The Adoptee, The Next Door Neighbor, and The DNA Twist No One Saw Coming | Episode 125

When I handed an adoptee a paper with his biological siblings’ names, he burst out laughing. Turns out his long-lost brother was his neighbor!

After connecting with an AncestryDNA cousin match looking for his biological family, I spent hours piecing together census records and city directories to identify his biological parents. But nothing prepared either of us for the moment he read the name of his oldest brother.

In this episode of Stories That Live In Us, I share the incredible story of an AncestryDNA match that led right next door, how my sister’s college roommate fit into the puzzle, and the delicate balance of navigating unexpected genealogy discoveries when one side welcomes you with open arms and the other turns away. Push play to hear how DNA testing brings hidden family connections to light!

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♥  Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Transcript

A Twisty Adoption Discovery

Crista Cowan 0:00

I was sitting in a conference room with a man who had been adopted at birth. He had given me his DNA match list, and I had spent hours going through his DNA matches and census records and newspaper articles. And as we were sitting there, I handed him a piece of paper with the name of his older brother on it. And he nervously took the piece of paper, looked at it, paused, and then laughed out loud. Because it was a name he knew. And that isn't even the only twist in the story. Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family. Welcome to Stories That Live In Us.

How A Life In Genealogy Starts

Crista Cowan 0:58

Some of you have heard me tell the story about how I got started in family history. Here's a little recap for those who haven't heard it. My parents were going to school at Brigham Young University when I was born, and they were taking entirely different sets of courses. My dad was an accounting major, my mother was an English major, they had a newborn, and so they decided they wanted to take one class together every semester. Well, at BYU, you can actually get a degree in family history. So there were a lot of family history classes they could choose from. That's what they decided to do. One class every semester that they took together, bringing me with them in family history. As part of that, they would also drive up to Salt Lake City one Friday a month and do family history research in the library there. My dad would shove me under a microfilm reader in my baby carrier, and he would tell me stories about the things that he was finding. So it's no wonder that my parents take full credit for my career. I didn't get here right away, though. It was a journey. So I started with my first computer when I was 12 years old with the very first DOS-based family history program on it, doing the data entry of all the family history that my parents had collected over the years. Then, when I was 17 and went away to college, I worked in a library that had a family history section, and I got to help people with their genealogy. It became a passion of mine long before it became my profession. I've been here at Ancestry since 2004, which feels like a whole lifetime in and of itself. But

DNA Testing Changes The Family Tree

Crista Cowan 2:44

in 2012, there was a change in family history that kind of disrupted everything. That's the year that Ancestry launched our autosomal DNA testing. Now, when I first tested, people would ask me, why are you taking a DNA test? Because don't you already know your family history? And I would explain that I did know my family history, but that I wanted a layer of genetic evidence to put over all the other evidence that our family had spent decades collecting. And that's really what it was for me in those early days as new DNA matches rolled in. Well, if you've listened to the episode from season one about my new Aunt Carol, you know that there was a very big surprise we discovered through DNA in our family. It wasn't like some discover that they have another parent or another grandparent that they didn't know about. It was that we discovered somebody who belonged in our family that we didn't know was missing. And that kind of changed my perspective about how we deal with each other when we find DNA matches that are unexpected. So every Sunday night for the last 10 years, my dad and I get together over FaceTime, sometimes in person, and we spend four or five hours going through some of the new DNA matches that have come into our match lists over the course of the last week. And it sends us down rabbit trails and it sends us up branches of our tree we haven't spent time on in ages. And it's really fun to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together. But every once in a while we get a match who has a tree attached, and nothing in the tree makes sense to how they might fit into our family. Luckily, Ancestry has some tools that make it easier to figure out. One of those tools allows us to look at how much DNA those matches share with each other, and we can kind of figure out at least what branch of our family tree they fit on. Well, one

