<div id="attachment_22956" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22956" class="wp-image-22956 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-300x203.jpg" alt="IMG_2762" width="300" height="203" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-300x203.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-768x518.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-1024x691.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-880x594.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762-1180x797.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_2762.jpg 1988w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Barbara Weir, right, with her daughter Casey.</div>
Not everyone who tries 23andMe has the same sort of reaction to his or her results as Barbara Weir.


“It’s mind boggling,” said the 87 year-old who lives in San Diego. “Next to marrying my husband and having my children it’s the most exciting thing in my life. It explains so much about me – who and what I am.”
With the help of her daughter, Casey Spaccarelli, a doctor who lives in Chicago, Barbara not only found out that she’d been adopted – something she’d never known – but she also connected with and then met her half brother in person.
“One of the big things for me is that it explains so much,” she said. “Looking back I was nothing like my family. We had different aptitudes and interests. I remember my sister once telling me ‘we’re not alike at all.’ I wanted to be like her and my family, but I just wasn’t.”
<div id="attachment_22955" style="width: 269px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22955" class="wp-image-22955 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-259x300.jpg" alt="IMG_4728-1" width="259" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-259x300.jpg 259w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-883x1024.jpg 883w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-768x891.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-758x880.jpg 758w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_4728-1-1017x1180.jpg 1017w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px" />Barbara and her brother Marvin soon after meeting for the first time.</div>
The revelation that she’d been adopted and that she had biological family, including a half brother, who had lived in the Boston area, didn’t happen all at once. It started with a lot less drama, with Casey deciding to create a family tree and look at her ancestry. She tested first with another company.
“I did it for fun,” she said.
But very quickly she discovered a lot about herself that didn’t match what she had always been told. For one, she has about a quarter Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
“No one in the family knew of any Jewish heritage, only German,” Casey said.
Eventually Barbara tested and it turned out that she has about 50 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Casey tested with 23andMe thinking that perhaps the result was a mistake. It wasn’t. So she had her mother and her mother’s sister, Nancy, test on 23andMe. Her mother’s results confirmed the Ashkenazi ancestry, but her mother and Nancy didn’t have any overlapping DNA. They weren’t biologically related, according to the test.


“So I told my mom, ‘I think you may have been adopted?’” Casey said. “And she just said, ‘Oh I don’t know, maybe,’ and left it at that.”


But Casey wanted to figure this out. Fortunately she found a close relative connection in her 23andMe results with a name she didn’t recognize. So Casey contacted him. His name is Steve and she told him a little bit about herself and asked if he had any family in the Boston area, where Barbara had been born in the late 1920s.


“He said ‘my whole family is from Boston,’” Casey said.


He was open and helpful. Steve also had a lot of family history that he was willing to share with Casey, names and dates. That all became very important for Casey, who, by triangulating information, figured out that Steve’s grandfather Karl was also likely to be her grandfather, and Barbara’s father. Fortunately Steve’s uncle Marvin was still alive and they decided to talk to him.


“That got the ball rolling,” Casey said.


She knew they were close to solving this mystery. After looking at a few high school photos of Marvin and his sisters, Casey was pretty sure she’d found her mother’s biological family. A few weeks later Marvin, who grew up in Boston but now lived very close to Barbara in California, tested with 23andMe.
Bingo.
He turned out to be Barbara’s half brother.
The two arranged to finally meet. In photos they look remarkably similar with the same slim build and smiles.
“I’d never seen anyone who looked like me before,” said Barbara, surprised to be able to see family resemblances in her new-found brother and in photos of her sister.
Marvin’s father, Karl, had been a successful business owner in Boston, who had emigrated from Russia. He had a big family – Marvin, who is a year younger than Barbara, was the last of the family’s six children.
Casey still doesn’t know the circumstances of Barbara’s conception, only that she and Marvin have the same biological father, but different mothers. Barbara’s parents lived in Boston at the time she was adopted but later moved to Nashville where she grew up.


“So my mother found out she was adopted at 87 years of age,” Casey said. “It had been this huge family secret only known to her adoptive mother and the secret had died with her, until now. Until 23andMe.”


Even learning this so late in life was hugely important for Barbara. Things she wasn’t sure about in the past suddenly made sense.
“It’s amazing to learn this all at my age,” said Barbara. “I finally found out who I am.”

