RLP 92: The Lost Family – interview with author Libby Copeland

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 92: Interview with author Libby Copeland about her book, The Lost Family. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.

Nicole (42s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of Research Like a Pro and I’m here with my mom, accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana.

Diana (58s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (58s):
I’m doing well. I’m so excited for today’s podcast.

Diana (1m 3s):
Well, I am too. We have got Libby Copeland here, who is the author of a new book out that we’re going to talk all about. So welcome, Libby, how are you doing today?

Libby Copeland (1m 12s):
I’m good. Thank you so much for having me, you know, it’s a little bit strange here with everything going on, but I’m happy to be here talking about something else for a little while.

Diana (1m 23s):
I know isn’t it great to get our minds off what’s going on in the world? Just for a little bit.

Libby Copeland (1m 28s):
Even if it’s only 15 minutes, it makes me feel better.

Diana (1m 32s):
Exactly. It makes us feel like life is going on. For all of our listeners, we hope you are all staying safe and healthy, and we’re hoping to give you to something interesting to listen to today. So I think a lot of our listeners have taken a DNA test, and I think that probably everybody has had something unexpected come up in those DNA tests. And a lot of that has prompted you Libby to write this book called The Lost Family. And so I’m really excited to dig in and talk about how you did your research for this, what your motivations were.

Diana (2m 14s):
So let me just give a little bit of an introduction about you. So Libby is a journalist and in the course of writing this book, she consulted with DNA experts like CeCe Moore and so many people. It was fun when I read through the book, because I knew personally some of these people in the book and it was just really fun to read about them and put everything in perspective. I’ve really, really enjoyed the book. And I’m excited to talk to you more about this book.

Libby Copeland (2m 45s):
Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. I’m excited to talk about it.

Nicole (2m 49s):
Tell us more about when it was published and just your background with the book.

Libby Copeland (2m 54s):
Sure. So A Lost Family came out in March, so about a month ago, and I started working on it when I wrote a piece for the Washington post three years ago. The piece was on a woman named Alice Collins Plebuch who had taken a test in 2012 through Ancestry. This was when autosomal DNA testing was really starting to come on the scene. And Alice was an early adopter and she didn’t know a lot of people who had done this kind of testing. In fact, the Ancestry test that she took was still in beta testing. So she didn’t know even how reliable it would be. She took this test and she was fully expecting to be British Isles, primarily Irish when she got her little ethnicity pie chart back.

Libby Copeland (3m 38s):
And in fact was stunned and confused to see that her results were half British Isles as expected, but then half Ashkenazi Jewish. And she didn’t know what to make of that and at first thought that perhaps that the science wasn’t as good as Ancestry was promising and sort of embarked on this genetic detective mystery to unravel her results. And it turned out that Ancestry was correct. And the explanation was not the expected one. It wasn’t that her dad was someone other than she thought, or it wasn’t that she was adopted, but she had to kind of go through all these theories and do a lot of really complex genetic genealogy work to uncover the truth. And it took her about two and a half years. So I wrote this really long, fascinating story for the Washington post about Alice’s tale.

Libby Copeland (4m 21s):
And after that story ran, it got a really big response. And I started to get emails from readers telling me about their own DNA testing stories about their revelations, about their moments of reckoning with genealogy, with family history and what it had meant to them. And these stories were so moving and so intimate and personal, and really life-changing that I realized that there really needed to be a book and there wasn’t one yet. So I started working on the book in earnest and looking for people who would be my characters, who would tell different kinds of stories about what life is like, in the margins of the DNA testing era.

Nicole (5m 1s):
I really love how you used Alice’s story throughout kind of as a framework for the book, it was really fun to keep coming back to her story and hearing the next part of it. So wonderful job just weaving all the characters together with the themes in the book. I loved it.

