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://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-300x236.jpg" alt="IMG_8768" width="300" height="236" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-300x236.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-768x603.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-1024x805.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/IMG_8768-880x691.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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>

23andMe Blog

23andMe Blog Team

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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Paul1-268x300.jpg 268w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-255x300.jpg 255w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-768x905.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-869x1024.jpg 869w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-747x880.jpg 747w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-at-Kibbutz-1001x1180.jpg 1001w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-300x123.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-768x314.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1024x419.jpg 1024w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-880x360.jpg 880w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fotos-de-Fotos-116-1180x483.jpg 1180w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Israel-Alina-e-Jimmy-1951-300x282.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-225x300.jpg 225w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-660x880.jpg 660w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jimmy-Goldberg-e-Rebeca-Becky-Brooklin-1949-886x1180.jpg 886w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aj_about-291x300.jpg 291w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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.org/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://www.23andme.org/blog/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>

Family Reunion Time

By Kasia Bryc
Earlier this month, I attended the South by Southwest conference in Austin to speak on a panel with the writer AJ Jacobs about how interconnected we are.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22355" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Kasia-@-SXSW-300x229.jpg" alt="Kasia @ SXSW" width="300" height="229" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Kasia-@-SXSW-300x229.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Kasia-@-SXSW.jpg 574w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
But walking around the conference with such a diverse mix of people – many with their rock star cool outfits and denim jackets – you’d be forgiven if you questioned whether they could come from the same gene pool as me, a former nerdy high school kid.
And yet, we really are all one big family. In June, AJ will host the <a href="http://globalfamilyreunion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Global Family Reunion</a> in New York City, what he’s described as the world’s largest family reunion.
AJ spoke about the many cousins he found in his research year. He was very proud of his family connection to Gwyneth Paltrow, and would welcome her to join his family for a kosher Thanksgiving. He also noted that he was related to Judge Judy, which caused him to revise his opinion of her – as a person – in a more favorable light.
Also on the panel was Joanna Mountain, 23andMe’s Senior Director of Research. Joanna spoke about the incredible stories and discoveries that people have made by connecting to their DNA cousins, which are regularly highlighted in this blog.
But I was most excited to show how many cousins we all have. The typical 23andMe customer has over two thousand DNA cousins, and that’s just within the 23andMe database.
It all comes down to the math: the further back—in generations—you go, the more genealogical ancestors you have. Two parents, four grandparents&#8230; all the way up to 128 fifth-great grandparents. And that only takes you back about two hundred years. Imagine if you were looking for your ancestors from the sixteenth century—you’d have 131,072 genealogical ancestors to hunt down!
So, as unique as you are, all these ancestors passed on their DNA to create you and your many cousins. And, as you can imagine, 130 thousand people have a lot of descendants, so it’s unsurprising that the average 23andMe customer can find so many cousins.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-22354" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Connections-300x169.jpg" alt="Connections" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Connections-300x169.jpg 300w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Connections.jpg 720w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
It quickly follows that, with each of us having so many DNA relatives, any pair of individuals are connected through their cousins. To illustrate this point, I showed that each of Tuesday’s panelists, together with Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (host of “Finding Your Roots&#8221; on PBS who kindly agreed to participate in my experiment), are all just one or two “cousins&#8221; connections apart.
In fact, almost everyone in the database is connected through one, two, or three DNA cousins. Which should make you rethink how you treat anyone you meet on the street. Regardless of what they may look like, you never know who you might be related to!

Kasia Bryc

Everyone Is Related. The (Big) Data Proves It

Last weekend, more than 500 years after dying at the <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/battle_of_bosworth.htm">Battle of Bosworth</a>, the last English monarch to die in combat was put to rest.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-full wp-image-21981" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/richardiiiportrait.jpg" alt="richardiiiportrait" width="200" height="269" />
King Richard III’s funeral ends a fascinating years-long <a href="https://www.23andme.org/blog/news/king-richards-bones/">scientific investigation</a>, which began when his bones were uncovered under a Leicester parking lot.
The discovery offered a rare chance to take a known historical figure – made infamous by Shakespeare – and use DNA analysis and living relatives to piece together new information about this historical figure.
Simply confirming that the bones were Richard III’s was part of the process, and scientists <a href="https://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141202/ncomms6631/full/ncomms6631.html">published findings</a> to show how that was done.