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Who I Am

It was a cordial conversation, but as the phone call came to an end Mike Reed wasn’t sure how to sign off and then the man on the other end of the line did it for him.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22524" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-300x236.jpg" alt="IMG_8768" width="300" height="236" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-300x236.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-768x603.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-1024x805.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-880x691.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768.jpg 1050w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“’Goodnight son,’” the man said.
“I was just floored,” said Mike.
The man on the other end of the phone was Dennis Fay, Mike’s biological father. The two connected for the first time using 23andMe. Initially Mike, a 60-year-old adoptee, had used 23andMe not to find his biological family, but just to learn a little bit more about his ancestry. He said he&#8217;d been frustrated when his kids would ask him about their ancestry.
&#8220;I&#8217;d just tell them we were &#8220;American,&#8221; he said joking.
But he was curious to learn more, so he tested. And learned more than he could have imagined. Not only did he find out his ancestry is mostly from the UK and Ireland, but testing connected him to a woman who turned out to be his half-sister. She in turn connected him to Dennis, who they ultimately figured out was Mike&#8217;s biological father.
The two met in person for the first time in May. Their meeting, and Mike getting introduced to his nine half siblings, was covered by the <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865628808/Murray-man-meets-son-he-didnt-know-he-had-60-years-later.html?pg=all" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Desert News</a>. Check it out.
Stay tuned for more about Mike and his family.
<script height="338px" width="600px" src="https://player.ooyala.com/iframe.js#ec=JrdGozdTp2-ZWXOM5X7R54UE20x2MAyq&amp;pbid=3ce6404476914e86994d87aac3e4391b"></script>

Goodnight Son

If it’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then Jimmy Cygler and Paul Leventhal are plenty tough.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_22516" style="width: 278px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22516" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg" alt="Jimmy, left, and his brother Paul." class="size-medium wp-image-22516" height="300" width="268" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg 268w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1.jpg 449w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 268px) 100vw, 268px" />Jimmy, left, and his brother Paul.</div>
When both were infants, they were taken from their mother, Rebecca Kaufman, and raised worlds apart without knowing of the others’ existence.
With the help of 23andMe, the brothers recently found each other and were able to meet in person in early 2015.
Jimmy traveled from his home in Sao Paulo, Brazil to spend a week with Paul in Florida.
There the two men got to talk about their lives. Paul shared with Jimmy the little he knew about their mother, a brilliant but troubled woman. Jimmy was able to share with Paul a little about his improbable life.


“Stories of this kind, they are hard to believe,” Jimmy says. “Do you know the book ‘Life of Pi?’ A fantastical story, but it is nothing compared to my life.”

Paul downplays the drama in his own life – the separation from his mother, spending his first five years in a foster home, and growing up in a house where his father and stepmother were distant.
Paul has one fleeting memory of sitting on his mother’s knee – almost everything else he knows about her comes from what he’s gleaned from relatives. It wasn’t until Paul turned 18, after his father’s death, that he learned he’d been the product of an affair.
At first Paul pushed this information out of his head, but a few years later as a young man, a relative confirmed it was true.
“My life was turned upside down,” Paul said.


He had to live with not only his mother abandoning him but her family cutting ties with him as well. Jimmy thinks that Paul having to endure their mother’s abandonment and rejection may have been harder than the physical abuse he suffered.
Paul’s not so sure, but he knows that it affected him.


“I was angered by the fact that her brothers – two doctors and two lawyers – didn&#8217;t step up to the plate and save me from going to a foster home,” Paul said. “I must have been quite an embarrassment to them and my maternal grandmother, who was still living at the time.”


Rejected by his mother and her family, Paul spent years trying to find his biological father. That’s part of why he eventually got his DNA results with 23andMe. While he hasn’t yet found the identity of his biological father, Paul did find his brother Jimmy.
“My father had no idea who his mother was and finding his brother finally helped us solve that puzzle,” Jimmy’s daughter, Orly, said. “Now we know who she was.”


Her father agrees that it has helped.
“You know Nietzsche, ’that which does not kill us makes us stronger?’” Jimmy asks from his office in Sao Paulo. “Well, it is true for me.”


Paul disagrees with his brother on this point. What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger or it may damage you for the rest of your life.