Libby Copeland (5m 15s):
Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. Alice is like one of those people that a journalist dreams of finding, because she’s got an amazing analytical brain, she’s got incredible attention for details and retention for details, and she keeps great records. So she and her sister and the rest of the family were able to basically document step-by-step everything they did. And so for people who are into genetic genealogy and sort of the techniques of triangulation and so on, it’s really fun to read her techniques that she was using and just the sheer volume of data that she had to amass thousands and thousands of cousins that she was trying to understand her relationship to all of it muddled by in endogamy within the Ashkenazi Jewish population.

Libby Copeland (5m 57s):
So she really had her work cut out for her and she did an incredible job. And she’s also very funny and I was able to weave some of her dry humor into the book, which was a pleasure.

Nicole (6m 7s):
Yes, it was very entertaining. And I couldn’t put the book down because it was just so engaging.

Libby Copeland (6m 14s):
Oh, thank you so much. It was really an honor to write it because I got to talk to so many people and they were telling me their stories and I felt incredibly moved by their trust that they put in me and the intimacy of these stories, which, you know, in many cases they’re making people think about their lives differently. Think about their childhoods differently. And that’s like a really profound thing to have happened when you spit into a tube and you’re maybe not expecting such a moving and significant outcome.

Nicole (6m 39s):
Yes. I think that’s part of the reason why it was hard to put it down is because we are so curious about each other’s very personal stories.

Libby Copeland (6m 47s):
Yeah, exactly. DNA testing gives us this opportunity to kind of engage in something we’re really interested in, which is genealogy and how can it inform our lives now? How can it tell us about who we are? How does it provide a model for us to get through our lives? I’ve been thinking about that a lot right now, particularly with the epidemic, how can the trials that our ancestors went through, help us in the modern day survive and thrive in these incredibly challenging and frightening circumstances. The people I interviewed in some cases were heavy into genealogy already. And so they kind of were ready to engage with all of the methods of genetic genealogy techniques, but they also found that sometimes when there was a surprise in the testing results, that the implications were even more personal, right?

Libby Copeland (7m 30s):
Sometimes they were in their immediate family, not two or three generations back, but actually something significant about their own parent, for instance. So that was interesting, the way that for many people, these family history journeys became so immediate through the DNA tests.

Nicole (7m 43s):
Exactly. We’ve had a friend who was an accredited genealogist. She was focusing on finding her ancestors with DNA, but then ended up finding that her grandfather was not who she thought it was. So you’re right. It just, it really comes back to those discoveries of immediately family.

Libby Copeland (8m 0s):
Right. And sometimes you don’t even realize that you’re asking the question that you’re asking. One of the other groups of people that I was really interested in was people who aren’t genealogists. And they just think, well, I’m just going to get an ethnicity pie chart. They might not even know they’re going to get their DNA relatives. For example, I interviewed a man who was a sperm donor back in the 1970s, and he got a DNA test kit as a gift and decided to do it. And didn’t even realize it would tell him who his genetic children were, that he had helped conceive through sperm donation. So there’s people engaging with DNA testing who are really schooled in it. You know, maybe they tested with FamilyTreeDNA back in the early 2000s. And they did, you know, Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA tests.

Libby Copeland (8m 41s):
And then there are consumers who get it as a gift and they don’t even know exactly what it’s going to give them. And it’s so inexpensive now. And so there’s different kinds of reactions, depending on how much facility and literacy you have with the testing and with the genetics behind it.

Diana (8m 54s):
Well, that reminds me of a hair appointment I had a few years ago, and my hairdresser, she said, you know what, my husband, his coworker is one of those children of this man who spread his sperm around and he has like 50 children in Utah. And it was absolutely shocking to her. I had read about the story in the newspaper. And so when I found out that it was that close to home, and I actually knew this teacher at the school, I thought, oh, my word, I think it was just taking the test for fun, just to see ethnicity. I think that that is one of the key themes of The Lost Family is that you explore that, but I want to go back and talk a little bit about Alice and her pioneering some of these techniques, because when she started her DNA discovery, genealogists were just trying to figure out how to use this.

Diana (9m 52s):
And so when I read it, I was just fascinated with following that progression of how we started to use DNA results, to figure things out. And it has come such a long way. I just remember people talking about those immense spreadsheets that Alice used. So talk to us a little bit about what you discovered with that progression and your thoughts on that.

