Oregon adoptee’s DNA test leads to discovery of sister
PORTLAND, Ore. — On the night of March 23, 1984, a little boy was found crying on the steps outside the Yongsan Theatre in Seoul, South Korea. He was scooped up by the manager, a Mr. Hong, and taken to the local police station.
The boy was estimated to be about 2-and-a-half years old and quickly prepared to be placed for adoption.
Less than 24 hours later and a mile or so away, a little girl was dropped off by her father at a marketplace. He said he’d come back for her, but he never did. When a woman found the child alone, she discovered a note in the girl’s pocket that read, “Please send this child to an orphanage through police station. At present, she has no parents.”
Records from the Social Welfare Society Inc. don’t say whether police ever tried to find her family before placing her up for adoption as well.
Through different agencies, the children were each adopted by families in the United States. The boy was raised as Justin Kragt and grew up mostly in Salem. The girl became Renee Alanko and grew up in Northern California.
And until this year, they never knew they were brother and sister.
In 2014, searching for some distant blood relatives, Kragt did a DNA test through the company 23andme.
He did find some distant connections and was happy with the outcome.
Kragt was born with congenital heart failure, which required open heart surgery at age 4. He had assumed he had been abandoned because he had special needs.
Alanko, who had known the name of her father and sister, had always wanted to know more about her birth family. She had traveled to South Korea for a birth family search in 2008, but turned up no one.
This summer, Alanko, now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, took her own DNA test because she was thinking about having children. After the search in 2008, she was looking for health indicators, not family.
So it was a shock when the results of her 23andme kit predicted she had a sibling living just 600 miles away in Salem.
When she reached out to Kragt and discovered they had been abandoned in neighboring districts and within a day of each other, the pieces came together.
They talked over the phone and shared photos but saw each other for the first time last week when Alanko flew into Portland for a tear-filled reunion. Kragt’s adoptive family was there on what was Kragt’s 36th birthday.
“I always thought I was alone in the world, and I was content with that,” Justin said before tearing up.
“I have a lot of holes that need to be filled in my heart,” he said, “and this does, it patches it up.”