we wrote about <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/jesss-story/">Jess</a>, who with the help of her 23andMe results discovered that 100 years ago her grandfather had been accidentally switched at birth with another baby boy and raised by<div id="attachment_22174" style="width: 236px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22174" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-22174 size-medium" width="226" height="300" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg 226w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-662x880.jpeg 662w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam.jpeg 665w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 226px) 100vw, 226px" />Jess&#8217;s grandfather Phil and her great grandfather Sam.</div>Jewish immigrant parents while the baby he was switched with by an Irish Catholic family.

The reason Jess was able to figure this out is because for three years, another woman, Alice Plebuch, was working to unravel her own family mystery. It was Alice who ultimately reached out to Jess asking in an email if she’d learned something unexpected about her ancestry. 


Now we get to hear Alice’s side of this amazing story that has been posted on <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/2015/02/switched-at-birth-unravelling-century_27.html">CeCe Moore’s blog</a>.
Alice was raised to believe that she was almost all Irish on both her mother and father’s side, but after testing with several different DNA testing services she learned that she was actually half Jewish. Her quest to figure out why took years of work, and required testing of several different family members as well as document searches and even creating a database to track all of her the relatives she discovered through testing. It’s instructive to see how careful Alice was with information, knowing that it could be difficult for some family members to digest and wanting to make sure she had all the facts first. Alice’s story
<div id="attachment_22272" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22272" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-200x300.jpg" alt="Alice's father, who turned out to be Sam's biological son." class="size-medium wp-image-22272" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-200x300.jpg 200w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-587x880.jpg 587w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father-787x1180.jpg 787w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Alices-father.jpg 816w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />Alice&#8217;s father, who turned out to be Sam&#8217;s biological son.</div>
is also informative about how a smart and resourceful person can use genetic testing and other records to uncover hidden family history.
What is also stunning, at least for us here at 23andMe, is that none of this would have – or even could have – come to light without genetic testing.


If Alice and Jess hadn’t tested there really wouldn’t have been any other way to uncover this hidden history. Even for CeCe – a genetic genealogists with <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/p/about-me.html">years of experience</a> unraveling countless family stories – that Alice and Jess were able to figure this out was hard to believe.

The Other Side of the Story

The author <a href="http://www.christinekenneally.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Christine Kenneally</a> – who wrote the wonderful book The <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21767" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race-199x300.jpg" alt="Invisible History of the Human Race" width="199" height="300" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race-199x300.jpg 199w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race.jpg 230w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" />Invisible History of the Human Race – graciously agreed to participate in a Twitter chat we are hosting on January 21st at 4pm EST.
Her book had some delightful insights into how our DNA, our personal history and our environment shape us. Using personal stories, including her own, she conveys the complicated history of genetic science.
A former academic Christine, who has written for the New Yorker and is a contributing editor at Buzzfeed, said she became a journalist, in part, because it allowed her to expand the kind of questions she was exploring as a scientist.
“I became increasingly frustrated by the narrowing of interests that my academic career seemed to require,” she said. “Journalism allowed me to keep asking the questions that interested me, all the big and the little ones.” 

The beauty of her book is that Christine uses personal stories including her <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-books-blog/2014/nov/06/christine-kenneally-i-was-thrilled-to-find-out-im-a-convict-princess" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">own family’s story</a> to explain some of the issue around genetic testing.
“I knew that I cared deeply about some topics that many other people found pretty dry, and I wanted to understand why they mattered to me,” she said. “Asking that question led me into the past and back to my family. I also wanted to find a way to connect with readers who wouldn’t normally be interested in science. Working out why I cared helped me think about the ways that they might.”
But her book also looks at how the advances in genetics broadens our understanding of biology, evolution and medicine.
“DNA won’t change everything about medicine, but I do think it is going to have a huge impact on much of it,” Christine said. “I feel deeply excited that my children are going to be able to access medical information that may help them make choices about their (health). I hope I live long enough to see what happens. It’s so fascinating.”
Join what promises to be a stimulating and interesting conversation with Christine. We want to hear from you. So ask Christine a few questions or simply track our chat on Twitter with the hashtag #23BookClub. You can enter for a chance to win a copy of the book.

Let’s Talk

We’ve heard some incredible stories from 23andMe’s customers, but Menachem Bodner’s brought us to the edge of our seats.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents-259x300.jpeg" alt="Menachem's parents" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21940" width="259" height="300" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents-259x300.jpeg 259w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents.jpeg 408w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px" />
A Holocaust survivor, Menachem has been searching for his twin brother, ever since the two were separated in Auschwitz when they both were only four.