Libby Copeland (10m 14s):
Well, one of the things I was really interested in tracing was the history of how citizens, scientists, genetic genealogists have taken the information that company is like FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe gave them and figured out how to use it, to find their birth parents. For instance, in the case of adoptees, there is an astonishing amount of information you can get, but you have to experiment with it. You had to use spreadsheets in the early days. And that’s what they did. And there’s an organization called DNA Adoption and they really pioneered these techniques that Alice wound up using. She took a class and she used their instruction, which was incredibly complicated. I mean, I tried to read through, I think it was like 19 pages of instructions about how to piece together the information from your overlapping genetic segments with your genetic kin, and my eyes rolled back in my head, it was so confusing.

Libby Copeland (11m 6s):
And Alice happens to be somebody who worked in data processing for her entire career is very comfortable with technology. So she was like ready for the challenge. But I think a lot of people at that stage in 2012 would not have been. Part of the challenge was that the databases were just so small. And you find this now, for instance, if you’re in a smaller population like GEDMatch, for instance, if you were trying to piece together the identity of say a birth father, just using a very, very small database, maybe you say a million or fewer, you would have quite a challenge on your hands. Nowadays, if you have a database of 60 million like Ancestry, you’re going to spit into a vial and you’re going to get a first cousin, perhaps certainly a second cousin and most genetic genealogists who do this work will say, if you have a second cousin, you’re going to be able to figure this out.

Libby Copeland (11m 56s):
Third and fourth cousins might be a little harder. Sometimes people are spitting into a tube and they’re getting a half sibling and that makes it much easier, but it’s astonishing how quickly the field has changed just eight years ago, I knew this was something that was going to take Alison an extremely long time to solve. And indeed did take her an extremely long time to solve. And part of what I wanted to get across was the complications of that. You know, just the time that she spent and the sheer volume of data. And so I spent a lot of time with her when I was out in Washington state, just kind of watching her method and then writing about it because the woman is tireless and stubborn and smart, and she was not going to stop. She would send out thousands of requests to genetic cousins saying, let’s figure out how we’re related.

Libby Copeland (12m 37s):
And she and her sister would send out test kit after test kit to people. Some of them, they were related to, some of them they, they hoped they would find were related to, trying to figure out if they could narrow down the explanation for Alice’s unexpected ethnicity results.

Diana (12m 53s):
I think that you’re having chronicled, that is kind of the history of genetic genealogy. And it’s really great to have that in writing because I look back and think, man, I’m glad I got what I’ve got. Now you think the tools Ancestry has and you know, some of the other sites and just imagine what it’s going to be like, even in five years with the rate things are progressing. So it’s really great that we have kind of a little history here of how it started out. So thank you for reading the history of genetic genealogy, because that’s what I felt I was reading. And I Iove that. So I know that you talked to a lot of really interesting people. You took the whole gamut of genetic genealogy, and I just had to ask you, you know, what about the science?

Diana (13m 36s):
You’re a journalist. You don’t have a big science background and there’s so much science in this book. Was that intimidating to you at all?

Libby Copeland (13m 43s):
Yeah, it was, I have to say that was really challenging. I flew down to Houston and toured Bennett Greenspan’s lab at FamilyTreeDNA and I remember putting on the little booties over my shoes, and I think there was some sort of lab coat I had to wear and just thinking to myself, okay, I’m going to record everything. And then if I don’t understand something, I will just have to ask like a scientist to translate it for me. And I just remember going through and listening to the recording later, I kept asking over and over, so wait, what does this do? Wait, what, tell me this. And then I went back and I wrote it up and I sent it to him and I was like, tell me everything that’s wrong. And then I vetted it. In fact, I had a geneticist read the entire book and correct it for me.

