There was an interesting letter in Dear Prudie on Slate today. Written by the husband of a wife who’d left an abusive marriage and a child behind many years ago before marrying him and starting another family. Kids of current marriage know nothing of the half sib, and mom has never tried to find or contact the kid. Husband has a few photos (wife wanted him to destroy them, but he hid them). Now he’s wondering if he should have followed her wishes (wife is still very much alive).
Prudie’s advice was to destroy them as that was the wife’s wishes. But I think given the burst of common access to DNA info, a MUCH smarter approach would have been for the husband to talk to the wife about sharing the info about the half sib with the current marriage kids. Odds that the kid left behind with abusive spouse will track her down seem really high - it really only takes a cousin or sib or niece or nephew of the wife putting info on ancestory.com (or one of the children themselves), and that kid could contact the family. I’d sure rather my kids heard it from me than via a contact out of the blue.
It sounds like the mom has a lot of shame about not taking or looking for the kid, from what I could glean. So… of course that adds a lot of complexity. But it feels like a ticking time bomb given recent events and ease of access to genetic info from our family members.
My husband did ancestry.com last year (Christmas gift from me) and just got 23 and me results today (he asked for it for this Christmas to compare). Very similar results and nothing unexpected. Scotland, England, Ireland , Northern European. The results today were even more detailed though about Europe (beyond UK stuff)- Netherlands and Germany only -exactly what he had been told. A trace of Scandinavian and “broad” European but said 100% European . And Neanderthal (seems to be traced to Europe/Germany) which he was very pleased about!
@sevmom for a moment, I thought you had written that your husband was “very pleased” about being 100% European, and I was thinking “OK, then”. However, then I realized that he was pleased about having a bit of Neanderthal, which is indeed cool.
I think that there were multiple interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals in Eurasia, and it’s cool if they can trace separate genetic lines back to where each particular interbreeding happened.
S1 and DIL gave DH and me 23andme for Christmas. IMO, it was a waste of money. Showed I’m 98.7% Ashkenazi Jewish. Big yawn. Nothing I didn’t already know. We’re still waiting for DH’s results, but I’m certain they will be the same.
Mine was about 96% Ashkenazi Jewish and 4% Scandinavian (establishing the truth of an old family rumor), which highlighted to me the insularity of the Jewish population over preceding centuries. My H is primarily Irish, so my kids are more diverse and, if the two who currently have SO’s have kids with them, any grands will be further diverse. D’s bf is Sephardic Jewish on one side and whatever constitutes non-indigenous Australian on the other. Just based on the look of that parent, I would guess a great deal of Irish, which fits with Australian history as well. Oldest son’s gf is English-Irish-German on one side and somewhat diluted Native American (though still enough to be eligible for a tribal card if she chose to live on the reservation) on the other side. I spend a little bit of time daydreaming about what any possible grands might look and be like.
As an adoptive parent, I know it’s perfectly normal for adoptive children to want to know more/search for birth relatives. Unless they are very naive, there must be more to the story.
My son met a guy this week who never knew his father. He is estranged from his mother and just learned, through one of these DNA tests, that a family friend is his father. He is trying to figure out how to approach the man he has known all his life.
My perspective is that the ancestry portion is entertainment, a parlor game. The value lies in having the data, not only as discoveries are made in the future, but right now today. Recently we were wondering why a medication was not going well for a family member and the doc asked about genetics - I went back to the Promethease report and found a rare SNP that meant the family member was a Poor Metabolizer of the medication. Now that knowledge impacts decisions going forward. (Promethease was around $12; you upload your 23andme text file which any user can download from their account, even users who only bought the ancestry from 23andme.)
We found my late cousin’s birth son. Another cousin of mine did a different test (a second test he did to see if it would have different result) and this guy came up as a match. The guy contacted my cousin, who asked him to take the test from the company the rest of us had used. He matched all of us. My mom called my late cousin’s sister, who said that her brother had a child many (35) years ago. He had told his family and told them he had given up all parental rights.
Long story short, they ( the grandfather and the Aunt) all met last weekend for lunch, including my mom who played the role of go between. The grandfather even had some pictures of his son with the guys mom when they were together. Everyone was thrilled to find each other.
They guy wasn’t brought up by his birth mom but instead her brother and sister-in-Law who adopted him as an infant. He has been looking for his birth father since he was 14.
He is the ninth closest relative in my DNA matches, right after the cousin on my list (my first cousin’s son) he initially contacted.
After seeing this thread become active again I took a look at my latest 23andme results. They added a map feature for your genetic relatives. It actually maps fairly nicely to the family history. Clusters in GA+FL for my mother’s side and KY+TX+CA on my father’s side. One distant relative, a 4th cousin, lives in Maui (obviously, the smartest of the bunch!)…
I only recognize a few of the last names of the “relatives” … and both are my grandmothers’ maiden names.
The only unusual result in 23andme is in my Y chromosome. They say I’m E-V13, which isn’t common in northwestern Europe. It’s common in the Balkans. However, a different genetic analysis company puts my Y in the more common group of European males.
