Wondering how to start the process of using DNA research and genealogy to find your biological family, or help an adoptee do the same? Here are a few tips. Get tested at both Ancestry and 23andMe. Both have big databases but you can’t compare your results to the people in their database unless you test with them directly. If you can only test with one, start with Ancestry because their database is larger and users there are more likely to…
Tag: unknown parent
When doing DNA research consider adoption’s troubled history
Like most genealogists who have taken a DNA test or three, I’ve come across several adoptees in my DNA match list. I was intensely curious about where these people fit in my family tree, but I had never given much thought to the process behind these adoptions, or known that babies could be taken from unwilling mothers who desperately wanted to keep them. Reading journalist Gabrielle Glaser’s compelling new book, American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History…