Discovering Your Birth Family through DNA Testing: A Guide to Reconnecting with Biological Relatives

Between 1945 and 1975, official government statistics reveal that almost three million US children were adopted through official adoption agencies. Formal adoptions peaked at 175,000 during that decade (this figure does not capture informal adoptions that weren’t documented through courts).

About five million American adults currently alive today were adopted, and have fond memories of Christmases and birthdays, baseball games and lake vacations with the families who raised them. Many adoptees nevertheless harbor longings to know why they have green eyes or high cheekbones or whether their family histories include diabetes or heart disease.

Adoptees, their children and grandchildren of adoptees and the people looking into adoption themselves are increasingly turning to DNA testing for answers on parts of their personal history that remain unknown to them. We will explain the process of discovering your birth family via DNA.

Step 1: Establish Realistic Expectations
I had a client who conducted DNA testing with the hope of discovering her father’s biological father. After finding an additional second cousin match that led her back to their family tree, genealogical research allowed her to form a hypothesis on who her biological grandfather might be. When we confirmed these results together, she stated: “Honestly I wasn’t expecting this process to be so straightforward!”

Of course, finding second cousins or closer matches through autosomal DNA databases may not always be simple – but your odds of doing so have certainly increased since more people began testing with services like AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA, 23andMe and MyHeritageDNA.

Before taking a DNA test, set reasonable expectations about what may be found and its potential effects. Like any journey of self-discovery, taking a DNA test to trace biological ancestry can be fraught with uncertainty – where do you start, what interpretation methods will you employ, do you really wish to learn the full picture and are all those questions being asked worth answering?

Before finding that match, it’s important to think through how its discovery will impact someone who doesn’t yet know of your existence. Aim for a balance between your rights of knowledge and their right not to know; no hard and fast rules apply here but generally speaking researchers with experience in birth family reunions agree that as an adoptee you have a right to know about your heritage while not having access to biological family relationships.

Contact family and/or professionals for advice before embarking on a search and support during its duration. Finding comfort and direction through others who have gone before you might help; check out DNAAdoption Community or Search Angels online groups as possible resources.

Your goal may be to learn just your ethnic background; however, with over 25 million people taking tests annually in DNA databases alone and millions taking DNA tests themselves having taken tests themselves it would be unrealistic to expect this knowledge to stop there. Your best option if you don’t wish to find your birth family is finding matches through work instead.

Step Two: Take Your Test
To understand your biological family tree more completely, a large pool of potential matches are needed. At time of writing, three out of the four companies offering cousin matching can be had for less than the cost of one test with AncestryDNA; once your results arrive use their settings menu at the top right to download them directly to your computer and upload that raw DNA data to Family Tree DNA and MyHeritage by following their instructions (for help here).

If you already know one parent, have them or one of their half-siblings or cousins tested for DNA. If your DNA matches match those on that side as well, you will know it belongs on that side and that your match could possibly be related.

An autosomal DNA test may not be the only tool you need when searching for birth family connections. Other DNA tests like those of direct male line (Y-DNA) and mitochondrial or mtDNA (direct female line) might prove more helpful. You’ll know which cousin matches are related directly by male or female lines.

MtDNA testing will likely not lead to major discoveries about your biological parents. MtDNA serves as an accurate record of your maternal line ancestors; for example, you have the same mtDNA as your mother who in turn had it from her mother. Someone sharing an identical maternal line could share an ancestor but when that person lived is unknown; an exact match could be your mother, sister or 20th cousin; there’s no good way of distinguishing among these results.

Men looking for their birth family will find their Y-DNA test more useful than women’s, since neither possess this particular DNA type and cannot take part in testing for it. Working similarly to mtDNA testing, Y-DNA reveals origin and match data related to your paternal line, such as ethnic origin (known as haplogrouping) information about their paternal lineages; typically this will indicate where in Europe their roots lay.

Your Y-DNA match list could reveal an invaluable clue: your surname. In most cultures, surnames are passed from father to son just like Y-DNA is passed from generation to generation; therefore if Family Tree DNA offers full Y-DNA testing and you see several guys with Butler in their list as potential biological fathers’ surname, that could indicate they were indeed related. At least 67 markers/locations should have been tested.

Keep an eye on the Genetic Distance column of your table of matches; if two individuals share a recent common ancestor, their genetic distance should be 3 or lower. Since Y-DNA mutates slightly more often than mtDNA does, it makes estimating how far back this person might have lived easier.

