A Different Kind of Surprise

 

I have a confession to make. It has to do with all those saccharine TV and magazine stories about adoptees meeting their birth family. While the stories may be sweet—even heartwarming—they almost seem to me to be just a little bit too effervescent. As in, over the top. I've always wondered whether the journalists producing the stories—not to mention the companies sponsoring such stories—put just a little bit too much icing on top of an otherwise interesting story. After all, there may be more DNA kits to sell in the process.

Well, that's what I thought until last month, when I got a message from another Ancestry.com subscriber. In a letter that couldn't have been more considerately written by "Your DNA Guide" Diahan Southard herself, a total stranger reached out to explain that we share far more centiMorgans than most other relatives could have expected.

This stranger happened to be an adoptee. And I unwittingly happened to be a close relative.

Carefully and cautiously, we bridged the gap between strangerhood and close family connection. First through the anonymous channels of Ancestry's messaging system, then gradually to email, we eventually took the next step to a phone call.

At the time of that first call, I happened to be accompanying my husband on a business trip. Far from home in a hotel room where nothing was familiar, I placed the call and made the first tentative exchanges of small talk. By this time, I had gathered enough information to figure out the possible connection between us and began explaining that theory, while the person on the other end of the line shared a review of the independent research—actually, the guessing game—that led to unsealing adoption papers and discovering the once-redacted story.

We talked for an entire hour, a surprise to me when I realized how quickly the time had passed. If it weren't for an upcoming appointment I had that next hour, I could easily have stayed on the line and chatted for much longer.

Why? Well, this is the point: no matter how cheesy those adoptee reunion news stories may sound to strangers, there is something uncanny about the experience of connecting with a close relative you never knew you had. Granted, that one phone call might have been an exception, a time shared between two people who can really keep a conversation going. But it wasn't a one-off; our next phone call easily lasted for two hours. And we both have been amazed at the unexpected sense of connection. How can that be?

The more I study genetic genealogy, the more it has always left me in awe. But this most recent discovery has reached beyond that. Much like the experiences I've mentioned years ago, when transcribing World War II letters home from my father-in-law—my husband would find himself thinking, "I would have written it that way, too," even though his father died when he was barely five years of age—this new connection between close relatives who never knew each other has been just as awe-inspiring.

We play with chromosome segments and centiMorgan counts as if we were working math equations, but those finite numbers are the measure of something far more intangible about life. Yes, it's great to find a new DNA match, but it's the mystery buried deep inside the genetic substance that holds me entranced. How does something so small as that direct such vitally expressive connections between otherwise total strangers?