DNA testing may upend adoptees’ lives

All Rich Crandall was expecting from his Ancestry.com test was a chuckle about his ethnic origins.

But his expectations changed when his test results arrived via email. It said with an “extremely high” confidence level that he was related to one other person. She lived in California. Her name was Pam. She was his mother.

Adopted at birth, Crandall, 50, said he never contemplated that the mailin DNA test —which he had done for fun at a family reunion — would turn up any surprises. He knew he had been adopted and was never curious about his birth mother. But now, the unfamiliar name tugged at him.

Like an increasing number of people, Crandall discovered the power of DNA testing. It can uncover secrets long protected under court seal and unravel family mysteries that would have been lost to history.

And for adults who were adopted as children, the simple act of spitting into a tube is now accelerating a search for birth parents in ways unthinkable even 15 years ago.

Companies like Ancestry, 23andme.com and FamilyTreeDNA .com have made mail-in DNA tests easy and cheap, with more than 10 million tests so far among the “big three.”

Those numbers will increase as relatives take tests or give them as gifts in a new way of bonding around the holiday table.

Combine that with easy searches of Google and Facebook and troves of old paper records now available from online genealogical resources, and the result is a recipe for reconnecting lost segments of a family tree.

Mail-in DNA testing is “kind of the gateway drug to genealogical research,” genealogist Scott Fisher said. The companies’ marketing usually plays off the drive to find out where your ancestors hailed from. But they also go beyond geography to match individuals with other living people when their DNA lines up.

“People say ‘This can’t be,’ and I say, ‘Well, it’s science,’ ” said Karin Corbeil, director of DNAAdoption, an online network that offers courses to help adoptees and others use DNA to find family connections. “DNA is not going to lie.”

For older adoptees and birth parents from years past, this boom in online DNA testing has been especially potent.

Before the early 1990s, “closed adoptions” were the norm, with records protected under court seal. But the online tests get around that obstacle.

The tests allow users to choose whether their identity should be made public in the testing company’s database. If adoptees pick this option, a birth parent can find them. And if a birth parent has already taken the same test, that parent’s name is likely to be printed right there on the test results.

Even if a birth parent doesn’t have public test results, a test often connects the dots to a sibling, cousin or another

relative who does.

Birth parents may be shocked that technology has unveiled information that they were told would remain secret forever. Men find out they have children they never knew existed.

“It’s absolutely amazing what adoptees are doing,” genealogist Phyllis Lewellen said. “Or, it’s kind of awful.”

Fisher, host of Extreme Genes, a syndicated family-history radio show, cautions people doing genealogical research to prepare for the unexpected.

“I give them a warning: Are you prepared for this?” he said.

Making connections

Rich Crandall barely paused to weigh the consequences of what the DNA link to his biological mother might bring.

“There’s nothing to lose by connecting,” Crandall said.

It took only five days after he got his results in July for him to make contact.

He was driving back from the bank when his cell phone rang. It was Pam, calling from her California home.

“I kept driving around,” Crandall said. “I didn’t want to go back to the office. We just talked and talked. It was a very easy conversation.”

And Pam had lots of news for the son she gave up in 1967. She had hired a private investigator four years earlier when she learned she had colon cancer.

“I didn’t even need to see him,” she said of the fruitless search. “I just wanted someone to tell him I had cancer.” Now, she was able to tell him herself. Pam frets that Rich hasn’t done a cancer screen yet, noting there’s a history of colon cancer in her family. (Rich explains he waited until he turned 50 so his insurance would cover the screen, but says a busy travel schedule has continued to delay the test.)

He suspects Pam is still trying to get her head around the fact that her son is a Mormon.

Pam admits as much: His traditional upbringing, his blended family of 13 children and eight grandchildren, is a stark difference from her blended family of two daughters. Adding a son with a bevy of offspring is a lot to grasp.

“Dealing with this whole thing is not that easy,” she said.

Pam, wary of how the new revelation might affect her adult daughters’ lives, asked to be identified by only her first name. Like Rich, she said she did a DNA test, at her sister’s urging, to uncover ethnic origins. She didn’t give a thought to the possibility of finding her son.

In frequent texts and occasional phone calls, the two are getting to know each other. It’s a cautious courtship as they learn more about each other.

A meeting is in the future, they say, but nothing is set.

Other adoptees have more disappointing DNA matches. They realize that even if they find their birth parents, that doesn’t mean they can connect.

No contact, please

Randall Howe, 54, hungers for a chance to learn more about who brought him into the world. He was adopted at three days old and knew barely anything about his biological parents.

Eight years ago, he found his biological mother’s name on the pre-adoption birth certificate he obtained to complete his passport application.

But she made it clear, through an intermediary, that she did not want any contact. The family-history trail was cold until Howe, an Arizona appellate court judge, got a DNA test as a birthday gift this year.

