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

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

Jessica has a black and white photo of her grandfather, Phil, standing next to her great grandfather, Sam.
In the photo, both father and son are staring into the camera and smiling. Now after uncovering something hidden about her ancestry, the photo takes on a new meaning.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22174" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Phil-and-Sam-226x300.jpeg" alt="Phil and Sam" 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" />
Phil, in a white t-shirt with his hair slicked back, towers over his dad and has a pretty distinctive chin dimple and big ears. His dad, Sam, with a gap-toothed grin and his sparse hair sticking up all over, has a very different set to his chin than his son.
The photo is an old one, something Jessica had looked at many times before. But after getting a message from another 23andMe user, Jessica realized something that was staring right at her. The two men – her grandfather and his father – couldn’t look more different.

<h6>Hidden Ancestry</h6>
Jessica’s fascinating post<a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/"> “And Who Would’ve Thought…,”</a> drew us in like few others. We won’t ruin the story for you. You need to read it yourself.
But in a brief exchange about her post, Jessica, who writes the<a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/"> “Strange Kind of Pilgrim”</a> blog, said she learned something that might have remained hidden if she hadn’t tested with 23andMe.
“I&#8217;m really thankful that this all came to light while there was still a chance of finding out what really happened,” she said. “I feel like, very slowly, I&#8217;m gaining some roots, and I&#8217;m grateful that I will have these stories and this information to pass down to my children so they can know where they came from.”
<h6>What Does it Mean?</h6>
Reading her story conjures up all sorts of questions about our upbringing, our ancestry and our identity. Your biology and your upbringing make up who you are, but which is more important? How much of what we are is dependent on our biology and how much on our ancestry?<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22176" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-300x267.jpeg" alt="Jess photo" width="300" height="267" srcset="https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-300x267.jpeg 300w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-768x683.jpeg 768w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-1024x911.jpeg 1024w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-880x783.jpeg 880w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo-1180x1050.jpeg 1180w, https://blog.pub.us-west-2.prd.23andme.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Jess-photo.jpeg 1861w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“The way you&#8217;re raised and the family who raises you can influence who you are in a big way, but I think the biology is always there,” said Jessica.
Jessica graciously let us post an excerpt of her story below, but you really should read the whole piece on<a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/"> her blog here</a>. Let us know what you think.
<h6>“And Who Would’ve Thought…It Figures”</h6>
 “In October I decided, rather on a whim, to order a genetics test from 23andMe.  It’s a company that compares your DNA to populations all over the world and lets you know where your ancestors likely hailed from.  I didn’t do this because I doubted my parentage at all (did you hear that, Mom?  I believe you.  Maybe other people who see us together assume I’m adopted, but I do not.  ), but I wanted to see my father’s side of the family tree more clearly.
“My dad passed away when I was very young.  His mother passed when he was very young, and his father died almost exactly two years after Dad did.  So while I had a vague idea of the Benson family heritage as communicated to me by my mother and aunt, I still felt a bit rootless.  I knew we were Russian and Polish Jews, but that’s it (and to be honest, I wasn’t even sure how Polish we were.  I came across a family tree partly filled out in my baby book, and it traces my paternal grandfather’s heritage to Russia and my paternal grandmother’s heritage to Turkey, but it went no farther back than that.)
….
“Fast forward to December: The results came in, and they were…surprising.  I was on the phone with my mom at the time, and I think the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m Irish?!” … I wasn’t supposed to be Irish (or British).  Or Western European at all.  I was supposed to be a Russian, Polish Jew.  I was flummoxed.  My mom was flummoxed.  My aunt was flummoxed.  I really like the word “flummoxed.”  So descriptive.
…
“Frustratingly, my search for answers had only turned up another mystery.  Even more infuriating, I couldn’t see a way of solving it.  The pertinent players were all long dead.  I could only figure that someone had fooled around on somebody in my family’s recent history and gotten away with a doozy of a lie.  
…
“One of the features of 23andMe is that they match you up with possible DNA relatives.  I have a whole list of 3rd to 4th and beyond possible cousins who share small segments of my DNA.  But my closest relative in the system was a predicted second cousin, who I only knew as P.  I didn’t contact P because I have nearly crippling social anxiety, and it’s a bit of an awkward conversation to initiate (Hi, I think we might be related.  Do you have any idea how?)  I hate awkward conversations like I hate the Patriots.  The antipathy runs true.
“This is all kind of important because a few days ago (has it really only been a few days?  What a short, strange trip it’s been) I received an email, not from P himself but from his cousin, A.  I’m so grateful that A was brave enough to ask those awkward first questions.  She asked if I had any known connections to the [Name removed]   family, and I answered that I didn’t.  I had never heard of the [family].  And then, interestingly, she asked me if I had expected my genetics results to report a sizable Ashkenazi component.  I had expected it, I told her, but it turns out, I’m not very much Ashkenazi.  Instead, I am unexpectedly Irish.  It’s all very mysterious, I confided.  And that’s when everything started to get a little weird.” 
 (READ THE REST OF THE STORY <a href="https://strangepilgrimage.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/and-who-wouldve-thought-it-figures/">HERE</a>)

