Several media stories in the last few months have highlighted the potential of 23andMe to help adoptees.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-6586 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg" alt="An image of 23andMe's logo." width="300" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/23andMe_Logo_blog.jpg 350w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
One of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/nyregion/a-son-given-up-for-adoption-is-found-after-half-a-century-and-then-lost-again.html">more touching pieces</a> highlighted a woman’s 50-year search for the son she’d given up for adoption at 19. She was able to find him using 23andMe, only to lose him again to cancer. Another interesting <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-21/korean-adoptees-are-using-dna-kits-get-glimpse-their-ancestry">story on PRI</a> looked at Korean born adoptees using DNA to learn more about their ancestry.
Inventor and scientist Thomas Park Clement, who was among the first wave of Korean adoptees to come to the United States in the 1950s, set aside a million dollars of his own money to cover the cost of other Korean adoptees who want to get tested.
&#8220;Everyone on the planet has the right to know who their relatives are,&#8221; Clement is quoted as saying.
Those stories and others highlight that while it’s not designed with adoptees in mind, 23andMe has become a resource for many wanting to fill in the gaps in what they know about their ancestry, their inherited traits or family history. 
For many of us we take for granted knowing this basic information about ourselves, but for many adoptees using a DNA test is the only way they could find out this kind of information.
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 650px; background-color: #eee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;"><a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/more-than-just-luck">More Than Just Luck</a> 
With the help of a genetic genealogist and her 23andMe results, a woman abandoned behind a grocery store as an infant is able to identify her biological mother.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-22519 size-thumbnail" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-150x150.jpg" alt="A photo of brothers who found each other using 23andMe with a quote that says &quot;Stories of this kind, they are hard to believe…”" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul-quote1.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> 
Not an adoption story, but this story tracks some of the same kind of ordeals adoptees have to go through to find out about their biological families. In this case, half brothers– one who lives in Brazil, the other in the United States – connected through 23andMe. Their story, which spans over several decades and includes some harrowing childhood trauma, ends with the two brothers meeting for the first time.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/goodnight-son/">Goodnight Son</a> 
Not every reunion between an adoptee and his or her biological parent or sibling is a happy one, but for Mike Reed the meeting with his biological father couldn&#8217;t have gone better. His biological father welcomed into the family and introduced him to his nine half siblings.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-21929 size-thumbnail" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-150x150.jpg" alt="A photo of Liz with the quote: “To site and talk with someone who is your sibling, or your biological parent … who you have never met… incredible.” " width="150" height="150" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-300x300.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-768x768.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-880x880.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-271x271.jpg 271w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-372x372.jpg 372w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-574x574.jpg 574w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote-980x980.jpg 980w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Liz-Quote.jpg 1000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> 
Abandoned in a laundry mat as an infant, Liz Kellner used 23andMe and ultimately found her sisters and biological parents.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/an-unexpected-discovery">An Unexpected Discovery</a> 
Cody tested to find out more about his health, but in the process he found his biological parents and half siblings. He also learned that he&#8217;d been conceived when his mother was a young teen and that&#8217;s why he&#8217;d been put up for adoption.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/its-a-girl">It’s A Girl</a> 
Although not an adoptee story, Kelli&#8217;s story highlights some of the anxiety many go through when trying to connect with a biological parent. They simply don&#8217;t know how it will play out. For Kelli the experience was a good one. She used 23andMe to help her find her biological father. Once she made the connection her biological father, who hadn’t known of her birth, welcomed her into the family.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-21348 size-thumbnail" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-small-quote-150x150.jpg" alt="A photo of an adult son who found his biological father using 23andMe and how the two later became friends: “I am awed by how this happened.” " width="150" height="150" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-small-quote-150x150.jpg 150w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jeremy-small-quote.jpg 200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> 
An adult son connects with his biological father and they become friends.
<a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/a-siblings-story-from-23andme">A Siblings Story</a> 
Using 23andMe Tricia found her half brother and half sister. They were able to tell her more about her biological father and the three of them met and became friends.
</div>

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

Searching With 23andMe

The amazing <a href="http://www.yourgeneticgenealogist.com/p/about-me.html">CeCe Moore</a>, a genetic genealogist and 23andMe Ancestry Ambassador, has done it again, solving a family<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-12939" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/CeCephoto.jpg" alt="CeCephoto" width="114" height="162" /> mystery and helping a woman connect with her biological mother for the first time.
“DNA,” Moore told the Orange County Register, “was the only way to solve this.”
<a href="https://www.ocregister.com/articles/tovo-670236-kayla-baby.html">The story</a>, which appeared in the Orange County Register, generated a lot of questions and some strong reactions. CeCe and her team had helped Kayla Tovo, a 27 year-old mother and US Army veteran, solve the mystery of her birth.
Kayla was just a few hours old when a janitor found her wrapped in a towel in a milk crate left in the back of an Alpha Beta grocery store.
Her story could have ended in tragedy if not for being adopted by a wonderful loving mother and growing up in a supportive home. But after having children of her own, and a brush with death in Afghanistan, Kayla decided to try in earnest to find the woman who abandoned her. She wanted to know why. A friend connected her to CeCe. Kayla then tested with 23andMe and found a first cousin once removed, providing her the pivotal lead to connect her to her biological family.