Libby Copeland (14m 26s):
And by that point I had some mistakes, but I had grasped a lot of it because I had talked to so many geneticists by the time I got to the point of writing it. But every time I would interview a scientist, I would go back to them afterwards. And I would say, I think what I understood that you said is this, do I have it right? And that was so incredibly challenging to fact check. Then you don’t want to bumble it up, but you also don’t want to make it so complex. I wanted to make this accessible for everyone, people like me who do not have PhDs in science. There was a lot of challenging things about this book, but understanding the science was a key part of that.

Diana (14m 59s):
Yeah. I totally feel your pain because we have been developing a Research Like a Pro with DNA course and working on the book right now, and we’ve done a lot of blog posts. And so I’ve just been reading all the white papers on ethnicity this week and trying to get my head around all the science. And it is difficult to translate that into words and not to plagiarize, not use the company’s words, put it into your own words, but still have it be correct. So I really appreciated that because I’m kind of in the thick of that right now, myself. So yeah. You have a good model there.

Libby Copeland (15m 35s):
Oh thank you so much. I did spend a lot of time on the phone with the companies vetting also the science of what they use, you know, how do you determine ethnicity results? You know, how does that all work and happily, they all use basically the same method, just obviously different versions of that method, but they all have the same kind of basic template for how they do that. And that made it a little bit easier, but certainly the specifics vary and that’s where things can get complex.

Diana (16m 0s):
Yeah. And I think you did a good job of explaining that because people do get confused about why their ethnicity is different from website to website.

Libby Copeland (16m 8s):
Right. And the problem with that is then they throw in the towel and they say, well, this stuff is just bunk and it doesn’t hold water. Well, it certainly is not bunk. And it certainly does hold water, but you have to take it, to mix metaphors, with a grain of salt, right? If a company tells you that you are 1% Korean, as one of the companies did for me, like, don’t be shocked if six months later when they update their ethnicity estimate that 1% Korean disappears. You just have to know that maybe at the margins with the very small percentages, they’re constantly improving and evolving their science. And so it may not be a hundred percent. Don’t take it to the bank.

Diana (16m 43s):
No, I’m really interested to see what our ethnicity is going to look like in a few years.

Libby Copeland (16m 46s):
I know. I know its been getting better.

Nicole (16m 51s):
So, Libby tell us, were you already interested in genealogy when you started writing? What’s your journey been like?

Libby Copeland (16m 56s):
Yeah, I was, my dad had been doing genealogy on his side of the family since I think the 1980s taking trips down to court houses in Tennessee to try and fish stuff out. I think he may have hired local genealogist at one point to try and trace his line. And my mom was somewhat interested as well. Both my parents had done the National Geographic DNA test back in like the mid 2000s. And then they had both done 23andMe and my dad had gifted me a 23andMe kit and it was sitting on my microwave in my kitchen for a few months. And I was very curious about it, but I was also working full time with two small kids and thinking once I like test and get the results, I’m just going to want to do that.

Libby Copeland (17m 41s):
So I had to kind of gear up to have the time for it and I was putting it off and putting it off for a few months. And then I started working on the Washington post story about Alice and I, well, if I’m doing this story, I better see what it looks like. And that’s when I spit into a tube and it was like entering another country. It was incredible. A lot of people who’ve been doing genealogy for years, which I have not, they talk about how DNA testing helped them break through brick walls and just really cut through a lot of barriers. And for people like me, it’s almost like a back door into genealogy instead of being into genealogy and then doing DNA testing. I did the DNA testing and then sort of like lost my mind over the number of records that were possible to find at Ancestry, and FamilySearch, on MyHeritage and elsewhere.

Libby Copeland (18m 26s):
And I was like, holy cannoli, what can I find here? So I did sort of fall a bit down a rabbit hole and I went out to the Family History library in Utah. And again, lost my mind a little bit in the records, forgot that it was time to eat, forgot that the garage might be closing where my car was parked. Like just kind of lost time. And then kind of came back up again for air and was like, oh, I got it. I understand why this is such an incredible obsession for people. Compared to doing this like in the eighties, there’s so many more records. It must be like going to a party, and like the world is filled with candy for genealogists right now. So it’s completely amazing. So I did do some genealogy for the book.