The results put him on the trail of other relatives, who welcomed him into the clan. He’s looking forward to a reunion in Oregon in the spring, although he doubts his biological mother will attend. His relatives told him she kept her pregnancy secret, telling only her mother.

Howe is bothered at her refusal to make contact. He’s not looking for a relationship, he said, but he’d like information, to understand his personal family history.

“I’m owed an acknowledgment and information,” Howe said. “I don’t see why that’s particularly traumatic, 55 years later.”

The test results also turned up information about his father. Howe hired an investigator to get a letter to the California man Howe suspects is his dad.

“I said I did not intend to disrupt his life or his family life, but I am looking for information about him and his family,” Howe said of his letter. “I offered to travel and meet with him.”

The letter wasn’t persuasive. There’s been no response, other than a polite “thank you.”

Howe said he may try and reach out to the man’s adult children.

“I’m not as reluctant to invade their privacy as I was back then,” Howe said of his earlier reticence to contact his birth parents and their kin. “I decided I exist, I’m a fact.”

Rich Robertson, the PI working for Howe, is wary about pushing too hard. As much as an adoptee might want to find a birth parent, it’s important to respect the privacy of all involved, he said.

“You just don’t know what would happen when you roll in a grenade like this,” Robertson said of family links uncovered by DNA.

Birth parents and adopted children alike can be caught in a DNA test’s unforeseen results.

No more secrecy

Britany Luna said birth parents who thought closed-adoption records would shield them should prepare to be found. The same goes for adopted children. “There is no confidentiality or secrecy anymore,” said Luna, an adoptee herself who found her birth mother through DNA testing.

A test may not immediately identify a birth parent, as was Crandall’s case, but it’s only a matter of time before anyone working through a web of cousins and other family connections finds a parent.

“It’s a wonderful thing,” Luna said of DNA testing. “Otherwise, many, many people wouldn’t have access to their identity at all.”

But she says any adoptee delving into their history shouldn’t stop with a DNA test. Records are important, too.

She advocates opening adoption records, something she’s pursuing through her work with the Utah Coalition for Adoption Reform and Education. She’s also worked with a Facebook group to reunify adoptees in her birth state of Utah with their birth parents. So far, she counts more than 100 reunifications.

She’s pursuing a degree in social work because of what she said is a lack of therapists who understand the issues of adopted adults, who fundamentally want to be accepted, to feel their adoption was not a rejection.

DNA led to happy occasion

Amy Huckeba got those reassurances when, at age 50, she found her birth mom. It was a happy occasion, in more than one way: Amy lives in Chandler and her birth mom in Tucson. Now, they meet monthly for breakfast, traveling to each others’ cities or meeting halfway.

For years Huckeba buried the instinct to track down her birth parents. It was only when her own children started pressing the issue two years ago, curious about their other grandparents, that she ordered not one, but all three of the major DNA tests.

Those test results led her to her birth father in Kansas, who was in failing mental health. They talked by phone a few times, but he died before they could meet. She also learned she had a halfsister in Kansas City. They met in Las Vegas last year and hit it off.

For as happy as that connection was, Huckeba wasn’t prepared for her reaction when, a year later, her search led to her birth mother and a call from Tucson.

“I fell on the kitchen table and let out a sound that I didn’t know I could make,” she said. “It was very primal.”

It gave her the connection, and the acceptance, she had been seeking. She learned the circumstances of her birth, that her birth mom gave her the name “Amy” and they were together for more than a week before she was placed in foster care. Her birth mom carried her to that placement, holding her tiny finger all the way.

“Bonding was really discouraged,” Huckeba said. “But I had that.”

She said she’s lost any hesitance about digging up her past.

“You have no need to apologize,” she said. “You need to know. For your mental health, you need to know your origins.”

Look mom: Here’s my mom

Crandall had a happy and satisfying life growing up as the oldest son of Linda and her husband, Rex.

So when Rich got his DNA results, he went straight to their Mesa home to share the news. His mom, he said, is a very confident woman. He wasn’t worried about upsetting her.

He popped open his laptop and pulled up the Ancestry.com site. “I say, ‘Mom, this is my birth mother,’ ” Crandall recalled. “And that’s when she goes, ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’ ”

Linda toyed with the idea of inviting Pam to Rich’s surprise 50th-birthday party in September. But on the advice of one of Rich’s daughters, who has twins via adoption, she backed off.

“I think we ought to let Rich take the lead on this,” she concluded.

For his part, Rich says finding his birth mother left him with no regrets.

Although he said he never had a great curiosity about his origins, something deep inside him was triggered when he heard testimony on adoption while serving as a state senator.

Crandall recalls “bawling like a baby” when a young woman testified to the Senate Health Committee about why she gave her baby up for adoption.

He can’t recall the legislation, nor how the vote went. But he does remember how her words moved him.

It made him think how much love his birth mom must have had for him, to give up her baby.