A Match Who Wants Biological Family

Crista Cowan 5:08

Sunday night, several years ago, my dad and I were going through a new set of matches on his mother's side of the family tree, and we found one of those matches that just didn't make sense based on the family tree they had attached. And then we clicked through to his profile page. His test was actually managed by his wife, and there was a small notation there that they were looking for biological family. Very quickly, my dad and I were able to figure out which branch of my grandmother's family tree this man was connected on, but we didn't have all of the pieces. So I sent a message to his wife. And I just said, It looks like you're related to us on this branch of our family tree. I would love to help you figure this out if you're interested in helping. I have spent a lot of my career here at Ancestry since 2012 figuring out DNA puzzles for other people. Maybe even more than I've spent time figuring out DNA puzzles for myself. I don't know if you remember the television show Long Lost Family, or if you've ever heard of the Paul Fronzak case, or any other number of big DNA mysteries that have come out in the news. I have worked on a lot of those projects. I cut my teeth on Paul Franzak's case. I was one of the lead researchers on Long Lost Family when it was on the air for those four years. And so I've learned how not just to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but also how to communicate information to people who might not be ready to hear it just yet. So when I send those messages out to people, I always try to be careful because I don't know what they know and what they don't know. There was some indication that they were looking for biological family, but I didn't know if they had an unknown father, or if they were adopted and they knew they were adopted, or if they had taken a DNA test and just found out yesterday that their dad wasn't their dad. So I always approached that carefully. I instantly received a message back that same night. And that doesn't always happen. But this man, responding on his wife's account where his test was managed, said that he would love my help and then proceeded to share information about when and where he was born, what we call non-ID for adoptees, which is the information they're usually given by the adoption agency. Stuff like your birth mom was this old when you were born, and your birth father was this old, or they are this ethnicity or that ethnicity, or here's some medical information about their families of origin. He had very little of that. He knew that his birth mother was not a teenage pregnancy. He knew that she had older children when he was placed for adoption, and he knew nothing about his biological father. So I went to work. He shared his DNA match list with me and asked me to let him know if he found if I found anything. So I started digging into his DNA matches. I was able to separate them, maternal side and paternal side. I realized I was related to him on his mother's side of the family. And because I had already identified which branch of my grandmother's family tree he was connected on, I put the pieces together on that side pretty quickly. I discovered that his biological mother had indeed been married and had several children, and then she had gotten divorced. And then she had gotten pregnant. And she placed him for adoption. And then a few years later, she had gotten married again and had more children. She had a set of older children, she had a set of younger children, and she raised all of them, but she had placed him for adoption. And I didn't understand the story or fully why, other than that she was a single mom back in the 1960s, trying to raise her children the best she could, and maybe she just couldn't raise him. Then

Finding Parents Then Planning The News

Crista Cowan 9:53

I dug into the father side of the family. And what I uncovered was that this man's biological father had been her boss. He was married, had a family of his own, and she had been working for him at the time that she had gotten pregnant. I put all those pieces together through newspaper articles and city directories, the timeline timeline out, and now I had to decide how to share this information. Both biological parents were deceased. So there was nobody in that generation still living to give him any additional information or answers. But his oldest siblings on his mom's side were old enough to have remembered that their mom had been pregnant. And so I thought maybe if I could put him in touch with them, they might have some information for him. This is the point in this process where I usually start to get really nervous. Because again, I never know what people know and what they don't know. Sure, these older siblings were old enough to have remembered that their mom was pregnant, but I didn't know what they had been told. Did they know mom had placed this child for adoption, or had they been told that the baby had died? Did they even really remember that she had been pregnant, or had they blocked that out? Had they been raised in good circumstances or traumatic circumstances? Did they have good feelings about their mom or not? We don't ever know what we're walking into. And when I I've got somebody on the other side of this that already is a little bit nervous, maybe a little bit desperate, maybe longing for information, and sometimes longing for a relationship. I have to think about how to present the information in a way that I'm not causing any additional harm in that circumstance. So I think about it sometimes for days, even after I've figured out the answer. Sometimes I go diving into newspapers and yearbooks and Facebook, trying to figure out all of the pieces of the puzzle, trying to see if there's any additional information I can gather that will help me feel a little more confident and help me present the information in a way that helps them feel a little bit more comfortable about what they're walking into. So I went diving into the Facebook pages of these older maternal siblings. And as I was looking at the Facebook page of the oldest brother, I realized that his name seemed vaguely familiar. He lives in the next town over from me, but that couldn't be it. Then I started looking at his family members. I wanted to piece together like, was he married? Did he have children and grandchildren? And yes, he did. And as I was looking through the list of his children in Facebook, I realized that one of his daughters was Facebook friends with my sister. So I immediately ran upstairs. My sister and I live together. I live in a mother-in-law apartment in the basement. And I ran upstairs to my sister and I said, Who is this person? And she said, You know her. She was my college roommate. And I said, Do you know her parents? And she said, Yeah. Remember that year I spent Thanksgiving at their house? And we've we've been friends for, you know, almost 30 years at this point, right? What is happening? She said, Why? And I proceeded to tell her that her old college roommate was the daughter of a man who was the oldest brother of this man that I was trying to help find his biological family. And then I had to tell my sister she couldn't tell anybody until I let this man know and let him have first contact. Because when you're helping somebody find biological family, you, as the researcher or the family member in this case, because these were our distant cousins, you probably shouldn't be the one to break that news. You probably shouldn't be the one to reach out to the family. Because if the family decides to reject this information or this relationship, you don't want to have taken away the only chance that that adoptee has to have had a conversation with a family member. And that's always a delicate dance. Sometimes they want you to make contact, and then you have to figure out how to navigate that. But in this case, I hadn't had a conversation. And so I didn't want my sister to spill the beans. So put her under a gag order and asked her not to say anything. Then I dug a little bit more into the biological father's family. Now remember, he had been married at the time that the child was conceived. He had children. And again, we don't know the circumstances. Maybe he and his wife were separated at the time. Maybe they had gotten divorced and remarried, and I just hadn't found that record yet. I had no idea what the circumstances were, again, nor what we would be walking into. But I found all of the children, all of his children were older than the man who I was helping. And so they wouldn't necessarily have known, though, that their father had gotten someone pregnant. The father might not even have known that he had gotten someone pregnant. And that's the thing I always have to remind myself is that women know when they've given birth to a child, but men don't always know when they've fathered a child. And so we have no idea what this group of people knows or doesn't know. But I again went on Facebook, looked up information, dug into white pages online, got some contact information for some of them. So the day came.

