Getting Started with Your Search

Perhaps you've known all your life that you were adopted. Perhaps you recently discovered that you were adopted. Perhaps you just feel that you're out of place within your family dynamic and you remain unconvinced that your birth parents are truly your birth parents. Perhaps you'll take a DNA test and find out that you aren't who you always thought you were.

You may have asked many questions along the way. After all, we all want to know where we came from. Do I have brothers or half-brothers? Do I have sisters or half-sisters? Aunts? Uncles? What were they like? What were my grandparents like? What is my real ethnicity? Are there medical issues of which I should be aware? It is human nature to want understand where you come from and what your family situation is. And asking "Who am I, and where do I come from?" is perfectly natural and reasonable.

Most people seek birth families — despite all of these questions — to help fill a void. Many need a sense of closure to address the gaping hole in their hearts. They often seek relationships with new family members, while not throwing away the relationships that preceded them. Doing so doesn't change the past or unravel the threads that have nurtured them — nor, likely, do they want it to. Their intentions are almost always pure, and most don't want to disrupt a birth family that has since moved on.

The desire to learn more about birth families can affect anyone touched by adoption, from an adopted child seeking his genetic ancestors to the parent who had to give up her child and wants to reconnect. Perhaps a sibling wants to find a child given up under less-than-ideal circumstances, an individual knows he has a long-lost half-sibling, or a man suspects a one-night stand resulted in a baby. Or maybe you've discovered the man who raised you isn't your birth father, which is called a non-paternity event (NPE).

Regardless of who or why, someone might be curious and wants to know what became of the human being who was brought into the world and put into another family's arms. Or, from the adoptee's perspective, wants to know who his parents and other family members are. Some just want an answer to the question, "Why?"

To find these important answers, many adoptees and families involved in adoption have come to rely upon various tools and tactics, and technology has evolved into a multitude of resources. In less than a decade, DNA tests have become relatively affordable for the general public. These new tests have amazing, highly accurate features to help you find birth relatives, including databases of matches, ethnicity information, and (on some tests) statistics about how your genetics compare with those who share DNA with you. Better yet, these tests are widely available and boast databases of millions of people, many of whom are also looking for clues about their own families.

At time of publication, four major players (AncestryDNA , 23andMe , Family Tree DNA , and MyHeritage DNA ) have cornered this market, but more and more companies are following suit and offering similar services that enable test-takers to establish fairly accurate relationships. In fact, DNA science will likely, in time, advance so far that you're able to take and process a test from the comfort of your own home.

Before the advent of genealogy companies, researchers had to resort to finding information through an adoption agency or birth certificate, two imperfect sources that we'll discuss in more detail in chapter 2. Name changes or fabricated/inaccurate information can corrupt these resources, providing false information. With these traditional methods, one's success was a matter of searching — perhaps with the help of a licensed investigator, a phone book, and certified mail. However, a person could be unlisted in the phone book, or he moved and failed to update his contact information.

Modern technology such as social media has made these conventional methods somewhat more accessible, but even these have significant drawbacks. The person you're looking for may not have an online presence, or perhaps he rarely updates it and won't receive a message. And even if you do find relevant information, it may not provide the answers you need. The possibilities go on and on.

This is exactly why so many who have been involved in the adoption process have turned to publicly available resources such as DNA testing. No matter what you know about your birth family's history, DNA doesn't lie. If you can document a relationship through DNA (and you draw the correct conclusions from your results), you can usually trust it more than any paper trail you have.

However, the information at your fingertips can be overwhelming. Not every DNA test is the same, and each DNA website has its own pros and cons. How do I decipher my results, and how can I make sense of the data to establish a relationship? What happens if the connections aren't so strong? How accurate are these services? What should I expect? Is my data safe and secure in the hands of a third party?

Those questions, my friend, are why we are here. This book will walk you through how to sift through these questions to find your birth family using DNA. But first, let's discuss what you can realistically expect to discover in your research.

Why Should I Test my DNA?

By taking a DNA test, you are enrolling in a database of other test-takers who also want to know more about who they are and where they come from. DNA research is only as strong as the data comprising it, and who takes the test is an important factor in how useful your results will be.

The more people related to your research who test, the better your chances are for finding someone who you may be related to. If you suspect you are adopted or a family member is adopted, test. If you have a genuine curiosity about where you fit in the context of relationships with others, test. And — most of all — if you want to learn your genetic makeup and find family members, test.

Testing more people helps the genetic genealogy community at large as well. By building up a database of test-takers, we can help those who pursue genetic testing for other reasons. Some are interested in health information, for example, and test on sites that provide that context. They may even...