RIP Richard III

The author <a href="http://www.christinekenneally.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Christine Kenneally</a> – who wrote the wonderful book The <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21767" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race-199x300.jpg" alt="Invisible History of the Human Race" width="199" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race-199x300.jpg 199w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Invisible-History-of-the-Human-Race.jpg 230w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" />Invisible History of the Human Race – graciously agreed to participate in a Twitter chat we are hosting on January 21st at 4pm EST.
Her book had some delightful insights into how our DNA, our personal history and our environment shape us. Using personal stories, including her own, she conveys the complicated history of genetic science.
A former academic Christine, who has written for the New Yorker and is a contributing editor at Buzzfeed, said she became a journalist, in part, because it allowed her to expand the kind of questions she was exploring as a scientist.
“I became increasingly frustrated by the narrowing of interests that my academic career seemed to require,” she said. “Journalism allowed me to keep asking the questions that interested me, all the big and the little ones.” 

The beauty of her book is that Christine uses personal stories including her <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-books-blog/2014/nov/06/christine-kenneally-i-was-thrilled-to-find-out-im-a-convict-princess" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">own family’s story</a> to explain some of the issue around genetic testing.
“I knew that I cared deeply about some topics that many other people found pretty dry, and I wanted to understand why they mattered to me,” she said. “Asking that question led me into the past and back to my family. I also wanted to find a way to connect with readers who wouldn’t normally be interested in science. Working out why I cared helped me think about the ways that they might.”
But her book also looks at how the advances in genetics broadens our understanding of biology, evolution and medicine.
“DNA won’t change everything about medicine, but I do think it is going to have a huge impact on much of it,” Christine said. “I feel deeply excited that my children are going to be able to access medical information that may help them make choices about their (health). I hope I live long enough to see what happens. It’s so fascinating.”
Join what promises to be a stimulating and interesting conversation with Christine. We want to hear from you. So ask Christine a few questions or simply track our chat on Twitter with the hashtag #23BookClub. You can enter for a chance to win a copy of the book.

Let’s Talk

In a new study published in the <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-21956 size-medium" src="http://35.88.189.111/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kasia1-197x300.jpg" alt="" width="197" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kasia1-197x300.jpg 197w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Kasia1.jpg 369w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px" />
<h6>Regional Ancestry Differences</h6>
The study offers a detailed look at how the ancestry make-up of self-identified African Americans, Latinos and European Americans differs by region and these differences reflect some of the distinctive socio-political history in different parts of the United States.
“Our study not only reveals the historical underpinnings of regional differences in genetic ancestry, but also sheds light on inconsistencies between genetic patterns and commonly accepted notions of race and ethnicity,” Kasia said.
<h6>DNA USA</h6>
Although the study doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive portrait of the genetic makeup of the United States, it’s unprecedented in its scope and it does show how the history of the Americas as a crossroad for disparate cultures is written in our DNA.
Using aggregated and anonymous data from 160,000 23andMe customers who consented to research, Kasia looked at how the ancestral make-up for whites, blacks and Latinos differed in each state. Some of what she found is well known, but some of the data illuminates a United States with a much more complicated multicultural history than many of us understand.

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<h6>Hidden African Ancestry</h6>
Among her findings were that about 3.5 percent of self-identified European Americans have at least 1 percent or more African Ancestry. It’s likely that many of these Americans, who describe themselves as white, may be unaware of their African ancestry, which in many cases goes back between five to ten generations. There are also differences regionally – with the highest levels in the South – so that in South Carolina, at least 13 percent of self-identified whites have 1 percent or more African ancestry, while in Louisiana the number is a little more than 12 percent.
In Georgia and Alabama the number is about 9 percent. The differences perhaps point to different social and cultural histories within the South.
Among black Americans, those with the highest percentage of African ancestry also live in southern states, especially South Carolina and Georgia. The percentage of the population who are African Americans are also highest in those states, but there are also differences among states with similar percentages of African Americans.
<h6>Native American Ancestry</h6>
That may also be due to the different histories of those states. Kasia’s study also found that one in every 20 African Americans have Native American ancestry, while in Oklahoma 14 percent of African Americans carry at least two percent Native American ancestry.
Among self-reported Latinos in the US, those from states in the southwest, especially from states bordering Mexico, have the highest levels of Native American ancestry.
But among Latinos too there were wide regional differences that also likely reflect the history of migration and intermixing. For example, some Latinos have no discernible Native American ancestry, while others have as much as 50 percent of their ancestry being Native American. Latinos in states in the Southwest, bordering Mexico – New Mexico, Texas, California and Arizona – have the greatest percentage of Native American ancestry. Latinos in states with the largest proportion of African Americans in their population – South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama – have the highest percentage of African Ancestry.
All three groups — African Americans, European Americans and Latinos — showed asymmetrical male and female ancestry contributions, with more European male and more Native American and African female ancestors. This asymmetry is likely a legacy of slavery, unbalanced sex ratios in frontier settings, as well other social factors.