While Y-DNA (and sometimes mtDNA) may provide valuable clues in your search, they won’t always confirm whether a potential match is related. To be certain of that fact, autosomal DNA testing must also be completed to complete this step of verification.

Step 3: Explore Autosomal Matches
As soon as you log into your autosomal DNA test results for the first time, your ethnicity chart may draw your eye with its vivid colors, maps and percentages – especially if you don’t know anything about your background – but the excitement soon wears off once you see that beautiful ethnicity chart with all its vibrant hues, maps and percentages indicating where your DNA originated from. With one click of your mouse you could go from floundering aimlessly through endless possibilities to settling somewhere like Baltic Sea or English Channel; but keep in mind that these percentages may differ depending on who conducts testing services used during

To locate close biological relatives, turn to your list of matches — other test-takers who share some of your DNA–for help. Follow these three steps.

1. Search for second cousin or closer matches.
The website ranks matches from nearest to farthest in order of relationship potential (sibling or third-to-fifth cousin). Parents or siblings could make finding matches easy, while for everything else you should aim to match with second cousins or closer relatives; further away it might become more complex and time consuming.

Steps for Prioritizing Which DNA Matches Should be Researched First

2. Examine the pedigree chart of your potential match in search of common ancestors. As second cousins typically share great-grandparents, you will know which set of great-grandparents also belong to you and vice versa.

Ascertaining relationships is sometimes more challenging than anticipated. A DNA testing company will estimate your relationship based on how much DNA you share, measured in centimorgans (cM), but due to random DNA inheritance patterns, any given relationship could share different amounts. For instance, 250cM shares could indicate second cousins, first cousins twice removed, or genetically equivalent relationships. To identify your true relationship more precisely, compare your shared centimorgans with our free Relationship Chart which displays ranges for known relatives who’ve tested their DNA.

Remember, if you’re much older or younger than your match, they could be “removed” relatives. For instance, if you are 68 and your match is 28 (which might be discernible from photographs or the birth years of their parents and grandparents), chances are good you are “once removed”, meaning one generation closer to her ancestor than she is and will need to look further back in their pedigree chart to locate them.

Assuming you share 500 cM with Amber and are first cousins once removed (FCR), instead of looking at her two sets of grandparents as you would with any first cousin, you would assess all four sets of great-grandparents instead.

As with second cousins, third cousins present more challenges. Instead of four sets of great-grandparents to evaluate, this process would include eight sets of great-great-grandparents; should your match not already have an online pedigree chart published, you may have to message him or her and request one, which can create some touchy situations.

3. Narrow down your common ancestor candidates.
A good way to narrow your common ancestor candidates to one connecting you is triangulation, using Shared Matches or “in common with”. Your match list might only contain second cousin matches; but more likely there will also be third or fourth cousin matches who share one or more sets of great-grandparents as well.

Triangulating Your DNA Matches Here Are some Tips for Analyzing and Rectifying Them

The Shared Matches tool lets you discover matches who share DNA with both yourself and a second cousin match, enabling you to examine pedigree charts of those shared matches for any signs that they could be related through one of your candidate great-grandparent couples.

Assume you have a second cousin match named JSBrown68 and write down his great-grandparents; one such couple could be Mary Ann Waterton and Wesley Hall. When looking at your DNA matches with each other, two have Halls in them while one contains Watertons; this provides evidence that Mary and Wesley may indeed be your great-grandparents! For assistance using triangulation analysis to establish relationships among your matches, read July/August 2017 Family Tree Magazine.

4. Research Forward in Time.
Once you’ve identified an ancestral couple, the next step should be identifying all of Mary and Wesley’s grandchildren nine months before your date of birth and where they lived during that period.

Step 4: Connecting The Dots To put this all together, follow these steps. Find a second cousin or closer match, identify which generation has your tie, use shared matches to identify an ancestral couple, then research their descendants. My mom was adopted as an infant; our search for her birth family is an example of how your DNA match list can help locate your ancestors.

Mom and I were delighted when June, a first-to-second cousin match on Family Tree DNA, appeared. If June were my mom’s first cousin (given permission by June to share her story here), we expected they’d share parents, grandparents and possibly an uncle on Dad’s side (we suspected this from other research); or secondly they’d likely share great-grandparents together; unfortunately this was before Shared cM Project came along or we could have quickly identified that June was indeed related to Mom via its table immediately showing we likely shared great-grandparents with Mom cM Project’s table that suggested this connection instantly!