Jimmy survived years of abuse as a child, life at a kibbutz, four wars, and three marriages. But he doesn’t feel damaged.


“I’m a rebuilt human being,” Jimmy says. “Really all the conditions of my life were anything but normal or positive, but the art of my life was to become a good human being.”


But it wasn’t easy.
When Jimmy first went to Israel at the age of 13, he began getting psychological help to work through his childhood trauma.
<div id="attachment_22476" style="width: 265px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22476" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg" alt="Jimmy as a young man on a kibbutz in Israel." class="size-medium wp-image-22476" height="300" width="255" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg 255w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-768x905.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-869x1024.jpg 869w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-747x880.jpg 747w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-1001x1180.jpg 1001w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz.jpg 1640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 255px) 100vw, 255px" />Jimmy as a young man on a kibbutz in Israel.</div>
“When I came to Israel I was a pile of wreckage, and I had to do something to these broken pieces to reassemble a human being,” Jimmy said.
But not having all the pieces about his life made that “reassembling” a life-long process.
“The story with Paul is part of it, but just one part of it,” said Jimmy. “I’m one of nine brothers and sisters. I’m the only brother (related to) all of them and I spent my whole life searching for those missing pieces.”
Jimmy mentions connecting this process with what psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote about in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
“He says a person who has meaning can bear almost anything,” Jimmy said. “So this search for meaning became important to me.”
Part of that search has included trying to learn more about who he was, where he came from and to whom he is connected.
“First I had to gather all the pieces and then you start putting the puzzle together and you try to find meaning in the picture that emerges,” Jimmy said. “You might have the whole picture or, like me, just parts of it.”
Jimmy said he also learned that one small piece of information could change everything. Recently a relative in London found a travel document Jimmy’s father had used when Jimmy was a baby. On it was the name James Maurice Goldberg.
“That’s my name (from his birth certificate, before his father changed his last name), but I’d never known it before,” he said.
The name also helped him find out more about his father, Izrael Aron Goldberg. Jimmy’s father fled Poland before the start of World War II and settled in Peru. There he married a woman and had two children, a son Lucho and a daughter Alina, and converted to Christianity. He would later say that all the family he had in Poland died in the Holocaust. After experiencing financial troubles, Izrael left his family in Peru and moved to New York City.
“I do have a business card of his from his time in New York,” Jimmy said. “It says ‘I. Aron Goldberg, specialist in furs.’”
<div id="attachment_22477" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22477" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg" alt="Jimmy's father's business card when he lived in New York." class="size-medium wp-image-22477" height="123" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-768x314.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1024x419.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-880x360.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1180x483.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116.jpg 1581w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jimmy&#8217;s father&#8217;s business card when he lived in New York.</div>
It was in New York that he met Rebecca Kaufman, who already had two sons, Paul and Jay, who were several years older than Jimmy.
Paul ended up in foster care and Jay was taken by Rebecca’s first husband. Rebecca was unable to care for Jimmy when he was born in 1949, and she was subsequently placed in an institution. Izrael, alone with his infant son, asked his estranged wife in Peru to come to New York with their two children.
“The interesting part of the story is that he didn’t tell her that he had a baby, me,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy’s half-sister, Alina, was almost 10 years old at the time. His half-brother, Lucho, was about eight. His sister remembers holding Jimmy as an infant, and falling in love with him. But it would be the last she’d see him for almost 55 years because the family quickly fell apart.
<div id="attachment_22478" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22478" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg" alt="Jimmy with his father and his half sister Alina before he was taken to Brazil." class="size-medium wp-image-22478" height="282" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951.jpg 408w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jimmy with his father and his half sister Alina before he was taken to Brazil.</div>
Jimmy doesn’t know all the details but is aware that his father fought with his wife. She stayed just a few months before returning to Peru with her two children, leaving Jimmy and his father in New York. Izrael took Jimmy to Brazil shortly thereafter. Jimmy thinks his father suffered from survivor’s guilt and wanted to somehow reconstruct the family he lost in the Holocaust, which might explain why Izrael had three children from two different mothers. Jimmy’s father took the name Israel Cygler when they moved to Brazil. He also quickly remarried and that’s when Jimmy’s life turned into a nightmare.
