When DNA tests find skeletons in your family’s closet, these researchers want to know about it
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(RNS) — When Joseph Stuart was two weeks into his new job at Brigham Young University as an assistant professor of history, a student came into his office for advice. She sat down to talk but didn’t make eye contact, instead looking past Stuart to stare out his office window.
“I found out something about my family,” she began.
Through DNA testing, she’d recently learned she had a half-sibling she never knew existed. This discovery rocked the certainty of what she thought she knew about her parents and their family’s history. She also wondered what this meant for the afterlife in a religion that teaches that families can be together forever if they’ve been sealed in a Latter-day Saint, or Mormon, temple.
Stuart was uniquely positioned to help, as he teaches courses on genealogy and the family at BYU, the only university in the world that offers an undergraduate degree in family history. He’s also a committed Latter-day Saint who believes in eternal families, but he sensed his explanation about how complicated family relationships could be worked out in heaven was “not as comforting as I wanted it to be.”
The student looked at him and asked, “Yeah, but what about now?”
Great question. In the several years since then, Stuart has had many more such conversations with Mormons and others who have discovered previously unknown relatives through DNA testing. People spit into a tube or swab the inside of a cheek and send that sample off, often hoping just to know what nationalities they’ve got in their family history.
But in addition to learning, say, that they’re 12.5% Lithuanian, many are also finding close family relatives they had no idea about — half-siblings, first cousins and even parents who are not the parents who raised them.
To date there’s not a lot of research about how often this happens and how people cope with the news. Stuart is teaming up with an expert to try to change that. Diahan Southard is the founder and CEO of Your DNA Guide, which helps people use DNA testing to research their family history.
This is the field of “genetic genealogy,” which has been in existence since around 2000, when the first direct-to-consumer DNA testing became available. She’s been in the industry since its beginnings and has seen it evolve to test autosomal DNA, which is not just a single direct line but both sides of your family.
Consumer education has not caught up with the tests’ growing sophistication. Southard said many people who take the test still don’t know it will match them to living relatives, and the testing sites don’t explain who those people are or how the company found them. And even when consumers do find out they have, say, a long-lost sister, they often don’t believe it.
“They say, ‘That can’t be. This is fake. How could this be possible?’” Southard said.
Sometimes it’s “not the presence of someone, but their absence” on a DNA test that is the shock, she said — for example, if you know that both of your parents have taken DNA tests with the same company you did, but only your mother showed up in your results as being biologically related to you. The man you thought was your biological father is not. That can be a staggering revelation.
Southard and Stuart have now heard many such stories through their work, but they want to learn more. Earlier this month they launched a website called Belonging Beyond Biology, where individuals can share their stories about how a DNA test changed what they thought they knew about their family.
They want to hear about all of it. Some stories, they expect, will be joyful, and others will be hard.
Southard’s got both kinds of stories just within her immediate family. Her mother was adopted, which they always knew about. Through DNA testing her mother was able to connect with her biological half-siblings on one side of her family, and “they’re incredible people,” Southard said. “They’re the salt of the earth, the best people you could ever want to be related to.” Her mother’s father’s history, however, was difficult to learn about. He, too, was adopted. Southard isn’t certain exactly what happened, but she thinks his conception “probably wasn’t consensual.”
Southard and Stuart said individuals whose DNA testing reveals incest and rape in their family history are often at a loss about how to absorb that trauma. “As we ask people to share their stories, we have the utmost respect for those who are willing to share it in the hope of helping others, but we completely understand if someone is not in a position to be able to talk about it,” Stuart said.
The researchers are particularly interested in how people’s DNA testing experiences have challenged, expanded or changed their religious faith. They expect that most of the people who contribute will be LDS but would also like to hear from people of other religious traditions (or no religion).
After volunteers first put their information into the Belonging Beyond Biology website, they will receive a survey about their DNA testing experiences and a consent form. Some of those people will also be contacted for a longer interview for research that will eventually be published in academic journals.
The more people who participate, the fuller the picture the researchers can present. Large numbers, Southard said, can also be reassuring for the participants themselves whose worlds have been rocked by DNA revelations about their family history.
“A big purpose of this research is to normalize the experience, so that people can see just with the numbers that ‘Oh, 27% of other people responded like I did.’ And that’s really comforting,” said Southard. “Everybody has their own individualized experience, but there’s so much that we share in common. That can bring a community together, in a way.”
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