We were talking about these tests, and a friend whose brother is some kind of medical researcher said this is where medicine is headed. He had this experience with some common drug, that he wasn’t metabolizing it so therefore it was no good for him. He said doctors will soon be getting a baseline for almost all patients and will then know what kind of antibiotic to prescribe.
This is a very scary thing! I’ve been trying to warn people about this for a long time. People don’t see the risks. But there are tremendous risks.
I’d never give my DNA to anyone and I’ve warned my family too. why? Because once you’re tested you’ve given them the most personal information you could possibly give them. They can identify every mutation you have. Mutations can be linked to diseases; some of which we already know about. Some are tied to diseases that may not emerge for quite some time if ever. With others, an outcome is more certain. And, advances are being made quickly. That means that your vulnerability to certain diseases -even those way off in the future-will be detectable in your DNA.
The information you give these companies can have major implications for you and for your offspring and your relatives because the inheritability patterns of many of the the disorders are known-and/or will be known soon. Thus when you hand over your DNA you are also handing over information about your offspring. “So what?”, you may ask.
Take Note: There are no laws against using DNA findings to discriminate against you or your family members except in the case of health insurance. And even that could change on a dime. And DNA findings can be used to exclude you or your kids from life insurance. And in the future it could be used to discriminate against you and your family in many other ways too. It’s hard to even predict the different ways giving up your DNA can come back to bite you. There are no laws to protect you from that. And civil rights laws are not expanding right now. Quite the opposite.
Sometimes people who submit their DNA say they will be anonymous-so how would anyone know or get the results? The first thing to realize is that DNA can’t ever be “anonymous” in the sense that it is even more you than your name. But how it can be used to discriminate is easy to see. Let’s say you want to buy life insurance. Well the insurance company does not know if you have donated. But they can mandate that, if you want life insurance, you have to be willing to sign a form that consents to the release of any DNA material that has been submitted to any of the DNA companies. Then they can submit the forms attesting to your consent to have your DNA released to them Bingo! Now, if your kid wants life insurance…etc. Don’t do it!
I am adopted and took the 23andme test when I learned about it about 4 years ago, when I was 49. I had/have never searched for my bio-people (as I have come to call them) and wasn’t searching when I did 23andme. I was thrilled at the idea I might no longer have to put “None Available” in the medical history section of forms. I did turn on the DNA relatives function, though. I am half Ashkenaxi Jewish/half Western European mutt Long story long, last April I got an email from a DNA relative who shares 53% of my DNA - a full biological brother. He shares my birthday, 11 years younger. I have a full biological sister, too. Bio-parents both still alive, but divorced. It’s been interesting to process. Still working on it.
@VeryHappy You can upload the raw data to GEDmatch, and get a further break down from further back.
My parents came out mom-99% Ashkenazi, 1% East European, dad - 98% Ashkenazi, 1% East European, 1% Portuguese. Repeated updates left that 1% Portuguese. However, I was looking at the list of Jewish Families in my Paternal Grandparents’ shtetle mid 19th century. their (unique) last name was there. There was also a Jewish family with the surname Fortugal - A common name for Sephardic Jews from Portugal. In such a small Jewish community, there would have likely been at least one marriage, especially since, according to my grandfather, both families had failry high status in the community. There are not a lot of differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in DNA, so most of those likely were scattered and disappeared, except that stubborn 1% which wasn’t even Jewish.
I would recommend that any upload to GEDmatch be done anonymously, so that if some company gets a hold of it, it wan’t be easily traceable to you. Different, non identifiable email address, etc.
Life insurance companies generally require physical tests of some kind for large policies. Years ago, they were collecting saliva samples to test for tobacco usage as well as other things. A full-blown exam includes a blood draw. They have plenty of your DNA if they want to test it without resorting to Ancestry.
One of my sons has two friends who were adopted and raised as brothers. When their adoptive parents died, one looked for his birth family and now lives near his birth mother and several full siblings in another state. The other one has not searched and says he has no interest in finding people who didn’t want him when he just a cute little baby. He has said that if anyone contacts him through DNA or any other search methods, he will not respond. Of course, he is still in his 20’s and may change his mind someday, but as of now, he has not done a DNA test. What is interesting is that one boy is an amazingly talented artist and the other is an amazingly talented musician.
The “didn’t want him” assumption is faulty. In many cases it is love, and knowledge that the baby deserves more than he or she could have with the birth mother, that motivates an adoption. With maturity this adoptee may change his mind.
I have contacted two third cousins via 23andme. In both instances, I sent an email. One cousin responded. Our paths had crossed as children, because our parents were members of a social club made up of folks from a particular island in Yugoslavia (now Croatia). The email exchange was friendly, but that was the end.
The other cousin was on a Croatian genealogy website and I recognized the name from 23andme. This cousin had paid a genealogist to do research (my father and her great grandmother were second cousins??). She didn’t share much—other than to acknowledge we were probably related. It was clear she wasn’t going to share her results. Other than that, I didn’t have any contact as a result of 23andme.
I’ve gotten about four or five contacts from 23andme. All of them from very distant cousins. There’s one other person who shares 50% of her DNA with me on 23andme, and that’s my sister.