“I thought I had a ‘normal life,’” Jimmy said about what things were like after his father remarried. “I had a father, a woman whom I thought was my mother, and four younger brothers. I was raised Christian, studied with the nuns at school and went to mass on Sunday. Had a first communion. That was my life. But what I thought was normal at the time was not normal at all. “I was maltreated and tortured as a kid.”
His stepmother once punished him by putting him in a hole under the house for a week without food. Another time she smeared hot pepper juice “on all the holes of my body.” And after getting caught playing with matches as a seven-year-old, his mother placed his hand into a gas fire to punish him. He was burnt so badly that it took years of surgeries and skin grafts before he could properly open and close his hand.
“My mother did that to me,” Jimmy said. “She was the real villain in this, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know she wasn’t my mother, if I had known I could have dealt with that. But the only conclusion I could draw from those punishments was that I was a monster, that I deserved that because I was a monster. That was me at 13.”
Then the trajectory of his life changed when his father became critically ill and a stranger shared with him some surprising news.
“Out of the blue this young lad appears, speaks with me for half an hour and tore down the basis of my life,” Jimmy said. “He tells me ‘I’m your brother from another marriage. I’m from Lima, Peru. You also have an older sister, and your mother is not your mother. You were born to a woman in New York.’”
Jimmy was stunned. His father then told him it was all true.
“’Well son, now that you know you are a Jew, you are going to the land of the Jews, which is called Israel,’” Jimmy recalled his father saying. “I didn’t know anything about that country or those people. I didn’t know anything about the Jewish people. ”
He arrived in Israel in October 1962, and stayed for the next 27 years. “The country embraced me,” Jimmy said.
He lived in a special area of a kibbutz for teenagers who didn’t have parents. They were from 30 to 40 different countries and many had been orphaned or displaced by World War II. Jimmy received good care, including intensive psychological treatment to help deal with the emotional wounds from his stepmother’s abuse.
“That’s why I say I’m a rebuilt human being,” Jimmy said.
He served as a soldier in four wars, was married, has two sons and a daughter, divorced, married again, and had another daughter, and then divorced again.
“And then I met a Brazilian girl and fell in love and went to Brazil,” he said.
Jimmy reinvented himself &#8211; the twice divorced veteran who was a father of four went to college, married again, started another family, and now he runs a very successful business. But he was always looking, “desperately looking,” he says, for the pieces to the puzzle of his life. He was able to find his four half-brothers from his father’s family in Brazil. His stepmother told them he died in the war. With the help of a Peruvian businessman, Jimmy tracked down the phone number of a woman in Lima he thought might be his sister, Alina. He called her, said his name was Jimmy and that he was from Brazil.
“My dear little brother Jimmy, I have been looking for you all my life!” she replied. Jimmy pauses to control his emotion as he recounts meeting his sister.
“From this moment I felt love for her,” he said.
Jimmy traveled to Peru to get to know his sister, and she shared a blurry old photo she had of him being held by his biological mother. She also told him her own memory of holding him as an infant. She never forgot that and spent her life looking for him, never knowing how she could find him.
<div id="attachment_22479" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22479" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg" alt="A blurry photo of Jimmy being held by his mother Rebecca. The only photo he has of his mother." class="size-medium wp-image-22479" height="300" width="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-886x1180.jpg 886w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />A blurry photo of Jimmy being held by his mother Rebecca. The only photo he has of his mother.</div>
“She kept that memory her whole life, always wondering what had happened to me,” Jimmy said.
She also told him about their father, his financial problems in Peru, some of his history fleeing Poland and losing all of his family in the Holocaust. And he learned about being born in New York, but he still didn’t know anything about his biological mother. Jimmy says he and Alina became very close.
In 2013, his sister was diagnosed with cancer, a year later she died.
“Alina was a wonderful woman,” he said.
Losing her so soon was a huge blow to Jimmy. Jimmy’s story took another turn in early 2015 when his daughter, Orly, got her 23andMe results. She saw a match with Paul, thinking he was a cousin. But when she shared with Jimmy Paul’s date of birth and how much DNA he shared with Paul, they concluded that Paul and Jimmy were brothers.
In that first meeting, both men were overcome as they hugged and shed tears.
“It was very emotional,” Jimmy said. “We’re kind of old guys and I could see in his eyes how much he had suffered. I know what I went through and I came out a real strong person – a leader, a teacher and a family man. We both survived.”

