Author Topic: DNA search angels: the Facebook 'detectives' who help reunite families  (Read 649 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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The Guardian by Oscar Schwartz Mon 29 Apr 2019

Volunteers are helping others find their roots, and revolutionizing the young science of genetic genealogy

Beth’s older brothers would sometimes joke that she was the postman’s daughter. They had dark hair and brown eyes while she was fair and blonde. Growing up, Beth ignored them – the man that she was told was her father was not around anyway.

But as an adult, when her mother grew sick, the question became more urgent. During visits to the hospital, Beth tried to work up the courage to ask her directly: who is my real father? She would always back out at the last minute.

When Beth’s mother passed away in 2010, she feared the truth had gone to the grave. Beth reached out to her friend, Christina Pearson, who had experience tracing her own family ancestry. Together, they gathered as much information as they could from Beth’s relatives to fill the gaps in her family tree, but were led down a series of blind alleys.

Then, in February 2017, Pearson read a story online about how DNA tests were being used by adoptees to locate birth parents. Pearson, who worked full time as a schoolteacher, didn’t know anything about genetics, but found a Facebook group called DNA Detectives where people shared advice about how to use DNA to track down biological family, an approach called genetic genealogy.

In Pearson’s previous genealogical work on her own family tree, she started with known close relatives and then built the branches back in time in search of unknown distant ancestors. Genetic genealogy was the opposite. She had to take Beth’s closest DNA match from her Ancestry.com test, go back in time to find a common ancestor, like a great-great grandparent, and then build the branches forward to discover immediate relatives.

Pearson picked up the skills quickly and in a few months she had identified a man she was almost certain was Beth’s father.

In May 2017, the two friends drove from Indiana to Kentucky to ask him if he knew Beth’s mother. He said he couldn’t remember her, but Beth asked him to take a DNA test anyway, just to be sure. The results confirmed Pearson’s hypothesis. The man, who had briefly been Beth’s mother’s neighbor in the 1970s, was Beth’s biological father.

For Pearson, this experience was so profound that she began offering her services to adoptees she met online. By the end of that summer, she had closed nine cases. To date, she has helped over 200 strangers reconnect with their birth families.

Pearson is part of a community known as the “search angels”, a volunteer group who give up their time to help others find their roots. By sharing their skills online, they are also revolutionizing the young science of genetic genealogy.

The very first search angels began helping people find their birth families decades ago, as a response to the secrecy and stigma that defined the adoption process in the mid-20th century.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/29/dna-search-angels-adoption-facebook-detectives-reunite-families