“I received questions from all over social media on this story,” CeCe told us. “(Kayla) was lucky, and some have complained they don&#8217;t have matches that close.”


But as the database grows, so too does the possibility for new and closer matches, she said.


“New matches are coming in all the time and the newer ones are more likely to respond and share family tree information than the older matches,” CeCe said.
Check out Kayla’s <a href="https://www.ocregister.com/articles/tovo-670236-kayla-baby.html">story</a>.

More Than Just Luck

While 23andMe can inform you about your ancestry, that information doesn’t define you, as has been so eloquently written about by Jesmyn Ward <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/innovation-cracking-the-dna-code" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">in the New Yorker</a>, and by Simone Kitchens in <a href="http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2015/02/what-are-you-how-to-answer-identity-questions" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">her story</a> that first <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-22626 size-large" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/0315-GL-AABY06-01-copy-e1435353553605-452x768.jpg" alt="At Home in the WorldIn my apartment, with a favorite photo of me and my mom.Rachel Comey dress. See GLAMOUR Shopper for more information." width="452" height="768" />appeared in Glamour. Both Jesmyn and Simone write about being multiracial and the difficulty of navigating not just how their mixed race influences how others perceive them, but how they perceive themselves. In his new book <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/219260/loving-day-by-mat-johnson/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Loving Day</a>, the writer <a href="http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/interviews/a35341/mat-johnson-interview-mixed-race-in-america/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mat Johnson</a> covers some of the same territory. How people think about race, and the commonly accepted notions about what it means, are changing. Probably at the forefront of that transformation are people like these three writers who are of mixed ancestry. More and more people are walking this path. In the United States nearly 7 percent of adult Americans have a multiracial background, according to a <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">new report</a> by the Pew Research Center. Many other people simply do not know of their own mixed ancestry. Reconciling what it means to be mixed is complicated, and that process is elegantly captured in Simone’s piece, which we’re republishing here. Take a look. 



By Simone Kitchens
This is what I look like to you:
I&#8217;m brown.
Various shades of brown. Dark brown curly hair, darker brown eyes, skin a tan sort of brown. You might think I&#8217;m black or part black, but most people have trouble pinpointing my race. I do too.
I&#8217;ve gotten the &#8220;What are you?&#8221; question about once a week for the past 20 years, ever since I heard it for the first time in the girls&#8217; bathroom in sixth grade. I was looking in the mirror when a girl at the sink yelled over, &#8220;Are you mixed?&#8221; She was black. She came closer to get a better look. &#8220;What are you?&#8221; she asked. A group of girls, her friends, studied me as well.
&#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; I said.
The girl went back to drying off her hands and said, &#8220;You&#8217;re half-black.&#8221; She was matter-of-fact, as if she were filling me in on something I wasn&#8217;t aware of. From that moment on, I&#8217;ve known myself as a half-black person.
But &#8220;half-black&#8221; has never felt like the whole story.
I grew up with my mom, who was adopted and didn&#8217;t know her background. I look like her; she&#8217;s brownish too. I always had my mom for reference, and while I didn&#8217;t know my dad, I didn&#8217;t think a lot about why I look the way I do. Still, as a brown girl in Oklahoma, there were times when I noticed I was the only nonwhite person at a roller-skating rink or food court.
Some mixed people feel they&#8217;ve lived a black experience in America. President Obama, who is mixed-race, once said:
&#8220;I self-identify as African American–that&#8217;s how I&#8217;m treated and that&#8217;s how I&#8217;m viewed. I&#8217;m proud of it.&#8221;

In many ways, I identify. At times I&#8217;ve also gotten the feeling that people are assuming something about me, trying to place me. I get it–skin tone isn&#8217;t an easy thing to sort out. (And if anyone should understand skin tone, it&#8217;s me: I&#8217;m a beauty editor. I&#8217;ve worked on stories about how hard it is for women of color to find their true foundation shade, a frustration I&#8217;ve experienced firsthand.)
When it comes to people&#8217;s curiosity, this awareness of my skin tone, I&#8217;ve heard it all. The conversation usually goes like this:


&#8220;Where are you from?&#8221;


&#8220;Oklahoma.&#8221;
&#8220;No, but where are your parents from?&#8221; People seem unsatisfied when I say my parents are also from Oklahoma; perhaps they&#8217;re expecting something more &#8220;exotic.&#8221;
By the time I was in my twenties, my response to the question took on a &#8220;Sorry, can&#8217;t help you&#8221; tone. A friend joked that when a group of people looked at me for a little too long, they were playing Guess Her Race. What I never admitted was that I was playing the same game. My biggest insecurity was that I didn&#8217;t have the answer.