A Fantastical Story

There’s nature and nurture and then there’s all that bickering – or lack of it – with our brothers or sisters.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Slide11-300x169.jpg" alt="Slide1" width="300" height="169" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22426" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Slide11-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Slide11.jpg 720w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Birth order, and the family dynamic between siblings – or whether or not you have siblings – plays a role in determining who we become as people.
So in honor of National Sibling Day, which was a few weeks back, one of our scientists, Aaron Kleinman, looked at what our data could tell us about how birth order and family size influence us.
First off, it is pretty clear that it does make a difference if you were born an only child, or were the first, or last or middle child in a family, according to 23andMe data. Aaron found that being older or younger affects measures of intelligence and personality, impacting things like whether you’re more likely to have taken advanced math or whether you are more agreeable and altruistic.
This is all well-trod territory, with plenty of studies over the years looking at birth order and its influence on everything from <a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/10/6/482.short" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">personality traits</a> to <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5832/1717.short" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">intelligence</a> and health. Some of those studies confirm the stereotypes we have about first and last born children, and some – like its influence on allergies or the risk for cancer – are harder to peg.
<div style="float: right; text-align: justified; width: 200px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">Some Birth Order Findings
A First Born Child 
&#8211; Tends to start reading earlier 
&#8211; Tends to take more advanced math classes 
&#8211; Tends to be less tactful
A Last Born Child 
&#8211; Tends to be more altruistic 
&#8211; Tends to be less tense 
&#8211; Is more likely to own a dog
An Only Child 
&#8211; Tends to start reading earlier 
&#8211; Is more likely to learn another language as an adults 
&#8211; Is less likely to be able to do a cartwheel
</div>
Ever since Cain and Abel, there has been a fascination with sibling relationships. And with that interest come some well known clichÃ©s – the luster of the smart and driven first born, the carefree and crafty youngest child and the middle kid who is just trying to keep the peace.
But there has also been some interesting science around sibling relationships and birth order and what influence it has on development.
One of our <a href="http://psr.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/04/28/1088868310361241.abstract" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">favorite studies</a> looked at differences between 700 brothers who played in Major League Baseball. The data showed that younger brothers attempted to steal bases way more than their older brothers. The study, by researchers at UC Berkeley and Guilford College, tended to support the evolutionary theory that younger siblings are more likely to be risk takers. The theory is that the youngest sibling has to fight harder and be a little craftier to get his or her parents’ attention.
In our data Aaron also found that birth order affects personality, and although we didn’t see anything about base stealing, 23andMe data showed that younger siblings were less tense, more agreeable and more altruistic than their older siblings.
But studying these kinds of differences among siblings can be tricky, said Aaron.
In other words, some of the differences might be more a reflection of why the family is big or small as opposed to whether a child is older or younger. For example, it may be that people who are religious tend to have big families. So to control for family size and other things, Aaron ran several different analyses, all using data from 23andMe customers of European ancestry who’d consented to research. Aaron did things like restrict the customers he looked at to those who had precisely one sibling and then looked at the effect of being the first-born versus the last-born.
Aaron found that the 23andMe data confirms what some others studies have said about first-borns being <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w19542" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">smarter</a>. Or more specifically, 23andMe data showed that first-born kids read earlier and take more advanced math classes.
But other findings in the 23andMe data were for things we hadn’t seen before.
Aaron found a correlation between birth order and taste. Those who had fewer older siblings were more likely to enjoy cilantro and dark chocolate, for instance. We couldn’t explain that one with evolutionary theory.
Another odd correlation shows that younger siblings were more likely to be able to whistle and own a dog.
Not wanting to leave anyone out, Aaron also looked at only children. He found that they were more likely to have learned another language and less likely to be able to do a cartwheel.
This focus on you family dynamic is helpful for researchers here at 23andMe as they try to sort out the interplay of genetics and environment for various conditions.