Libby Copeland (19m 8s):
My parents have continued to do genealogy and through DNA testing, we found some pretty amazing things which would not have been possible through the paper trail. So on my dad’s side, we found a second cousin in Sweden, which is where part of his ancestry comes from. And we actually traveled to Sweden and met her. Her daughter is a genealogist and we would not have known about this family line because there’s an NPE or, or non-paternity event in the line, and so we wouldn’t have known from the paper trail alone that they existed. So to have that connection was completely wonderful. And then on my mother’s side, we were able to find a second cousin from Ukraine. My mother’s family is Ashkenazi Jewish and so this line of the family presumably survived pogroms and World War II and the Holocaust.

Libby Copeland (19m 54s):
And then this cousin moved to Israel and then came to New York. And again, we would not have known that this line existed at all because my mother’s ancestor just came to the United States and never spoke about the people who’d left behind. So we would have assumed that they would have all perished. So this is just an incredible gift. And I have to say that that ability to know those people and have access to the past, which really isn’t that far away, I find that astonishing and wonderful.

Nicole (20m 21s):
That is astonishing and wonderful. I love your stories of finding ancestors and relations, who you wouldn’t have found without the DNA testing. I think that’s so beautiful. And you just did a good job in the book with balancing these wonderful discoveries with some of the disappointments and the challenges that come from DNA testing, really covers the whole gamut of emotion that people feel when they test and they out that maybe their biological family is not interested in knowing them, all the way to the other end of like what you mentioned with finding these cousins who tell you about the history of your family that maybe you didn’t know about.

Libby Copeland (21m 0s):
Yeah. I didn’t want this to be a book that was all just one way or the other. It’s not a cautionary book, nor is it a book that says we’ll engage with it without sort of thinking carefully about it. I wanted it to be a book that shows the sort of wide sweep of what’s happening. I don’t think that people are going to stop engaging with DNA testing. There’s so many of us that have done it already about 35 million. I think that, you know, even if you don’t do it, your life will probably be affected by it. Anyway, because there may be a family discovery that will come out for a cousin or an aunt, and they’ll tell you about it and your life will be changed by this technology. So it’s not even about saying do or don’t, it’s simply let’s look at how this is changing us on a small level.

Libby Copeland (21m 44s):
It changes people’s lives. They look back on their own life. If they, for instance, discovered that maybe their dad’s not genetically related to them, that prompts a reckoning with the past, with childhood, with history, with memory and on a societal level, this is really affecting how we talk and think about family. You know, how broadly can we define family and how big can our hearts be? And the most optimistic stories and the stories that made me feel the most hopeful are the ones where people are really expansive in terms of their definition of family. They say, well, I may have been donor conceived and didn’t know it, but you know, the man raised me as my father. And I also feel a great connection to the man who contributed half my genetic material. And I don’t have to be super picky about the language, I can have room in my heart for both.

Libby Copeland (22m 28s):
And that to me, I think is sort of pointing the way towards the future in terms of how we think about making peace with these revelations. We don’t have to be binary. We don’t have to say genetics is everything nor do we have to say experience is everything. You know, it’s both, it’s truly both.

Diana (22m 42s):
And I love how you cover that in the book. Speaking from my personal experience, my youngest sister is adopted and I helped her find her biological family. The first time I worked with DNA for an adoptee was with her, finding her biological father. It was really interesting to see how this hole, that had kind of been in her life, with just not knowing, how, just finding who that person was, kind of helped fill that. And she kind of had the good and the bad where he didn’t want to have anything to do with her, but her two half-sisters embraced her and they met. But then the thing that she said to me was, our dad is my dad.

Diana (23m 27s):
The man who raised me is my dad. And you’re absolutely right that we are just having to define family in a whole new way. Now with the genetic relationships, the people that we are raised with, and we are having to expand our hearts. You know, it’s like this whole gamut of emotions and I watched my sister go through this, but now she’s come to such a good place with it and feels very healed and feels like she can now go on with life and not have this constant question in the back of her mind. So I am sure that is the story that you saw played out over and over and over from all these people that were contacting you and the people that you talked about in this book.