<h6>
Checking the Box–or Not</h6>

When I applied for college in 2002, I had to state my race. On the application there were six options, and I was instructed to choose one: Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, or Other. I identified with a few of these, but not fully enough that I felt I could legitimately tick only one, so I checked &#8220;Other,&#8221; then wrote &#8220;See essay&#8221; next to it. I wrote honestly about how it felt not to know, and then to have to choose an option as faceless as &#8220;Other.&#8221; For better or for worse, my identity could not be contained in a box.
I finally met my dad and his side of the family a few years later. In them I found a loving group of people–siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins–who embraced me. I also found out more about my ancestry. It turns out his side of the family is part German and part Native American, though if you saw my dad walking down the street, you&#8217;d probably think, White guy. I was so happy to connect and learn more about myself and my family, but I still couldn&#8217;t relate it to the tone of my skin.
Then I moved to New York City, a place where everyone on the subway looks like they&#8217;re from somewhere else. I still got the question, but now people took the liberty of telling me what they thought I was: &#8220;You look Egyptian&#8230; Brazilian&#8230; Dominican&#8230;.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m not sure,&#8221; I&#8217;d say with a smile. This was the way I lived my life–I&#8217;d become seemingly comfortable with the unknown.
And then the impossible happened. A year ago, after a lifetime of near misses, my mother met her birth mother. Here, I thought, was the missing link to what I was, and maybe, finally, an answer. My maternal grandmother, I discovered, is Irish and part Native American. But, frustratingly, there were few clues about my mom&#8217;s birth father, my grandfather–a man who doesn&#8217;t look that brown in the one black-and-white photo I&#8217;ve seen. I still didn&#8217;t feel any closer to understanding why I&#8217;m this color.

<h5>
Time to Turn to Science</h5>

Then, last spring, I learned that Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ph.D., would be speaking in New York, and I knew I had to hear him. With his PBS show, Finding Your Roots, this pioneer in ancestry research has helped many celebrities trace their backgrounds. He&#8217;s also a proponent of genetic testing kits like 23andMe, now easily available online.
At the end of the lecture, I introduced myself to Gates and mentioned that I was from Oklahoma. His response:
&#8220;I was going to say you look Native American.&#8221;
My heart sank.
Here I was in this room, with a lot of other black people, and didn&#8217;t look black to Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of our nation&#8217;s foremost experts on race. I ordered a 23andMe kit the next day. I had to know.
The kit costs $99 and is simple to use. You spit (a good amount) into a plastic vial, close it up, and send it off. It takes about three weeks to get your ancestry reports. The wait felt like an eternity.
When the email arrived, I was with two of my best friends, Rightor and Elizabeth. I held up my phone, pointing to the message that would reveal my race, my identity, my everything.
They went silent.


When I&#8217;d dispatched my kit, it had never occurred to me that I might not be ready to receive this information. Now I realized: I didn&#8217;t want to open the email–not yet. Suddenly, certainty didn&#8217;t seem so exciting.
Rightor whispered, &#8220;I do still hope you&#8217;re part black. You&#8217;re our half-black friend.&#8221;
We all laughed. I&#8217;d gotten used to being the brown friend among white friends. Now this message had the power to change my idea of myself.
I had taken the test last June, in a time we could call pre-Ferguson, pre-Eric Garner, two tragedies that drastically shifted the conversation around race in our country. Now, as the email waited in my inbox, I watched what felt like injustice on repeat. I kept asking myself, Where do I fit in?
When I went to the Millions March NYC protest in December, I stood shoulder to shoulder with blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics. Still, I wondered: What am I, here in this crowd? One of the oppressed? An empathizer? An outsider?
I realized that while I&#8217;d been searching for the answer to what I was, I&#8217;d also been looking for affirmation of the black part of me. I wanted to belong to that group because I did identify myself in that way. But what if technically, genetically, I didn&#8217;t belong? I was scared to find out.
The test results sat in my inbox for months. Then, one day, it hit me: I could know or not know. Live my life being safe, like I&#8217;ve always done, or take this leap. I was searching for answers, but did I actually want to hear them? I hadn&#8217;t been ready before; now all of a sudden, for some reason, I was.
My hands shaking, I opened the message. A map of the world popped up, indicating I had roots all over. Almost every continent was highlighted in a bright color.
The cold, hard science, the letter told me, was this: I was 67.8 percent European and just 2.9 percent West African; about a third of my DNA was labeled &#8220;unassigned.&#8221;
I had a moment of feeling, What the f&#8211;k? I&#8217;d waited 30 years only to find out that a good chunk of me was still a mystery, even to a genetic-testing company?
I read further. As it happens, DNA that traces from multiple continents is labeled &#8220;unassigned.&#8221; I also learned that Native American DNA is hard to test for, since there are few reference populations available to provide samples. (The Native American sample pool used for my analysis is smaller than the European samples.) With a good portion of my genetic makeup still unknown (mostly the not-white portion, it seemed), I went to bed feeling hollow.
When I started this process, my initial excitement had been clouded by a thought: More actual facts about my history might close off the possibility that I could be black, Brazilian, Dominican, fill in the blank.
All my life there&#8217;s been a chance that I could be a lot of things, and I&#8217;ve embraced that. Feeling unattached to groups and hard to categorize had become the most defining part of me. Not having a fixed identity had become my identity.
The day after I opened the email, I went through my morning, still feeling disappointed. As I crossed the street, a black man passed me on the left. At the same time a white woman came toward me on my right. For the first time in my life, it flipped for me: Before, I wasn&#8217;t sure which one would have thought I was part of their culture, what they would have called me. But in that moment, I saw parts of myself in both of them–I could identify with each one and, for that matter, whomever I wanted.