Sibling Rivalry

A few weeks ago Vox did a piece about a 23andMe customer, who at 50 found his biological sister and his mother using the service. He’d been adopted. His sister never knew her mother had had a son that she<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000015521781Small-300x199.jpg" alt="Troubled Water" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21718" width="300" height="199" /> put up for adoption. Their initial meeting was joyous, which we wrote about, but in the ensuing years their relationship soured. For adoptees using 23andMe – as well as the biological family who they may connect with – these reunions can be either joyous or fraught with anxiety. After the story in Vox ran, one of our customers wrote about her own experience complete with both the good and the bad. Her story includes the promise and pitfalls of connecting with lost family. 
By Anonymous
A year and half ago, 23andMe connected me with my maternal half-sister. This connection began as the stuff of fairytales but quickly devolved into something akin to an episode of “Mean Girls.”
We had formed an immediate bond over Facebook, Skype, texting, phone calls, and emails, communicating at a pace that over ran every other aspect of our lives.
It was beautiful and exhilarating and fun, but everything is at 100 miles per hour. Until you crash. Within two months of our connection, she had cast me out of her life, showing me the rage on the flip side of her love. You rarely end up where you started, though. 
<h6>A Ending and a Beginning</h6>
While my bond with her came to a heartbreaking end, I now embrace that separation as the catalyst for the amazing turn of events over the last year.
Like many adoptees, my identity has been a queasy dysphoria, a sense of separateness where connectedness was supposed to be. I grew up with a family in which no one looked, sounded, and thought like me. My identity was pockmarked with isolation and a knowledge that part of me existed in the shadows.
My 30-year search for biological family was not so much a search for “family,” as a search for myself. I wondered if I would die without knowing this part of myself. I was even more terrified that, when I did find her and other family, they would dislike me. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small-300x223.jpg" alt="Old photos" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21717" width="300" height="223" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small-300x223.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small-768x572.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iStock_000021155400Small.jpg 803w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<h6>Burdened by History</h6>
Everyone has a story. I did, and so did my sister. She grew up with our mother, who was controlling and destructive. Although our mother had plenty when she died, my sister inherited nothing but a box of old pictures and a fear of abandonment.
Our mother told my sister about me two decades earlier. She told me that, by the time we met, she had a vivid fantasy of the kind of person I would be. The problem was, her fantasy did not resemble who I am.
Neither of us was really prepared for reality.
<h6>Virtual Connections v. Real Ones</h6>
Cyberspace offers distance and deniability, even when the conversation seems never-ending. I still smile when I remember the first night we connected on Facebook, a six-hour chat with her, her husband, and my original family, while I accepted friend requests from total strangers and carried on open conversations between all of us on our pages. For five weeks, the pace was breathless. One of our aunts privately warned me later to slow down and be cautious, but I paid her no heed.
I was like Sally Field clutching her Oscar — I found my sister, and she liked me. She really liked me!
<h6>I Love You</h6>
When we finally met, I think I lost her at “hello.” I just was not what she expected, and the scars left behind by life with our mother became too much for her to overcome. During the week, I repeatedly begged her to open up about what was bothering her . After I returned home in another state, I called to tell her I had arrived safely. Despite the tension of the week, she told me, “I love you,” and hung up.
Within a week, I received an email from her telling me that me that we were not compatible. I begged her to give us more time, time to become family. I received two more emails, each written with blades more sharp than the last. My worst fear had been realized. I found my sister, and she hated me.
She really hated me.
<h6>Grieving </h6>
I grieved for my sister like she died. There was a time I would have done anything to repair the rift, but that time is long passed. There is a saying that everyone who comes into your life is there for a reason, but not everyone is supposed to stay. She may not have stayed in my life, but she did introduce me to our aunts and uncles with whom I have wonderful relationships.
She also went on the painful journey of digging through that box of pictures our mother left to find some idea of who my father was. During those wonderful weeks before we met, she found his picture and name.
<h6>One Search Leads to Another</h6>
Heartbroken after our tragic week, I turned my attention to finding the one person I had never intended to find. I found my father in a day, and I talked to him the next night.
In the last year, I have fallen in love with my father, the man who I grew up believing was heartless and cruel. Growing up, I never once pictured his face my head, but I only needed to look in the mirror. I look just like him. I have a wonderful stepmom and two younger paternal siblings, a brother who will one day conquer the world and a sister who is a rock. I traveled to meet them for the first time this summer.
<h6>It Was All Worth It</h6>
Being with them is home for me. I am forming an especially unique bond with my paternal sister. She is a young’un, 18 years my junior. During our hilarious talks in her living room that week, however, her old soul and my younger spirit found a common resting place in the middle somewhere.  She has asked me to come back for Christmas, and I am going. I found my sister, after all, and she likes me. She really likes me!
As adoptees, we wait so long to fill this gap in our lives. It is natural for us to believe that the first relative we meet is the destination, rather than one more step in the journey. Despite how things ended with my maternal sister, I would not trade those first happy weeks for anything.
And, without them, I never would have found my paternal family. In the end, it was all worth it, after all.