Although his search is not yet over, thanks to some incredible detective work by the genealogist Ayana KimRon and testing with 23andMe, Menachem is a step closer having found first cousins in California who were able to give him more details about his mother and even share with him a photo of his parents. The first picture he’d ever seen of them.
The story of his search is documented <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4589762,00.html">here</a>. (Some of the details of how Ayana used Menachem’s 23andMe results can help anyone doing genealogy with 23andMe.)
Ayana first spoke with us early this year, telling us about Menachem&#8217;s search after 23andMe contacted her with an offer to help.
She had already done an incredible amount of work, using Nazi archives, immigration records, documents from Auschwitz and other sources to piece together as much as she could about Menachem. She found his name at birth – Elias Gottesman, his brother’s name Jeno Gottesman, their place of birth in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary, and the names of their parents, Roza and Ignatz Gottesman.
Ayana also tracked down what happened to Menachem’s mother, Roza, who survived Auschwitz only to die at the hands of anti-Semitic rioters in her hometown in 1946. But from there the trail ran cold.
Menachem, who was adopted by a couple who survived Au
<div id="attachment_21943" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21943" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachem-and-Ayana-300x249.jpg" alt="Menachem, with Ayana, seeing a photo of his parents for the first time." class="size-medium wp-image-21943" width="300" height="249" />Menachem, with Ayana, seeing a photo of his parents for the first time.</div>schwitz and then immigrated to Israel, has never given up and he has found someone who is equally committed in Ayana.
Using 23andMe results, Ayana was able to help Menachem connect to three first cousins in California.
&nbsp;

“I knew about their existence but DNA was a miraculous short cut,” Ayana said.


Their mother, Menachem’s mother’s sister who immigrated to the United States before the war, had told them about the family and sister she left behind. They in turn were able to tell Menachim about his mother, and share with him a photo of his parents, giving him the first opportunity to see an image of them.
Ayana shared with us a photo of him seeing his parents for the first time.
Menachem is still searching for his brother. To help in his search Ayana has set up a Facebook page <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/A7734/499971010060858" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.

Auschwitz Survivor Finding Family

In her wonderful book, “The Invisible History of the Human Race,” writer and <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race.jpg" alt="Invisible History of the Human Race" class="alignright size-full wp-image-21767" width="230" height="346" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race.jpg 230w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race-199x300.jpg 199w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 230px) 100vw, 230px" />journalist <a href="http://www.christinekenneally.com/http://" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Christine Kenneally</a> conveys how your life is part of a thread of life that extends both backward and forward in time.
“We live in a temporal envelope,” Kenneally writes. “For most of us the horizon extends forward maybe two generations and back just two or three… It isn&#8217;t until you populate the family tree that it becomes clear how brief a human life is, how soon it is over, and how you only play a bit part in a story line that expands out and contracts back and goes off in directions that no one can predict or control.”


And it’s DNA – which is both the recipe for life and a record of it – that offers the thread linking the past, present and future.
It’s a beautiful idea and one that might change some people’s perspective about the importance of knowing a bit about where you come from.
This is just one of many delightful insights in her book that looks at how DNA, history and environment shape us. Using some of her own personal history, as well as fascinating stories from others, Kenneally conveys how the complicated interplay of biology, the past and the present makes us who we are. We are not fated by our biology, yet we are not free from it either. Understanding it can help us understand much about ourselves and where we’re going.
A few reviews – in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/christine-kenneallys-invisible-history-of-the-human-race.html?action=click&#038;pgtype=Homepage&#038;version=Moth-Visible&#038;module=inside-nyt-region&#038;region=inside-nyt-region&#038;WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&#038;_r=0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New York Times</a>, and <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/10/12/is_race_genetic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Salon</a> – have already noted that her book marks a nice counterpoint to Nicholas Wade’s <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/08/11/reviews-of-nicholas-wades-a-troublesome-inheritance/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“A Troublesome Inheritance.”</a>
Kenneally didn’t write her book to be played off Wade’s, but her story illustrates that human behavior and culture isn’t just about biology. It’s all much more complicated than that. But your DNA gives you insight that you wouldn’t be able to know otherwise. Indeed for many, using genetics is the only way to dig into a past that was erased by the Holocaust or slavery or simply not knowing ones parents.
The book isn’t just about looking back and self-exploration, Kenneally also tackles the science and gives us a quick tour of the uncomfortable history of eugenics, both in the United States and in Nazi, Germany. But she also quotes from Wendy Roth, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who notes that DNA testing might do more toward bringing people together by showing us how much we have in common.


“This kind of testing seems to make people more aware of how much racial mixing has gone on historically,” Roth said.
Kenneally is at her most interesting when she explores the stories revealed by delving into our DNA. She marvels at how genetics can confirm or alter what we know about our identity and ourselves. It’s also can reveal more about the human story.


“If everyone had his DNA analyzed, and that information were linked to everyone’s historical information, it would be the nearest thing to the book of humanity,” Kenneally writes.
Give it a read.

Invisible History

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://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-216x300.jpg 216w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-768x1067.jpg 768w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-737x1024.jpg 737w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-633x880.jpg 633w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AgnesMHolland-e1398988404182-849x1180.jpg 849w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/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://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/JohnMudonPJHolland-300x225.jpg 300w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/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://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-239x300.jpg 239w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-768x962.jpg 768w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-817x1024.jpg 817w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-702x880.jpg 702w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/PJ_1949-942x1180.jpg 942w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/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.

genetic genealogy