I flashed back to the Millions March, to all the faces on the New York City subway, to that sixth-grade girl looking in the bathroom mirror. What I had been seeing were just skin tones. I&#8217;d spent so much time trying to understand my own color, but as it turned out, there was something empowering about the fact that I didn&#8217;t have to take ownership of any particular race. I realized: I could be what I was by being who I was. My search led me to my father&#8217;s family, whom I adore, and to my mother&#8217;s family, whom I&#8217;m getting to know–and, most important, to myself. The daughter I am, the sister I am, the friend I am.
This is who I am. No email could ever change that.
The next time someone asks what I am, my response will be ready:
&#8220;I&#8217;m Simone. What are you?&#8221;


Simone Kitchens, Glamour&#8217;s deputy beauty editor, lives in Brooklyn.

Simone Kitchens

I’m Simone

Around this time every year, we turn our attention toward the patriarchs of our respective families and collectively ask: “What should we get dad for father’s day?”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-13497" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/FathersDayImage-300x141.jpg" alt="FathersDayImage" width="300" height="141" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/FathersDayImage-300x141.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/FathersDayImage-768x362.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/FathersDayImage.jpg 793w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /> 
Today, we want to step back and ask just the opposite:
“Genetically, what do we get from dad?”
Our customer care team has received countless phone calls from women wondering if they inherited any DNA from their fathers. The questions pop up because women don’t inherit a Y-chromosome from their fathers, and thus do not receive a paternal haplogroup assignment.
But if you were planning to call about this, we have good news for you — you actually inherit half of your DNA from your father.
The DNA 23andMe uses for most of our features, including Ancestry Composition and DNA Relatives, is inherited from both of your parents as a mixture and reflects both of your parent’s ancestry. 23andMe looks not just at the sex chromosomes – the X and the Y – but the other 22 pairs of chromosomes, called the autosomes. You can read more about how DNA is transmitted through the generations in our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubq4eu_TDFc&amp;list=PLF9969C74FAAD2BF9">Genetics 101 series</a>.
That being said, the Y-chromosome is only inherited by males. That allows 23andMe to make a paternal haplogroup assignment for male customers. Paternal haplogroups are families of Y chromosome types that all trace back to a single mutation at a specific place and time, and can help customers wanting to learn more about their ancestral origins. Some of us like to think that the Y-chromosome is responsible for a father’s ability to look like he appreciates ugly ties, but scientists don’t see it that way.
Geneticists, historians, and genealogists have actually discovered remarkable information using Y-chromosome DNA. So, for example, my paternal haplogroup is R1a1a. This branched off about 12,000 years ago and among people, with Western European ancestry, it occurs in about one-third of Norwegian men and a quarter of men from the far northern British Isles. Knowing that does give me a better understanding of my own ancestry.
Let me explain why this is.
First, you need to understand how the Y-chromosome is passed down. As we mentioned above, almost all of your DNA is inherited as a mixture, however, the Y-chromosome is handed down directly from a father to his son. For this reason, there is no mixing, or as geneticists say — there is no recombination — when it comes to the Y-chromosome. This is important to note when learning about your ancestry through your Y-chromosome because it only reflects one branch of your ancestry – your father’s, father’s, father’s, father… you get the idea.
You can technically trace your Y chromosome all the way back to the earliest known human civilizations.
If we’ve emailed in the past this might sound familiar, but we should confess something to the rest of you before we go any further, Y-chromosome DNA does not provide a comprehensive view of your ancestry. Features that use DNA that you inherit from both of your parents can identify relationships or ancestry from any branch of your family tree.
Okay, back to Y-chromosomes. Soon after geneticists discovered how a Y-chromosome was inherited, word got around to the historians. Historians took note that at certain points in ancient history Y chromosomes changed at specific places. Soon, they started naming and ordering these changes using this information to <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-15199 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/MaternalPaternalLines-300x283.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="283" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/MaternalPaternalLines-300x283.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/MaternalPaternalLines.jpg 400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
At this point, you are probably thinking that you haven’t heard a lecture this longwinded since your dad sat you down as a kid. But, before we wrap this up we want to explain why you should be interested in your father’s Y haplogroup. These days there are several hundred known paternal haplogroups if you are genotyped by the service we assign to you a <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/articles/historys-mysteries-finding-answers-in-our-dna/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">paternal haplogroup</a>. You can treat this knowledge as a sort of genetic family crest passed down from an ancient time from each father to his sons. Women can infer their paternal haplogroup by having a male relative on your father’s paternal line. So that could be your father, brother, or paternal uncle or paternal male cousin.
You can read more on our blog about how paternal haplogroups can provide insight into more recent history. If you want more information about paternal haplogroups in general, visit our help center. And because we have undoubtedly forgotten to send a card: happy father’s day dad, thanks for our Y chromosomes.