Not Everyone is Expected to Stay

Anyone with a brother or sister doesn’t need a national holiday to remind them how special bonds between siblings can be, but in recognition of<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblings_Day"> National Sibling Day</a> we bring you another in a long list of stories of siblings who found each other through 23andMe.


Tricia had a few details, but never enough to find her father.
John and Charlene, her brother and sister, never knew Tricia even existed. Apparently neither did their dad. It wasn’t until Tricia tested with 23andMe that they found each other and learned that they were all related.
<div id="attachment_20717" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-20717" class="size-medium wp-image-20717" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Siblings-on-dads-bench-selfie-300x232.jpg" alt="Trish, center, and her brother John and sister Charlene." height="232" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Siblings-on-dads-bench-selfie-300x232.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Siblings-on-dads-bench-selfie.jpg 574w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Trish, center, and her brother John and sister Charlene.</div>
Tricia first started searching for information about her biological parents more than a decade ago. With the help of her adopted brother, Tricia had tracked down the name of her biological mother, who’d passed away.
She was also able to find the town where her mother had lived, even the old school she attended. When she visited the old school building she saw for the first time a photo of her biological mother hanging on the wall. It was a striking moment for her to see some of herself reflected in the face of a person she’d never met.
“That was a kick in the pants,” Tricia said. “To see her face and that ‘Oh yeah, I got all things from her.’”
Later she tracked down her biological mother’s sister, who helped her cobble together a few more details around her birth. Her aunt told her that her parents were college students, when she was conceived. Her mom at Oregon State University, and her dad was a basketball star at a nearby college.
“In my head I thought maybe it was one of those spring break flings,” Tricia said.
According to her aunt, once the family learned of the pregnancy they took her mom out of school. The family moved to another town, and Tricia was put up for adoption and given to a new family on Christmas Day in 1957 a few days after her birth.
Those were all details Tricia had never had before. She learned a little about her mother, saw some more photos and learned that she had Irish and Norwegian ancestry.

<div style="float: right; text-align: justified; width: 300px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
More Stories About Siblings
&#8211; <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20609 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg" alt="Mike &#038; Leslie smiling" height="219" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling-300x219.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Mike-Leslie-smiling.jpg 697w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
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&#8211; <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20438 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen-300x206.jpg" alt="Cy &#038; Kathleen" height="206" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen-300x206.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cy-Kathleen.jpg 648w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
<a href="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-20723 size-medium" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square-300x300.jpg" alt="tile01-neil_Jolie-square" height="300" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square.jpg 460w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />&#8211; </a><a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/stories-from-23andme-neil-schwartzman/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> 
Hey Bro&#8217;
&nbsp;
</a><a href="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile01-neil_Jolie-square.jpg"></a>
</div>

But in all those details there was nothing about her father. And she left it at that, until she tested with 23andMe in late 2013.
Tricia said she signed up for 23andMe to find out a little bit more about where in Europe her ancestors came from.


“I was tickled to find out how much Cro-magnon (Neanderthal) I was,” she said.


But a match with a first cousin named Randy was a total surprise, she said.
“I did not expect that,” Tricia said.


She and Randy began exchanging messages and Tricia’s surprises kept coming. He wanted to figure out how they were related and began asking her about her background. Tricia told him what little she knew. A few of those details stuck out, basketball, a small college town in Oregon and the date of her birth. Randy connected the dots.


“I think my Uncle Ralph was your dad,” he said.