Jess’s Story

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 the early 1990s when he was on the cusp of turning 50, Paul Dodds didn’t have a midlife crisis, he had a midlife surprise.
Paul learned that the man he thought was his father wasn’t.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-20446" alt="Paul Dodds - Young Man" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Paul-Dodds-Young-Man-262x300.jpg" width="262" height="300" />
“It kind of made sense because although he was always there, he never bothered with me or my brother (he wasn’t his father either),” said Paul, about his brother who is two years older.
<h6>Searching with 23andMe</h6>
Although he’d never been very close to his dad, it never occurred to him that there might be a reason for that because as he said, “I never knew anything different.”
But the revelation propelled Paul on a two-decade-long search to find his biological father, a quest that only ended after 23andMe helped him find a half-sister and his father’s name. Now he wants to tell people about it.
“I would like to pass on the good things that have happened to me through 23andMe,” Paul said.
<h6>The War</h6>
His story starts in Wales just after the end of the Second World War. Although he didn’t know it, Paul, it turns out, was one of tens of thousands so-called “War Babies,” the offspring of liaisons between American servicemen stationed overseas during the war.
<div id="attachment_20447" style="width: 213px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20447" class="size-medium wp-image-20447" alt="The photo of the man Paul wrongly thought was his father. " src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Paul-Dodds-4-203x300.jpg" width="203" height="300" />The photo of the man Paul wrongly thought was his father.</div>
After he was born, Paul’s mother married a sailor with the UK Merchant Navy named Len. But unbeknownst to Paul – or Paul’s older brother – Len couldn’t have children. The family lived in Cardiff. In 1968 Paul immigrated to Canada where his father had moved after leaving his mom.
“He met me at the train and spent a day with me then that was about it, said Paul, who worked as a steel fabricator.
<h6>A Surprise</h6>
More than 20 years later, doctors contacted Paul about his dad, who had died from very rare cancer. The doctors wanted to know a little bit more about his father’s life and the family’s health history. As Paul scrambled to find out whether it ran in the family, he got a jolt when talking to one of his uncles in England.
“I called my uncle in Newcastle, and when I started asking questions, he immediately said, ‘Paul, Len is not your father,’” he said. “That is how I found out.”
<h6>The Search Begins</h6>
So Paul started looking for the identity of his biological father. He also learned that he and his brother were really half-siblings so he started searching for his brother’s father as well.
“Part of the reason it became so important to find him is that it was deliberately hidden from me,” he said.
His mother gave him false leads, at one point telling Paul that his father had died when the ship he was on sunk. At other times she was simply evasive. He wasn’t sure why perhaps she didn’t know herself, Paul said.
<h6>An Old Photo</h6>
But there were two bits of information that his mother gave him that turned out to be true. His mom once told Paul he had “Jewish blood.” She’d also told Paul that his biological father had known his stepfather during the war when his stepfather had been in the British merchant navy.
But at the time none of that information helped Paul. Instead, he spent years chasing down false leads, and that went on even after his mother died. Soon after she passed away, one of Paul’s daughter’s found an old photograph of a man in a U.S. Army uniform.
<h6>Searching Records</h6>
Paul believed at the time that the man in the photo might have been his father, so he spent years figuring out the unit the man served with by looking at the insignias and ribbons on the uniform. He then tried to cross-reference that with units stationed in the area at the time of his conception. Then he winnowed down names until he thought he had the right man. There had been writing on the back of the photo, which he had analyzed. But all of that painstaking work, which included searching military records in Britain and the United States, all came to naught.
<h6>Turning to DNA</h6>
It wasn’t until last year that Paul finally got a break when he tested with 23andMe. First, he got a DNA Relative match with a first cousin, who helped him track down a woman, who they believed was his half-sister. She recently tested with 23andMe.
Both Paul and his half-sister were ecstatic about finding the connection.
Paul learned his father, Leon Rossien, had been a merchant marine who served on the USS Cristobal, a troopship. Leon was in port around VE Day in May of 1945. Paul believes he may have been conceived during the celebrations around the end of the war.
His sister filled him in on his father’s life. After the war, his biological father had been a jeweler. His father, who died in 1999 not long after Paul started looking for him, also liked to bet on horses and was married four times. Paul learned he had two other half-sisters, who passed away.
“I’ve seen some photos of him and there are some resemblances,” said Paul. “The same long chin and eyebrows.”
He hasn’t yet met his half-sister in person, but they’ve spoken several times on the phone.
“She’s excited by this,” he said.
As for Paul, he has felt a whole range of emotions.
“All these things have fallen into place at last,” he said. “Good things are happening. Thank you 23 and me.”

Jewish ancestry

Meant to Be

The Other Side of the Story

Jess’s Story

Auschwitz Survivor Finding Family

War Baby

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