A Father’s Day Ode to the Y-Chromosome

High school teacher Thomas Holterman wanted to show his students that some of the human story and our own family history are written in our DNA if we choose to explore it.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/AC-300x294.jpg" alt="AC" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22530" width="300" height="294" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/AC-300x294.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/AC.jpg 757w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
Holterman is one of four teachers who won an award for lesson plans they developed as part of the <a href="http://iskme.org/media/press-releases/winning-teachers-announced-dna-learning-challenge-prize" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Genetics Learning Challenge</a>, sponsored by ISKME and 23andMe. Holterman was assisted by 23andMe&#8217;s academic program, which helps teachers incorporate genetic education into classroom instruction.
Holterman, a history teacher in Oak Creek Wisconsin, wanted his high school sophomores to use DNA testing to learn more about not just their own families’ histories but also human history.


Using 23andMe testing his students were able to learn more about their ancestry and use it to help create a “family history book” to trace where in the world their ancestors came from.
&#8220;We&#8217;ve done ancestry projects in the past, but I wanted students to dig deeper into their heritage,&#8221; history teacher Holterman told the <a href="http://www.oakcreeknow.com/news/a-spitting-image-of-themselves-b99474078z1-298987461.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Oak Creek Now</a>. &#8220;This is a journey of self discovery for them. We&#8217;ve lost so much of our personal history and now they&#8217;ll have information about their ancestors that they&#8217;ll be able to pass down the line.&#8221;
Some of the students plan to share their DNA stories at the <a href="http://www.discoveryworld.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Discovery World</a> in Milwaukee, WI.Check out what some of his students learned from testing.
<iframe loading="lazy" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a_t3C9JWj9k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Don’t Know Much About History?

For decades, Jonathan Hay, a well-known hip-hop producer and Santa Monica-based PR maven, felt paralyzed by the mystery of his birth.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22539" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/jonathan-hay1-300x266.jpg" alt="jonathan-hay1" width="300" height="266" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/jonathan-hay1-300x266.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/jonathan-hay1.jpg 610w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
That all changed late last year after connecting for the first time with his biological parents, in part because of testing with 23andMe.
His story was recently featured in The Ledger in Central Florida, where his biological father, Ron Bradley, and half-brother, Ryan Bradley, live. His biological mother, Pamela Nicely, lives in Ohio.
Although he spoke on the phone with Pamela and Ron, Jonathan had difficulty meeting them in person.&#8221;They wanted to see me on Thanksgiving, and then they wanted to see me on Christmas, and I found myself making excuses,&#8221; Jonathan told The Ledger. 
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-22541" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Haymaker.jpg" alt="Haymaker" width="250" height="138" />
He and his parents will meet in person for the first time sometime later this year, but it will be on camera as part of a reality series Hay is putting together called <a href="http://www.prweb.com/releases/thehaymaker/jonathanhay/prweb12604331.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“The Haymaker.”</a>
Stay tuned for more about his reality show.

How I Met My Father

It was a cordial conversation, but as the phone call came to an end Mike Reed wasn’t sure how to sign off and then the man on the other end of the line did it for him.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22524" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-300x236.jpg" alt="IMG_8768" width="300" height="236" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-300x236.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-768x603.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-1024x805.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-880x691.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768.jpg 1050w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“’Goodnight son,’” the man said.
“I was just floored,” said Mike.
The man on the other end of the phone was Dennis Fay, Mike’s biological father. The two connected for the first time using 23andMe. Initially Mike, a 60-year-old adoptee, had used 23andMe not to find his biological family, but just to learn a little bit more about his ancestry. He said he&#8217;d been frustrated when his kids would ask him about their ancestry.
&#8220;I&#8217;d just tell them we were &#8220;American,&#8221; he said joking.
But he was curious to learn more, so he tested. And learned more than he could have imagined. Not only did he find out his ancestry is mostly from the UK and Ireland, but testing connected him to a woman who turned out to be his half-sister. She in turn connected him to Dennis, who they ultimately figured out was Mike&#8217;s biological father.
The two met in person for the first time in May. Their meeting, and Mike getting introduced to his nine half siblings, was covered by the <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865628808/Murray-man-meets-son-he-didnt-know-he-had-60-years-later.html?pg=all" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Desert News</a>. Check it out.
Stay tuned for more about Mike and his family.
<script height="338px" width="600px" src="https://player.ooyala.com/iframe.js#ec=JrdGozdTp2-ZWXOM5X7R54UE20x2MAyq&amp;pbid=3ce6404476914e86994d87aac3e4391b"></script>