Sharing The Names In Person

Crista Cowan 16:45

He lives locally, so I asked him if he would come and meet me so I could tell him this information in person. I don't get to do that very often. Usually people that I'm helping are across the country or around the world, and I'm doing it over email or Facebook. As a matter of fact, I just shared on Facebook with a woman this last weekend that I had found her biological father. And the like she, like the effusiveness that was coming back at me through Facebook Messenger was lovely. But she also had questions. And then she emailed me or messaged me back a few days later and had more questions. And it was kind of this like awkward back and forth uh experience. But because this man was local, I knew I could sit down with him in person and deliver the news in a gentler way, in a more controlled way. I could pay attention to his body language and his vocal inflections in such a way that I could deliver the news and adjust my delivery based on how he was receiving it. I didn't want to overwhelm him, but I also wanted to make sure that he understood what I was sharing with him. So he agreed to meet me, and we sat down in a conference room. And I had written down on a piece of paper the 11 names of his siblings, the paternal siblings and the maternal siblings. And for the ones that I had contact information for or Facebook pages for, I had put that information on this piece of paper. And so we sat down and he was so nervous and sweet, but he was so eager to get this information. I told him, I have identified both of your biological parents. You and I are related, I think we're fourth cousins one time removed, through your mom's side of the family. And your mother and her mother are cousins on my grandmother's side of the family. And I would love, whenever you are interested, to tell you more about our ancestors on that side of our family tree. And then I proceeded to tell him that his mother had um been married and had children, and that she had been divorced, and that while she was divorced, she had been working for a man downtown in an office, and he had been her boss, and she had gotten pregnant by him. And that she had then placed him for adoption. A few years later, she had gotten remarried and had more children, and that she had raised those children. I told him that she had passed away several years early. And that's always a tricky part of the story, too, because when you're sharing that information, you're telling them, oh, I know who your mother is, and oh, she's passed away. So there's this joy and this grieving that gets mixed up in that moment that sometimes has to be navigated as well. He took it beautifully. He had kind of expected, knowing his age, and that it's possible that she had had passed by that point. It's always mostly heartbreaking when it had just happened, when the parrot had just passed, or they had just missed meeting them or knowing them. In this case, both biological parents had passed years before, years before DNA testing, even. And so he took it really well. And then I told him about his biological father and uh about his siblings on that side of the family, about the fact that he had been married and had stayed married to that woman until the day he died, and that I didn't know what they knew or didn't know. And so cautioned him that if he was going to contact the siblings on that side of the family, he might want to be a little bit more um circumspect or a little bit more cautious. And then I told him that when he contacted the siblings on his mother's side of the family, that his oldest siblings might remember that she had been pregnant. For all we knew, they might have been looking for him for years, but they also might not remember. And that the younger siblings might not know at all that he even existed. And he took that information in stride. You could tell he was still a little bit nervous. And then I slid that piece of paper across the table to him with those names on it.

The Brother Next Door Reveal

Crista Cowan 21:27

And he picked up the piece of paper, a little nervous, and he looked at it, and there was a long pause, and I could see his eyes moving down the paper, and then he laughed out loud. And I was very curious about that reaction because it's not a reaction I've ever had before from somebody in that situation. And I said, What? And he said, I know this man. And he pointed to the name of his. Oldest maternal sibling. The brother that my sister knew. And he said, He's my neighbor. What? He's been my neighbor for nine years, he said. We're friends. I know him. And it was such a tender moment for me. Gosh, I still get teary about it. It was such a tender moment for me to watch his just absolute delight in the fact that he knew this man and I could tell that he loved this man. That they were not just neighbors, that they went to church together, that their um children had interacted with each other. His oldest children were the same age as his brother's youngest children. They had had um, they had had meals together. They had, I mean, like these men knew each other. And he said, This is this is gonna be a crazy conversation. He hugged me, he thanked me, and uh he left. And usually for me, in these situations, that's the end of the story. Because they go off and make these connections and have these relationships, and I'm just the person who did the research. And I'm usually okay with that. But in this situation, I was dying to know what happened.

