By
ALYSON KRUEGER, The New York Times
Three years ago Dyan deNapoli, a 57-year-old author and TED speaker who specializes in penguins, was given a
23andMe genetic testing kit for her birthday. Intrigued, she spit in the tube and sent the results to a lab in Burlington, N.C.
About
two months later she received a pie chart breaking down where her
ancestors lived (99.4 percent of them were from Europe). What she was
most giddy about, however, was a 41-page list of all the people who had
done the test and were genetically related to her: 1,200 in all.
(Customers can choose whether their information is shared with others.)
Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter
“I
had the names of everyone from my immediate family members to my first
cousins, second cousins, third. Once I got past fourth cousins, it went
to my fifth cousins, and beyond,” said Ms. deNapoli, who lives in
Georgetown, Mass. “It started me down this genealogical rabbit hole.”
Using
the website’s internal messaging system supplemented with Facebook, she
connected with three second cousins, who were in neighboring towns. She
met each one for breakfast in a local diner, where they spent hours
drinking coffee and poring over family trees and photos, marveling at
various resemblances.
“Jorge is an older cousin, a very young 90,” Ms. deNapoli said. “Everybody agreed he looks just like my dad.”
Last
June she visited a third cousin and other relatives in a mountainous
village in the Campania region of Italy, her paternal grandmother’s
place of origin, walking the narrow streets, eating four-course meals
and learning stories of her ancestors, including a long-ago
Hatfield-McCoy-level feud. “That’s why I really didn’t know this side of my family,” Ms. deNapoli said in wonderment.
‘Are You Sure You Are My Sister?’
At-home
genetic testing services have gained significant traction in the past
few years. 23andMe, which costs $99, has over five million customers,
according to the company;
AncestryDNA (currently $69), over 10 million.
The
companies use their large databases to match willing participants with
others who share their DNA. In many cases, long-lost relatives are
reuniting, becoming best friends, travel partners, genealogical
resources or confidantes.
The result is a more layered version of
what happened when Facebook first emerged and out-of-touch friends and
family members found one another. Children of long-ago casual sperm
donors are finding their fathers. Adoptees are bonding to biological
family members they’ve been searching for their entire lives.
Sherri
Tredway, 55, is a marketing and development director for a social
service agency based in Washington, Ind. She was adopted as a baby, and
in January she drove two and a half hours to Bowling Green, Ky., to meet
her biological half sister, Patty Roberts-Freeman, 60, with whom she
connected through AncestryDNA.
 |
© Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times; illustration by the New York Times
Josh Broadwater found his biological father after a lifetime search. |
Ms. Roberts-Freeman needed an outfit for a wedding, so they arranged
to meet at a shopping mall to find one together. They started in the
food court, where they bought sodas and talked for over an hour about
their mother, their current lives, their upbringings.
They then
went to a Belk department store, where they tried on outfits. “I was
looking at some dressy dresses and showed her a few, and she said, ‘No,
no dresses for me!’” Ms. Tredway recalled. “I remember saying, ‘O.K.,
are you sure you are my sister?’ which we both laughed about. She found a
silky floral shell and a beautiful sweater in rose, pink and cream to
wear with some slacks. It was very classy.’”
The half sisters have
since seen each other several times, meeting in restaurants between
their homes. They also see other relatives including two more half
siblings, Sissy Bonham, 51, and Michael Clavette, 54, as well as their
biological mother’s sister, Nancy Kalman Bell.
“Not a day goes by
when I don’t talk to Aunt Nan,” Ms. Tredway said. “I call her to talk,
when I’m upset, anything. She’s my family now.”
Josh Broadwater,
44, a deputy police sheriff in California, was abandoned when he was 1
day old in a gas station bathroom in California. When he was in his 30s,
he implored the agency that placed him with adoptive parents to give
him whatever information they had about his biological ones but ran into
constant dead ends.
In July 2015 he sent a kit to AncestryDNA and
found a cousin who shared DNA with him. That led to him discovering his
biological father: a man who had had a one-night stand in the front
seat of a ’69 pickup truck and never knew he existed. They connected
over the phone, and soon Mr. Broadwater was driving 500 miles to go elk
hunting on his father’s farm in Kingston, Utah.
 |
© Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times; illustration by the New York Times
Christine Carter was startled at her results, and found some solace in writing about them. |
“He kind of sat there quiet for 10 to 15 seconds,” said Mr.