Tricia was stunned. Randy explained that his uncle had died a few years ago, but he added a happy surprise.
Ralph had two children, a son and a daughter. Tricia had a brother and a sister.
She didn’t know what to say.
In Texas, a woman Tricia had never met soon got a surprise of her own. When Charlene’s cousin Randy called, he started the conversation by asking if she was sitting down.
“My first thought naturally was, “Who died?” Charlene said.


Randy quickly explained that he’d tested with 23andMe, gave her a short description of DNA testing for ancestry and said he told Charlene that when he tested he’d connected not just to third and fourth cousins but to a single first cousin, who he didn’t know. He tried to explain how overlapping genetic segments are used to calculate “relatedness.” That the closer a relation the longer the overlapping segments. Charlene wasn’t following all of what he was saying until he got to the punch line.
You’ve got an older sister Charlene, he told her.
She said she was thankful that she was sitting down.
Charlene then talked to her brother. Randy helped connect them to Tricia and after exchanging messages, photos and family details, it was clear that they were indeed siblings.
“I’d always wanted a sister,” Charlene said.


Around Christmas time 2013 Tricia flew to San Diego where her half brother lived and her biological father was buried. She met him and Charlene. They spent the holidays together. They visited their father’s grave. They bonded. They learned of some uncanny shared family traits – an interest in painting, the sea and oddly dragonflies.
For Tricia the connection to family couldn’t have happened at a better time. Over the last few years she’d endured some difficult health problems and a divorce.
Now she feels blessed and finds herself, &#8220;smiling like a Cheshire cat all day long.&#8221;
She recently spent a week in Texas with Charlene and her family.


“Life is good thanks to 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.

A Siblings Story From 23andMe

An adoptee, Cody Harden turned to 23andMe to search for medical information. Little did he know that in his search he’d find more than just data about his health, he found family. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-19653 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cody-Hardens-Photo-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cody-Hardens-Photo-200x300.jpg 200w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cody-Hardens-Photo.jpg 427w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" /> 
Cody, a 39-year-old software systems specialist, hadn’t tested with the intent of trying to find his biological family. It just happened.
“I had a great life and my adoptive parents were wonderful,” he said. “I didn’t know the circumstances of my adoption, why I was given up, so I didn’t know if it was good or bad. I   didn’t really care to find my relatives.”
His search had really been about his health and wanting to learn about what, if any, genetic risks he had. So when he discovered that 23andMe had matched him to potential distant cousins, his reaction was lukewarm.
“I thought that was neat, but it was more of a novelty than anything else,” Cody said.
A little later, 23andMe matched him with someone that could be a fourth cousin. That caught his attention. He connected with his fourth cousin through 23andMe. The cousin didn’t know where Cody fit into the family but decided to start digging around.
“That kind of got the ball rolling, and eventually there was a second cousin, and poof! There’s the family,” he said.
His excitement grew as he got closer and closer to tracking down his half-siblings and parents. He learned that his father was fifteen and his mother only fourteen when they’d had him.
“They really didn’t talk about it for the next forty years,” Cody said.
He also grew more apprehensive.
“Are there going to be hard feelings? Did I ruin someone’s life?” he wondered. “Would they resent me?”
Then last spring he talked to his birth father for the first time, who encouraged him to contact his birth mother. It took a bit more work to track her down, but he eventually found and contacted her.
“I could tell she was so nervous and excited,” Cody said. “I felt for her.”
He discovered he’d grown up only 45 minutes away from her and his half brother.
“What a trip,” he said.
Cody says he felt an instant connection when meeting his half brothers and parents for the first time.
“In the last few months I learned a lot about genetics,” he said. “Personalities are just as much inherited as they are how you grew up.”
He looks more like his mother, he says, but he’s inherited his father’s outgoing, prankster personality.
He’s since visited with his half brother on his mother’s side several times, as he lives closer than his father and his father’s son. He keeps in touch with both sides by phone and intends on keeping up with that connection.
Still, it’s amazing to him to think that just last year, he had no idea who any of these people were.
“This is all really new to me,” Cody says. “It’s exciting to know that I’ve got half-brothers here and there, and I’ll try to make the most of it with whatever time I have left.”
Results not typical. Results vary due to unique differences in each individual’s DNA. On average, users receive at least one or two results that may help with proactively managing health.  23andMe’s services are not a substitute for professional medical or diagnostic advice.

An Unexpected Discovery

<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.

siblings — Page 3