Reunion Joy And A Painful Rejection

Crista Cowan 23:38

And so I let it ride. I let it ride for like a whole week before I reached out again through ancestry messaging. And I just said, just checking in, want to see how things went. If you've had any conversations lately. And again, an instant response. And he told me that he had talked to his oldest brother, that it was the most joyful reunion, that the oldest brother had, in fact, looked for him at one point, that he had failed and thought there was no way he was ever gonna find him, that he was so happy that he was the brother that he had been looking for. They had gathered the other siblings. Um, all of the siblings knew that he existed out there somewhere, and they were thrilled to get to know him and to have opportunities to uh develop a relationship with him. And then he told me that he had reached out to the father's family as well, to some of the siblings on that side, and that they had completely rejected him, that they did not believe him, that they did not believe that about their father, and that they wanted nothing to do with him. And that broke my heart as much as I understand it, it still breaks my heart every time I see that happen. People are gonna people. And as much as we sometimes put our parents or grandparents on a pedestal, they were and are human. And humans make mistakes. And so the fact that that they just couldn't wrap their brain around the idea that their father had had an affair or stepped out, or like we don't know. We don't know the circumstances, and we never will. Like, that's the thing when we find this information out later. We don't know if it was a consensual situation or a non-consensual situation. We don't know. We don't know any of the details. But the siblings on his father's side of the family were not even willing to wade into the messiness of that. And you know what? That's their right. And that's so hard. I firmly believe that everyone has a right to know who their ancestors are, to know who they come from, and to gather as much of the story as they can with the information they have available to them. But the reality is that nobody has a right to a relationship. And so I am thrilled for my fourth cousin one time removed. I am thrilled that he has reconnected with his mother's side of the family who knew he was out there and were looking for him and were thrilled to find him and establish that relationship. And I am still heartbroken for him that his father's side of the family wanted nothing to do with him. At least that was the case several years ago after he and I met. Now, I haven't followed up with him since then, so I don't know. Maybe hearts have changed, or somebody got curious, or some random nephew or niece took a DNA test and then turned around and asked their parents, hey, who's this guy on our match list? I don't know him. And maybe that opened up a doorway for communication. It happens more often than you might think. But I haven't wanted to press or ask or be nosy because really it's none of my business. I'm just thrilled when I can help people put pieces of the puzzle together. And so every Sunday night I sit down with my dad and we look at our DNA matches, and sometimes we discover somebody who was adopted out of the family. And I always reach out and I always carefully ask what they know and what they don't know and offer my help. And sometimes people take me up on it. Before you go, it is time again for one word, one story. Ooh,

One Word One Story Board Games

Crista Cowan 28:06

today's word is board game. So my family, when I was growing up, huge card game players. That was my grandparents' thing. They loved playing cards. We learned how to play hands and feet and canasta and I mean just all sorts of card games. My grandparents loved it. But as we got older, we we loved the board games, Monopoly and um Parchee, and I'm trying to think sorry and clue, right? Those standard board games. But as we've gotten older, I still get together with my siblings about one or two Sundays a month. And after dinner, we bring out the board games. And it is a very serious thing in our family. And we found a game that we love, and it is a game called Dominion. And Dominion is like a it's like a deck building game. Like you have, you have pieces and cards, and like it's just it's it's one of those complicated games that takes somebody like three times explaining it and five times playing it before you figure it out. And we fell in love with it, and then I realized that there were nine expansions to this game. And so for Christmas one year, I rather than I don't know what I was thinking, rather than buying one expansion for Christmas, and then one expansion for his birthday, and then the next expansion for the next Christmas. Nope, I bought all nine for my brother for Christmas one year. And they came in a giant box and they showed up on his doorstep and and we opened that box and we proceeded to play that game, I think that Christmas, for three days straight. And it is my new obsession. Um, it is my favorite board game, and when I can talk my siblings into playing it with me, they force me to pick which three expansions we're going to use at a time. Because if you try to use them all, it just gets way too complicated. But that is my board game story. I love a good board game, and it is one of my favorite ways to spend time with my siblings. So if you are watching here on YouTube, leave in the comments what your board game story is. If you're listening on a podcast app, share your board game story on Instagram or on Facebook. Be sure to tag me. I'd love to see your story. But more importantly than that, share it with your family. So, board games are how I love to spend time with my family, especially my siblings. My dad would still choose doing family history over a board game, though, any Sunday night. So I always have to jet out early from board games with my siblings to get home for my Sunday nights with my dad. And I love that time with him because you never know what you're gonna discover in those DNA matches.