Ancestry Across the United States

Liz Kellner loves puzzles, but piecing together the hardest one of her life required a little help from 23andMe.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-169x300.jpg" alt="2014-10-15 09.17.15" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21930" width="169" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-169x300.jpg 169w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-577x1024.jpg 577w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15-496x880.jpg 496w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-15-09.17.15.jpg 640w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 169px) 100vw, 169px" />
“This was the first time I was one of the pieces,” said the 48 year-old entrepreneurship specialist.
Abandoned as an infant, Liz said her origins were always a mystery to her.
She’d been found on a cold December day in Minneapolis almost 50 years ago. She was only a few days old when a rookie cop discovered her in an apartment laundry room wrapped in a kimono.
Looking back now, Liz doesn’t see her story as a tragedy – quite the opposite.
“I was lucky enough to have a birth mother who, when she realized that she couldn&#8217;t take care of me, left me somewhere safe, and warm, given that it was in December and in Minnesota.”
Then there was the young cop who found her, the nurses who cared for her at the hospital, the foster mother who took her in, and the loving parents who ultimately adopted her.
Liz says she was fortunate. If she hadn’t been abandoned she never would have had the wonderful parents who raised her, or the younger sister who was born nine years after her adoption. Her family, she said, is the “best gift ever.” 

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Liz wouldn’t want to change any of that even if she could. But that never altered her desire to know more about herself. It never changed wanting to know about where she came from or why she’d been abandoned as a baby.
Over the years, Liz searched for answers. She always knew she’d been adopted. As she was able to piece together the story of how she was found, she also did her best to find and thank those who’d been so good to her.
“Sort of paying it forward, you know,” she said.
Liz found and thanked Officer Jannsen, one of the police officers who found her. She also tracked down the foster mom who cared for her until her adoption and thanked her for taking such good care of her and being a part of the system.
They all remembered Liz.
“I guess I made an impression,” she said.
But the trail ended there, until, that is, she tested with 23andMe.
Initially the most important part of her results had to do with her ancestry. Liz quickly found out that despite being raised a Catholic, her heritage was 100 percent Ashkenazi Jew. Surprising for Liz, but the real surprised didn’t come until the summer of 2014 when Liz signed into her 23andMe account after not looking at it for awhile. She immediately saw something she’d never seen before.
“”I log in and …(the) screen says I have a cousin, and an aunt, and a half-sister.”
Stunned and thinking it was a mistake, she quickly logged out. She waited and then logged back in.
“Yup, still there,” Liz said.
It was the first time she’d ever been able to identify close biological relatives, in this case using 23andMe’s DNA Relatives tool.
This alone was huge, and Liz didn’t dare hope that she’d be able to answer the questions that have been there her whole life about who her mother or father was.
But she was also skeptical. Her first thought was that it was a mistake, so she emailed her sister, and her best friend, who is a bit of a genetics buff. Then she sent a message with her data to a friend who is a genetics professor. She wanted to know what they thought. Was it correct? Did she really just find her first close blood relatives?
Her sister’s response was immediate: “Oh My God!”
Then the professor weighed in.
“Congratulations, you have more family.”
Liz felt her head spinning.
Then things got really interesting.
Liz connected with her newly identified aunt, Abbieann. Abbieann had also been adopted. As they talked they realized that rather than Abbie being her aunt, they were actually half-sisters and they shared one other sister, who was also adopted. Because Liz’s two new-found biological sisters had been adopted in a more traditional way, they had birth certificates with names on them.
The two had used that to find their biological mother, who is also Liz’s mother and who was still alive. Liz’s full sister had also tested. So in a short time Liz went from having one sister to eight siblings, and identifying her birth parents, who were both still alive.
“So unreal,” she said. “There’s no way to describe my emotions. I think my heart stopped.”
While this was way more than Liz had ever hoped to learn, the new connections brought up difficult questions and histories. Her birth mother is still alive but has dementia. Liz’s siblings who share her father worried about the impact meeting Liz would have on their mom. Cautiously Liz moved forward and introduced herself to her new found cousins, aunts, uncles and siblings, most who seemed to welcome her into the family, even though “they didn&#8217;t even know I existed,” she said.
Liz also met her father, who had also been unaware of her birth. When they finally met, Liz saw in him some of her own quirks and habits.
Sitting across from him, she had the same strange sensation she had when she sat with her sisters. Here she was looking at someone who shared features and mannerisms with her, someone who looked totally familiar, but who was also a stranger.
“To sit and talk with someone who is your sibling, or your biological parent, at age 48, who you have never met &#8230; incredible,” Liz said.
This had all been more than she’d hoped for, but the encounters also left her with some lingering questions that may never get answered. She couldn’t ask her biological mother about what happened. Even if she’d been able to ask her mother those questions, she’s not sure she would be able to tell her why she’d been left in a laundry room, what day she was actually born or whether through all those years, her mother ever thought about the child she abandoned.
Liz’s biological family’s story is a complicated one, filled with emotional landmines. Her biological parents ultimately got married, but that was almost 19 years after Liz’s birth. Her biological father said he didn’t know of her existence or that of her two sisters who share the same mother. He had raised another family during that time, and only married Liz’s biological mother after his first wife passed away. As Liz figured all this out, she felt compelled to protect some of those family members who didn’t know about her and this complicated history. But that also meant that she didn’t get the opportunity to ask some of the questions she wanted to ask.
“At least I was conceived out of love,” she said.
She felt lucky to have made these connections. They’ve triggered all this thought about nature and nurture, she said. She found that she could see many of her traits in her new found siblings and birth father. Making all these connections helped her explain a little bit more about herself as well, she said.
Liz said she doesn’t know what will come from all this, but learning this history and meeting her biological family has helped her. Liz doesn’t know if the relationships with her biological family will endure, the bond she has with her family hasn’t changed and only become stronger.
Liz said she shared her story, in part, because she and her new found sisters believe that there may be at least one other sibling out there who Liz wants to find. She believes her sibling would have been adopted in the Chicago area through Jewish Services in late 1954 or early 1955.
Liz is still trying grapple with what these new connections have meant to her.
“So unreal,” she said. “(There is) no way to describe the emotions.”

