Every week on Explain It to Me, Vox’s call-in podcast, we answer the questions that matter to you most. When we got a question from a listener named Hannah, it piqued our interest. She wanted to know: How do you find a long-lost relative?
“I was raised by my mom,” she says. “I knew my dad was out there somewhere, but I never really gave too much thought about it because I did have a pretty full life.” By the time we spoke with her, she had found her father online and reached out to him. But it raised an entirely new set of questions. “I never gave much thought to, ‘Okay, so now what?’”
Journalist Libby Copeland has spent a lot of time thinking about those next steps. She’s the author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, a book that looks at the ways at-home DNA testing has shaped families. “This whole question around the distinction between biological and non-biological family and roots and identity, it’s everything to me,” Copeland told Vox. “I think it’s so intrinsically connected to existential questions around who we are and how we get to decide what to be.”
On this week’s episode, we discuss with Copeland how to find family, the way at-home DNA tests have changed things, and what to do if you come across an unexpected relative. Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Copeland, edited for length and clarity.
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Has this reporting changed the way you think about family?
Definitely. I grew up in my biological family, so I’m not someone who was donor-conceived or adopted. But spending so much time talking to people who don’t have a genetic connection to the families that they were raised in, it’s really interesting to hear just how much pull that genetic family has over you.
In my family, we were able to connect with ancestors in Sweden, and then we traveled there and we’re able to connect with a second cousin of my dad going back a hundred-and-something years from when our relative had emigrated. That made the world seem so much smaller and so much more intimate. It made history feel present to me. It made me feel like the past wasn’t over.
If someone’s taken one of these at-home DNA tests and they realize they have a family member, how should they go about trying to connect with them?
It very much matters who it is and how much knowledge you have going into it. It’s often easy to start with the person you’re finding [through the test] just because they’re the immediate connection. But if you’re finding a half-sibling and you know that’s because you share a father in common, a lot of [experts] will recommend that you start with the father first.
Very often, there’s a secret at the heart of your own origin story if you’re one of these folks who’s gone to DNA testing either looking for family or making a discovery. People are advised to start with the person at the center of it because they often want to have agency over their own narrative, and connecting with that person first allows the best possible chance of them then introducing you to other people.
What’s the proper way to go about this? Do you show up on their doorstep? DM them on Instagram? Write a letter?
When I was writing The Lost Family, I talked to people who did show up on someone’s doorstep or make a phone call and it can be quite challenging and disruptive. You want to do it on terms that allow the other person as much control as possible, because in this situation, very often, there’s a disconnect of knowledge. For instance, the seeker knows they exist, but their genetic father may not know.
Very often, the best possible way is to write a letter. The tone of that letter is something that you want to think really carefully about, because there’s different ways you could go. You’re not necessarily trying to make a really intimate connection right away, but you could share a little about yourself, share a little bit about what you’re looking for. You could start small and build a relationship from there.
Let’s say you’re in a situation where you find out who your parent is, but you know, it’s hard to find them. You can’t find a number, they’re not on Facebook, but their kids are. Should you contact them? Like what do you do in that situation?
You might say something like, “Hey, I see we’re genetically related based on our DNA test. I’d love to connect and learn a little more about how we’re related. Are you interested?”
There’s also this question of, “How do I ask my dad, ‘Why didn’t you ever come see me?’” without coming off too intense?
This is the mystery of a lifetime. People talk around that question for decades without ever fully asking it. I interviewed a woman who wasn’t told she was adopted. She didn’t find out until she’d had some life-altering surgery that it turned out she might not have needed if she’d known her full medical history. When she finally did find out the identity of her biological father, she reached out to him in a number of ways. He was not terribly responsive, and then she finally called and got him on the phone, and he was so dismissive. He could not at all give her what she wanted. He would not even confirm that he knew for sure that she was his daughter or that he’d even dated her mother.
She cried a lot when we spoke, and it was because she had these questions that could not be answered. Her biological mother had passed away a few months before she discovered her identity. And the real question she wanted to ask her biological mom was, “Did you ever look for me? Did you ever think about me?” And in the absence of being able to ask her, the daughters of her mother did not want to believe that she existed. They didn’t want to believe that her mother had placed a child for adoption.
In a perfect world, you would form a relationship and get to know them, right? But it very much matters what the secret is at the heart of your own identity story. Because the nature of that can alter people’s willingness to embrace that you exist.
There’s the question of what you do with that. I also think there’s the question of what people are looking for when they’re looking to connect with new family. Are you trying to figure out where you got your eyes? Where you got your personality?
All of it, right? I want to see someone else whose face looks like mine. I want to see someone else whose eyes look like mine. I want to have the experience of looking and seeing myself, the way I see myself in a mirror, in somebody else. If you’re adopted, you may never have had that experience. It’s profound. I interviewed a man who had been a donor in the 1970s. And he had, the last time I spoke with him, 21 children through donor conception, and then he had two biological children that he’d had with his wife.
They talked, and some of them are quite close to him. Some of them do have Thanksgiving dinner with him. And they talked about how they would get together and go to a bar, and they would just be completely struck by their mannerisms or their mutual love of music. It blew them away. And they were like, “Okay, yes, DNA is not destiny, but man, is there something to be said for the power of genetics.”
How much we should make of the similarities we see in family when it comes to personality traits? Do genetics really tell us who we are and who we’re going to be in this way?
The danger of the promise of DNA testing when it’s used like this can be that we interpret it in a simplistic way: “The blueprint for my future means I’m inevitably destined to be XYZ.” And that’s not true. I have seen cases where people were so eager to find family that they read into things and found patterns that weren’t there based on their assumption of genetic identity.
In all of this talk of found family, we haven’t really talked about managing the existing family you have. How do people juggle that desire to find out about new family members without unintentionally hurting or alienating the people who have been there for them all along?
I talked to a lot of people who were seekers, and some managed to do this really well. It’s incredibly reductive to think about this as a nature versus nurture thing — you can have room in your heart for both. You can have your dad who tucked you in at night; he fathered you and he still fathers you. There’s another man out there, though. And to him, you owe half your genetic data. He’s your biological father and we don’t have the language for that.
[Just] because we lack the words for that, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have room in your heart for that person. It means we don’t have a word for it. And so people who’ve successfully navigated it have managed to maintain those relationships and say, “You still matter to me so much. You’ll always be my dad. I also want to know about where half my DNA came from.”
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