Goodnight Son

If it’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then Jimmy Cygler and Paul Leventhal are plenty tough.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_22516" style="width: 278px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22516" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg" alt="Jimmy, left, and his brother Paul." class="size-medium wp-image-22516" height="300" width="268" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg 268w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1.jpg 449w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 268px) 100vw, 268px" />Jimmy, left, and his brother Paul.</div>
When both were infants, they were taken from their mother, Rebecca Kaufman, and raised worlds apart without knowing of the others’ existence.
With the help of 23andMe, the brothers recently found each other and were able to meet in person in early 2015.
Jimmy traveled from his home in Sao Paulo, Brazil to spend a week with Paul in Florida.
There the two men got to talk about their lives. Paul shared with Jimmy the little he knew about their mother, a brilliant but troubled woman. Jimmy was able to share with Paul a little about his improbable life.


“Stories of this kind, they are hard to believe,” Jimmy says. “Do you know the book ‘Life of Pi?’ A fantastical story, but it is nothing compared to my life.”

Paul downplays the drama in his own life – the separation from his mother, spending his first five years in a foster home, and growing up in a house where his father and stepmother were distant.
Paul has one fleeting memory of sitting on his mother’s knee – almost everything else he knows about her comes from what he’s gleaned from relatives. It wasn’t until Paul turned 18, after his father’s death, that he learned he’d been the product of an affair.
At first Paul pushed this information out of his head, but a few years later as a young man, a relative confirmed it was true.
“My life was turned upside down,” Paul said.


He had to live with not only his mother abandoning him but her family cutting ties with him as well. Jimmy thinks that Paul having to endure their mother’s abandonment and rejection may have been harder than the physical abuse he suffered.
Paul’s not so sure, but he knows that it affected him.


“I was angered by the fact that her brothers – two doctors and two lawyers – didn&#8217;t step up to the plate and save me from going to a foster home,” Paul said. “I must have been quite an embarrassment to them and my maternal grandmother, who was still living at the time.”


Rejected by his mother and her family, Paul spent years trying to find his biological father. That’s part of why he eventually got his DNA results with 23andMe. While he hasn’t yet found the identity of his biological father, Paul did find his brother Jimmy.
“My father had no idea who his mother was and finding his brother finally helped us solve that puzzle,” Jimmy’s daughter, Orly, said. “Now we know who she was.”


Her father agrees that it has helped.
“You know Nietzsche, ’that which does not kill us makes us stronger?’” Jimmy asks from his office in Sao Paulo. “Well, it is true for me.”


Paul disagrees with his brother on this point. What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger or it may damage you for the rest of your life.


Jimmy survived years of abuse as a child, life at a kibbutz, four wars, and three marriages. But he doesn’t feel damaged.


“I’m a rebuilt human being,” Jimmy says. “Really all the conditions of my life were anything but normal or positive, but the art of my life was to become a good human being.”