Diana (24m 8s):
Yeah.

Libby Copeland (24m 9s):
I mean that your sister’s story is beautiful and that description of a hole in the heart is one that I heard over and over for people who were seeking genetic kin. There’s a sense of really needing to understand where they come from. And that is such an important impulse. It doesn’t necessarily mean as you say that you then don’t consider the man who raised you to be your father. He is your father. And yet this is information that is profoundly needed by many people. And that’s what DNA testing provides. Then once you know the information, you can decide what to do with it, whether to reach out and then all the complications of how the other person on the other side responds. And those were some of the things that I also wanted to trace. How do people respond on the other side? What affects, how they respond and what makes people respond one way or another?

Libby Copeland (24m 52s):
And then how does that warm the seeker’s heart or break the sinkers heart and how do they get over that? You know, there’s just so many incredible stories of Americans going through this right now, all sorts of flavors of ways that it can play out. It’s just an incredible time that we’re living in right now.

Nicole (25m 9s):
It really is. Do you want to talk a little bit about the tipping point in home DNA testing?

Libby Copeland (25m 15s):
Sure. Yeah. So I was really interested in this idea that we’re all now affected by this technology, whether or not we choose to test. And that’s because something like 35 million people have tested at one of the four major DNA testing companies. That means that if there’s, for instance, something important about your family history, that you don’t yet know a genetic secret or an accident of history, those things are going to come out, whether or not you choose to test. And all of us need to be having a conversation about what this means. Even if we’ve never tested, we’re all going to be forced to think about how does this affect my family. And so, you know, maybe eight years ago when Alice, the protagonist of my book first tested, maybe back then there was kind of a choice you could say, well, if you don’t want to find something out, simply don’t test, but now so many people have tested.

Libby Copeland (26m 5s):
Many of them are bound to be related to you. It’s not even a question of choose to test, or don’t choose to test, ask the question or don’t ask the question. It’s more of, okay, now we’re all affected by it. So let’s have a conversation about it. And in some cases that may mean if, for instance, you’re a parent with an adult child, and there’s sort of an important fact about your child’s conception that they don’t yet know, for instance, perhaps they were donor conceived and they don’t know it. That means as experts have told me that, it’s probably smart to think about how to tell them before they do DNA testing, because it’s much better to find out from someone you love than to spit into a vial and discover that you never told something extremely important about your identity.

Nicole (26m 47s):
Agreed. I like that in the book, you talk about this experience of people finding out that there was a secret and the fact that there was a secret kept from them is more hurtful than the actual secret.

Libby Copeland (26m 59s):
Yeah, there’s a study that looks at people’s psychological reactions. And I think it was with people who are donor conceived and yes, indeed, and people are much more troubled by having had the truth held back from them then by the revelation itself. And that’s a really instructive thing for people to think about who’ve been hanging on to something and maybe thinking that it’s best for that person not to know. If you consider that the person is probably going to find out either way, it’s probably best to let them know. And people about whom something key has been revealed will say like, no, please tell me, because this is my identity and I have a right to know.

Diana (27m 35s):
You know, that right to know though, really butts up against the person who was the donor years ago and just, you know, this was a way to make some money and they were promised privacy and that no one would ever know. And then all of a sudden someone is knocking on their door, calling them, writing a letter. And so this privacy thing goes both ways because we’re looking at a generation now that wants to know versus a generation in the past who kept things so close.

Libby Copeland (28m 3s):
Right. That’s so astute. And I think this is one of the fundamental problems that’s very difficult to resolve is how the interests of two people can seem to be at loggerheads. Even though those two people are closely genetically related and at the start of relationship. So it’s like kind of the worst possible time to introduce a fundamental conflict. But you’re absolutely right. I mean, if you were a donor in the 1970s, you were probably promised anonymity and you had every reason to expect it. And the fertility banks could not have foreseen the future of DNA testing. There are many other cases where people may not want to be found. And so you see those accounts. And I wrote about some of them in the book, there’s a woman who goes searching for her father and finds him and makes contact and he deletes his kit.

