Second paragraph of third chapter:
Gerry decided to test at 23andMe, too. She was curious about her own results, and besides, if she matched Alice, that would eliminate some possibilities that Alice needed to consider—that Alice had been adopted or that Jim Collins wasn’t, biologically speaking, Alice’s father. These were contenders for an explanation, even if Gerry told Alice she was insane when Alice suggested their mother could have had an affair.
My attentive reader will have noticed that I have become very fascinated by the addition of DNA analysis to the suite of tools available to the genealogy researcher. I have been fortunate; all of my own direct ancestors appear to be genetically who we thought they were, at least back to the early nineteenth century; and while I have identified a couple of absentee parents for other people, only one of them was still alive (and his daughter decided not to try contacting him).
Libby Copeland takes us to stories of people who found much closer and less pleasant surprises in their DNA, and asks what this means for the American concept of families? And it is a much more American than European thing; I find more relatives on the DNA sites connected to my American grandmother than to my three Irish grandparents combined. There are lines around consent and confidentiality that modern technology is redrawing. The privacy of a brief relationship decades ago is up-ended by the genetic information encoded in the body of the child of that relationship, who has a right to know where they come from too.
If you haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of DNA testing, but are considering it, this is an essential read to think through what you might find out. If you have, you’ll find yourself alternating between nods of recognition and jaw-dropping astonishment. I am lost in admiration of CeCe Moore, who has turned the combination of DNA analysis and genealogical research into a new branch of science. My own dabbling has been fascinating but without any huge shocks. Not everyone is so lucky.
You can get The Lost Family here.