But it wasn’t easy.
When Jimmy first went to Israel at the age of 13, he began getting psychological help to work through his childhood trauma.
<div id="attachment_22476" style="width: 265px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22476" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg" alt="Jimmy as a young man on a kibbutz in Israel." class="size-medium wp-image-22476" height="300" width="255" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg 255w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-768x905.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-869x1024.jpg 869w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-747x880.jpg 747w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-1001x1180.jpg 1001w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz.jpg 1640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 255px) 100vw, 255px" />Jimmy as a young man on a kibbutz in Israel.</div>
“When I came to Israel I was a pile of wreckage, and I had to do something to these broken pieces to reassemble a human being,” Jimmy said.
But not having all the pieces about his life made that “reassembling” a life-long process.
“The story with Paul is part of it, but just one part of it,” said Jimmy. “I’m one of nine brothers and sisters. I’m the only brother (related to) all of them and I spent my whole life searching for those missing pieces.”
Jimmy mentions connecting this process with what psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote about in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
“He says a person who has meaning can bear almost anything,” Jimmy said. “So this search for meaning became important to me.”
Part of that search has included trying to learn more about who he was, where he came from and to whom he is connected.
“First I had to gather all the pieces and then you start putting the puzzle together and you try to find meaning in the picture that emerges,” Jimmy said. “You might have the whole picture or, like me, just parts of it.”
Jimmy said he also learned that one small piece of information could change everything. Recently a relative in London found a travel document Jimmy’s father had used when Jimmy was a baby. On it was the name James Maurice Goldberg.
“That’s my name (from his birth certificate, before his father changed his last name), but I’d never known it before,” he said.
The name also helped him find out more about his father, Izrael Aron Goldberg. Jimmy’s father fled Poland before the start of World War II and settled in Peru. There he married a woman and had two children, a son Lucho and a daughter Alina, and converted to Christianity. He would later say that all the family he had in Poland died in the Holocaust. After experiencing financial troubles, Izrael left his family in Peru and moved to New York City.
“I do have a business card of his from his time in New York,” Jimmy said. “It says ‘I. Aron Goldberg, specialist in furs.’”
<div id="attachment_22477" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22477" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg" alt="Jimmy's father's business card when he lived in New York." class="size-medium wp-image-22477" height="123" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-768x314.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1024x419.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-880x360.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1180x483.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116.jpg 1581w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jimmy&#8217;s father&#8217;s business card when he lived in New York.</div>
It was in New York that he met Rebecca Kaufman, who already had two sons, Paul and Jay, who were several years older than Jimmy.
Paul ended up in foster care and Jay was taken by Rebecca’s first husband. Rebecca was unable to care for Jimmy when he was born in 1949, and she was subsequently placed in an institution. Izrael, alone with his infant son, asked his estranged wife in Peru to come to New York with their two children.
“The interesting part of the story is that he didn’t tell her that he had a baby, me,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy’s half-sister, Alina, was almost 10 years old at the time. His half-brother, Lucho, was about eight. His sister remembers holding Jimmy as an infant, and falling in love with him. But it would be the last she’d see him for almost 55 years because the family quickly fell apart.
<div id="attachment_22478" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22478" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg" alt="Jimmy with his father and his half sister Alina before he was taken to Brazil." class="size-medium wp-image-22478" height="282" width="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951.jpg 408w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jimmy with his father and his half sister Alina before he was taken to Brazil.</div>
Jimmy doesn’t know all the details but is aware that his father fought with his wife. She stayed just a few months before returning to Peru with her two children, leaving Jimmy and his father in New York. Izrael took Jimmy to Brazil shortly thereafter. Jimmy thinks his father suffered from survivor’s guilt and wanted to somehow reconstruct the family he lost in the Holocaust, which might explain why Izrael had three children from two different mothers. Jimmy’s father took the name Israel Cygler when they moved to Brazil. He also quickly remarried and that’s when Jimmy’s life turned into a nightmare.
“I thought I had a ‘normal life,’” Jimmy said about what things were like after his father remarried. “I had a father, a woman whom I thought was my mother, and four younger brothers. I was raised Christian, studied with the nuns at school and went to mass on Sunday. Had a first communion. That was my life. But what I thought was normal at the time was not normal at all. “I was maltreated and tortured as a kid.”
His stepmother once punished him by putting him in a hole under the house for a week without food. Another time she smeared hot pepper juice “on all the holes of my body.” And after getting caught playing with matches as a seven-year-old, his mother placed his hand into a gas fire to punish him. He was burnt so badly that it took years of surgeries and skin grafts before he could properly open and close his hand.
“My mother did that to me,” Jimmy said. “She was the real villain in this, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know she wasn’t my mother, if I had known I could have dealt with that. But the only conclusion I could draw from those punishments was that I was a monster, that I deserved that because I was a monster. That was me at 13.”
Then the trajectory of his life changed when his father became critically ill and a stranger shared with him some surprising news.
“Out of the blue this young lad appears, speaks with me for half an hour and tore down the basis of my life,” Jimmy said. “He tells me ‘I’m your brother from another marriage. I’m from Lima, Peru. You also have an older sister, and your mother is not your mother. You were born to a woman in New York.’”
Jimmy was stunned. His father then told him it was all true.
“’Well son, now that you know you are a Jew, you are going to the land of the Jews, which is called Israel,’” Jimmy recalled his father saying. “I didn’t know anything about that country or those people. I didn’t know anything about the Jewish people. ”
He arrived in Israel in October 1962, and stayed for the next 27 years. “The country embraced me,” Jimmy said.
He lived in a special area of a kibbutz for teenagers who didn’t have parents. They were from 30 to 40 different countries and many had been orphaned or displaced by World War II. Jimmy received good care, including intensive psychological treatment to help deal with the emotional wounds from his stepmother’s abuse.
“That’s why I say I’m a rebuilt human being,” Jimmy said.
He served as a soldier in four wars, was married, has two sons and a daughter, divorced, married again, and had another daughter, and then divorced again.
“And then I met a Brazilian girl and fell in love and went to Brazil,” he said.
Jimmy reinvented himself &#8211; the twice divorced veteran who was a father of four went to college, married again, started another family, and now he runs a very successful business. But he was always looking, “desperately looking,” he says, for the pieces to the puzzle of his life. He was able to find his four half-brothers from his father’s family in Brazil. His stepmother told them he died in the war. With the help of a Peruvian businessman, Jimmy tracked down the phone number of a woman in Lima he thought might be his sister, Alina. He called her, said his name was Jimmy and that he was from Brazil.
“My dear little brother Jimmy, I have been looking for you all my life!” she replied. Jimmy pauses to control his emotion as he recounts meeting his sister.
“From this moment I felt love for her,” he said.
Jimmy traveled to Peru to get to know his sister, and she shared a blurry old photo she had of him being held by his biological mother. She also told him her own memory of holding him as an infant. She never forgot that and spent her life looking for him, never knowing how she could find him.
<div id="attachment_22479" style="width: 235px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-22479" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg" alt="A blurry photo of Jimmy being held by his mother Rebecca. The only photo he has of his mother." class="size-medium wp-image-22479" height="300" width="225" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-886x1180.jpg 886w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />A blurry photo of Jimmy being held by his mother Rebecca. The only photo he has of his mother.</div>
“She kept that memory her whole life, always wondering what had happened to me,” Jimmy said.
She also told him about their father, his financial problems in Peru, some of his history fleeing Poland and losing all of his family in the Holocaust. And he learned about being born in New York, but he still didn’t know anything about his biological mother. Jimmy says he and Alina became very close.
In 2013, his sister was diagnosed with cancer, a year later she died.
“Alina was a wonderful woman,” he said.
Losing her so soon was a huge blow to Jimmy. Jimmy’s story took another turn in early 2015 when his daughter, Orly, got her 23andMe results. She saw a match with Paul, thinking he was a cousin. But when she shared with Jimmy Paul’s date of birth and how much DNA he shared with Paul, they concluded that Paul and Jimmy were brothers.
In that first meeting, both men were overcome as they hugged and shed tears.
“It was very emotional,” Jimmy said. “We’re kind of old guys and I could see in his eyes how much he had suffered. I know what I went through and I came out a real strong person – a leader, a teacher and a family man. We both survived.”