Libby Copeland (28m 48s):
He doesn’t respond to her subsequent letter. He is not going to engage. It is so problematic for him and his family. Every person has to navigate this for themselves. You know, people seeking love and connection and finding rejection. It’s incredibly painful and it’s not really fair to blame it on either side. Part of this is also a collision of different cultures, culture of the present, of the culture of the past. We’re living in a culture of transparency and authenticity, and I’m going to speak my truth, and I’m going to tell my story, and you’re budding up against something that maybe happened 60 years ago when people didn’t talk about certain things, they didn’t talk about donor conception or they didn’t talk about an unmarried mother. In some cases, there can be reunion and reconciliation, and that’s very beautiful.

Libby Copeland (29m 31s):
And in some cases it’s just two people butting up against each other and there can be no reconciliation. At least there isn’t yet. And those stories are heartbreaking. I write about them too. And I don’t know that there’s an easy solution. The only thing that I can say is that I do wish there were better mental health resources for people in these situations because sometimes their stories are not going to have happy endings in terms of their connection with genetic kin. And they could really probably use much better support.

Diana (29m 57s):
I know that there is a really large Facebook group for DNA adoptees who are searching. And I look at that occasionally. When my sister was going through this, she was in that group and actively asking questions and getting advice. And I think just knowing that other people are out there in the same boat you are, can be helpful because sometimes you might feel very alone in this journey. And I really like your idea though, of having some counseling or something to help anyone in the situation to work through all the emotions and everything they’re going through, because this is kind of uncharted waters that we’re going through here. This explosion is really unique.

Diana (30m 38s):
In the past there would be just a small percentage of people who could unlock adoption records and figure out who the biological parents were, but now it’s just happening right and left. And so, yeah, this is definitely changing society. And I’m just looking at your book and this little subtitle, How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, is really true. It is upending so many people and our culture is, is having to change

Libby Copeland (31m 6s):
Yeah. In a really profound way. And you’re so right. There are these incredible Facebook groups. It’s really interesting to me that the largest support system exists on Facebook. There’s so many groups for people going through different kind of scenarios that have resulted from DNA testing. For instance, if you were a Foundling. So if you were left on the doorstep or abandoned as a baby, there’s a group just for you for seeking genetic kin and grappling with the experience, and there’s donor conceived groups. And there’s all sorts of different organizations to advocate for the rights of, for instance, people who had an NPE experience, they define it as Not Parent Expected, used to be defined as Non-Paternity Event.

Libby Copeland (31m 47s):
And I think some genealogists still use that term. There are also a handful of psychologists who have emerged who have started to specialize in this. And I think in the future, there’s going to be more of them. I think it could be a sub-specialty because I think this is a unique experience if it happens to you when you’re in your fifties, for instance, and it’s very sudden that experience can be very traumatic and maybe your parents are no longer alive and you can’t ask them questions about the circumstance. And I’m hoping that there’s more psychologists in the future who can specialize in this field.

Diana (32m 17s):
That’s a really good idea. I think we probably should just talk for a minute or two about the crime scene and that’s been a huge thing this last year or two, you know, using DNA to solve crimes. And I know in the book you talk about that in a whole chapter and did a lot of work with CeCe Moore and understanding how DNA was used to solve the Golden State Killer.

Libby Copeland (32m 41s):
Yeah, well, I thought it was so interesting that the techniques that adoptees’ search angels had been using for at least eight years, by that point in 2018, that those are the same techniques that the protagonist of my book, Alice uses to find her family, those techniques existed for a very long time. Then they were put to use with the Golden State Killer in 2018 and it felt like something very new, and indeed it was new in it’s application, in it’s used by law enforcement. That was a real sea change. I think that’s pretty amazing to think about all the things that genetic genealogists pioneered long before the rest of the world was even paying attention. So what interested me with the Golden State Killer and the work that Barbara Rae-Venter did was, you know, what are the privacy implications of this?