Putting It Together

We’ve heard some incredible stories from 23andMe’s customers, but Menachem Bodner’s brought us to the edge of our seats.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents-259x300.jpeg" alt="Menachem's parents" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-21940" width="259" height="300" srcset="https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents-259x300.jpeg 259w, https://blogcms.23andme.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachems-parents.jpeg 408w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 259px) 100vw, 259px" />
A Holocaust survivor, Menachem has been searching for his twin brother, ever since the two were separated in Auschwitz when they both were only four.


Although his search is not yet over, thanks to some incredible detective work by the genealogist Ayana KimRon and testing with 23andMe, Menachem is a step closer having found first cousins in California who were able to give him more details about his mother and even share with him a photo of his parents. The first picture he’d ever seen of them.
The story of his search is documented <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4589762,00.html">here</a>. (Some of the details of how Ayana used Menachem’s 23andMe results can help anyone doing genealogy with 23andMe.)
Ayana first spoke with us early this year, telling us about Menachem&#8217;s search after 23andMe contacted her with an offer to help.
She had already done an incredible amount of work, using Nazi archives, immigration records, documents from Auschwitz and other sources to piece together as much as she could about Menachem. She found his name at birth – Elias Gottesman, his brother’s name Jeno Gottesman, their place of birth in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary, and the names of their parents, Roza and Ignatz Gottesman.
Ayana also tracked down what happened to Menachem’s mother, Roza, who survived Auschwitz only to die at the hands of anti-Semitic rioters in her hometown in 1946. But from there the trail ran cold.
Menachem, who was adopted by a couple who survived Au
<div id="attachment_21943" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-21943" src="https://www.23andme.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Menachem-and-Ayana-300x249.jpg" alt="Menachem, with Ayana, seeing a photo of his parents for the first time." class="size-medium wp-image-21943" width="300" height="249" />Menachem, with Ayana, seeing a photo of his parents for the first time.</div>schwitz and then immigrated to Israel, has never given up and he has found someone who is equally committed in Ayana.
Using 23andMe results, Ayana was able to help Menachem connect to three first cousins in California.
&nbsp;

“I knew about their existence but DNA was a miraculous short cut,” Ayana said.


Their mother, Menachem’s mother’s sister who immigrated to the United States before the war, had told them about the family and sister she left behind. They in turn were able to tell Menachim about his mother, and share with him a photo of his parents, giving him the first opportunity to see an image of them.
Ayana shared with us a photo of him seeing his parents for the first time.
Menachem is still searching for his brother. To help in his search Ayana has set up a Facebook page <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/A7734/499971010060858" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.

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