Broadwater about their first conversation. “And then in his cute little
country voice he said, ‘Well, if Gloria is your mom, and this thing says
I’m your dad, there is a damn good chance I am your dad.’ He is just
the coolest person.”
The two got along so well that they now talk
on the phone once a week about the weather, what is going on with the
children, about the hunting season. “I never thought finding my
biological dad, he would be the one calling me,” Mr. Broadwater said.
He
also talks to a half brother who is eight months older than him. “I
just got a text message from him that I’m going to be an uncle in
October,” Mr. Broadwater said. “I don’t know how much I will be
involved. This whole new family is new to me.”
The Genetic Global Village
Others who have their DNA tested are forming relationships not with specific people, but with their family’s places of origin.
One
example is Leah Madison, 32, an education outreach coordinator for the
Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. She was planning trips to Peru
and Korea when she learned a year and a half ago from 23andMe that her
family came from Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.
Over the
winter she and her father went to the Iberian Peninsula for two weeks.
She felt an ineluctable connection to the people as she ate their bread
masterpieces, toured buildings by Antoni Gaudà and danced to flamenco
music.
“I had a piece of paper that tells me I’m from Spain,” Ms.
Madison said. “But then I went there and I noticed all these people have
curly hair, and maybe that is where mine comes from?” Now she feels
compelled to visit the other places as well.
But other testers have found their results more alienating.
 |
© David Walter Banks for The New York Times; illustration by the New York Times
"I'm like the heritage of warriors or something," David Hughes said. |
In February 2016 Christine Carter, a marketing strategist, was on a
business trip to London when she decided to open her 23andMe dossier.
She was in her hotel room, rushing to dinner. “I thought it would be a
quick reveal,” she said. “I was going to learn that I was Native
American and black, and maybe learn a little bit more about the stories I
heard as a child.”
Ms. Carter was shocked when the results showed
she was 31.5 percent white or European. She struggled through dinner,
keeping this revelation mostly to herself, until she got back to her
home in Baltimore and contended with her feelings.
She wrote a Huffington Post
blog
post, “I Celebrated Black History Month … By Finding Out I Was White”
that went viral. It attracted thousands of comments, from white
supremacists who berated her, to people who had a similar experience and
shared her sentiments.
“It took me less than 30 minutes to write
the post, it was like journaling, something to get it off my chest,”
said Ms. Carter, 32. “So to have that reaction was insane.”
Perhaps
the most frustrating reality is when users don’t have any known
connections at all. This can happen to people in certain ethnic groups,
including Latinos and Asians, that thus far have
fewer people using the services and a smaller database.
“Diversity
in genetic research is a global problem,” said Joanna Mountain, the
senior director of Research at 23andMe, adding that the company is
offering free testing in some countries to begin to rectify that. “The
results for Hispanics and Asians aren't there yet, but they are coming,”
said Jenn Utley, a family historian at Ancestry (the parent company of
AncestryDNA). “The database keeps growing.”
 |
© Tony Luong for The New York Times; illustration by the New York Times
Dyan deNapoli's readout prompted new connections and exciting trips. |
Finding Your Tribe
Even
for those privy to rich data, using a genetic-testing service as social
network poses challenges. Ms. deNapoli has written to 25 people related
to her and has heard back from only nine. “I guess a lot of people
aren’t doing the tests to connect with family,” she said.
Ms.
Tredway said she had a difficult experience after reaching out to her
biological mother, getting an out-of-the-blue phone call from North
Carolina while she was getting a haircut: “She said, ‘There is no way
you could be my daughter,’ even though I knew I was.”
And then
there is David Hughes, 38, the owner of an executive search firm,
Sandbox Partners, who was ecstatic when he got his results back from
23andMe. “My breakdown is basically 60 percent Balkan, which is
Mediterranean or Greek, 25 percent Native American Indian, 11 percent
Middle Eastern and 4 percent Eastern African,” he said. “I’m like the
heritage of warriors or something.”
But as much as Mr. Hughes
wants to explore the different regions he comes from and meet the family
members whom he got that DNA from, he hasn’t matched with anyone
through the genetic testing service.
“My biological dad is 50
percent Native American Indian, so I eventually hope to find which tribe
I am from,” he said. “But I have nothing yet.”
COMMENTS