Libby Copeland (33m 26s):
And, you know, is this right? Is this wrong? A lot of genealogists that I talked to were in favor of this and a number of them were not in favor of it simply because, you know, they felt it was a threat to civil liberties or privacy, or it was not the use for which they had originally had their DNA tested. And then there’s also legal experts who talk about the implications of this use, but there has not been that I can see a big public outcry on the part of everyday Americans against this use of DNA technology and genetic genealogy techniques to find people who in many cases were murderers, were serial killers, were rapists. And I think that has to do in part with the kind of crimes they’ve been going after, and going after cold cases and people who were particularly horrendous criminals.

Libby Copeland (34m 12s):
And so I’d watch that with some interest and for a long time, this was operating without a lot of guidance. And now you’re starting to see more policies on the state level and the federal level in terms of how to continue to do this. But I don’t think that this is a technique that law enforcement is going to turn away from anytime soon. I think that they’re happy to have this and to do it when they can afford it. And I think you’re going to continue to see more cases solved through these techniques and through these, these quasi-public databases like GEDMatch.

Diana (34m 38s):
Yeah. I appreciate your unbiased approach in the book because in the genealogy community, we do have people on both sides. And so it was nice just to read the reporting of that. And I do have a couple of colleagues who are working with Barbara and her team to continue to solve these. And I think that’s a fascinating line of work. Thanks for including that in the book, because I think it’s something we need to be aware of and just have a little education on. Yes, it’s time to kind of wrap up now we’ve done. This has been wonderful to get your thoughts.

Nicole (35m 7s):
I think a good final question would be, what advice do you have for people who are thinking about taking a DNA test?

Libby Copeland (35m 15s):
I think that it’s something that can really enhance your family history research and your understanding of where you come from. And also something to think about in terms of whether you’re ready to open that box right now. So it’s not something that I would do without thought, which is not to say that I wouldn’t do it. Personally, I have done it. I’ve tested it three companies and made some incredible discoveries about my family history. But it’s just something to kind of know, going in that there may be a lot of information in there that you’ll have to grapple with. And so if you’re going to do it, know what you’re entering into and maybe do it at a time when you’re ready to do that genealogy work and you don’t have little kids running around, but you know, do it when you have the time to dig in and to kind of reckon with whatever you may find.

Nicole (36m 1s):
That’s really great advice. I love that. I do somehow find time to dig into my DNA with my little kids running around. And I know you have to, but it is definitely more challenging because we do tend to want to work on it more than our children probably want us to.

Libby Copeland (36m 17s):
Yeah, there’s a bit of an obsessive quality to it I find. Like, where do you start to go down the rabbit hole and you just want to keep going, and then you get interrupted and you’re like, no…

Nicole (36m 29s):
Oh, this has been such a delight. Thank you so much for coming on our podcast and talking to us about this important subject and all of your wonderful research.

Libby Copeland (36m 36s):
Thank you both so much. This has been such a thrill and an honor, and a great pleasure. I love this conversation. Thank you.

Diana (36m 42s):
Well, thank you so much. And I hope everyone will go check out the book, The Lost Family, because it really has so many little gems in it and it takes you on a journey. And if you don’t know anything about DNA testing, you will learn a lot. Thank you, Libby for educating the public on DNA. And thank you so much.

Nicole (37m 2s):
And even if you do already know a lot about genetic genealogy, I think you’ll find the book just fascinating. It really is fun to read people’s experiences.

Libby Copeland (37m 10s):
Yeah, I really appreciate it. It was wonderful to write the book. I mean, it was an incredibly enriching experience, so I hope that people can appreciate it and share it.

Nicole (37m 18s):
All right, Libby, thank you so much, and everybody listening, we will talk to you again next week. Bye bye.

Diana (37m 23s):
All right, bye bye everyone.

Nicole (37m 56s):
Thank you for listening to Research Like a Pro with Diana Elder, accredited genealogy professional and Nicole Dyer. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your own genealogy research. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or visit our website, FamilyLocket.com to contact us. You can find our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.