A Fantastical Story

World Records often involve peril and great feats of courage, and in a way A.J. Jacobs’ plan to stage a <a href="http://globalfamilyreunion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Global Family Reunion</a> in New York City this June is a kind of daring <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aj_about-291x300.jpg" alt="aj_about" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21667" height="300" width="291" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aj_about-291x300.jpg 291w, https://blogcms.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aj_about.jpg 301w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 291px) 100vw, 291px" />tightrope walk of its own.
The daylong event – which the <a href="http://globalfamilyreunion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">New York Times</a> recently described as “part TED talk, part Coachella and part family picnic” – is billed as the largest family reunion ever.
AJ has put together an event that sprinkles in a little science, a little fun and a lot of socializing. Among the featured speakers are Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is also a host of the PBS show <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Finding Your Roots&#8221;</a>, the documentarian Morgan Spurlock, and performances by the illusionist David Blaine and the group Sister Sledge.
If A.J., an editor at large at Esquire and good <a href="https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-customer-stories/all-in-the-family/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">friend of 23andMe</a>, pulls it off, it will clearly be one for Guinness’s record book, but more than that the reunion also marks a sea change in the use of genetic testing for genealogical purposes. This direct to consumer genetic testing thing is really here to stay.
There’s also a point to the reunion beyond just setting a record. As A.J. has said both here on our blog but also in his well-received talks, we’re all family.
“I want to remind people that we are, in fact, one big family,” A.J. told the Times. “We do share 99.9 percent of our DNA, and that we need to treat each other with a little more kindness.”


There are still tickets available with money from the event going toward Alzheimer’s disease research. 23andMe will be on hand as well.
So if you plan to be in New York City on June 6 why don’t you drop in on some family?


(Ed’s note: A.J. really wants to connect with you if you are a 23andMe customer and are signed on you can connect with him <a href="https://www.23andme.com/user/?community_profile=2c85e926031b871d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>. In addition, A.J. has been generous enough to offer a discount for 23andMe customers. You can go <a href="https://globalfamilyreunion.eventbrite.com/?discount=23ANDME" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a> and get 25 percent off tickets.)

<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 600px; background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/global-family-reunion.jpg" alt="global family reunion" class="alignright size-full wp-image-22488" height="51" width="140" /> 
<a href="http://globalfamilyreunion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">GLOBAL FAMILY REUNION</a> 
The Day the World Connects</div>
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 600px; background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
WHAT: The largest, most inclusive, most fascinating family reunion in history. 
WHO IS INVITED: All members of the human family.</div>
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 600px; background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
AGENDA: The Reunion will have TED-style talks from scientists, genealogists and entertainers about every aspect of family, including DNA, genealogy and personal stories. There will be music, comedy, games, exhibits, food and booths. And the world’s largest family photo.</div>
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 600px; background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
WHEN: June 6, 2015 (all day long)</div>
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 600px; background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
WHERE: The New York Hall of Science, on the grounds of the historic World’s Fair. 
THE CAUSE: Proceeds from the event will benefit the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund and the Alzheimer’s Association NYC.</div>
<div style="float: center; text-align: justified; width: 600px; background-color: #eeeeee; padding: 15px; margin-left: 10px;">
THE BOOK AND MOVIE: The Global Family Reunion will be featured in a book by bestselling author A.J. Jacobs and a documentary by Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me).
</div>

Ancestry Service — Page 20