Remember a couple months ago when we all tried that Ancestry.com DNA kits? If not, I’ll recap for ya. We got these kits, spit in a tube, and sent them off to a lab to get a full breakdown of our origins. Based on our DNA, Ancestry is able to break down where our past family members are from. Now, this is really cool because you do get some surprises. For example: my mom was adopted so I had some sort of idea about my origin based on what she has been told. I was born in Mexico, so I know I have that going. Mine came back with a huge surprise… I am 38% British. What?! I did have my Mexico in there, and about 28 Spaniard.
Well, my mom was in town over the weekend and told me a pretty funny story. She actually tried the Ancestry.com DNA too! She didn’t even know I had tried it. She went ahead and got it because, like I said, she’s adopted. We have tried different methods to find her birth parents names to get some sort of contact going, but the file was closed at birth, so we hit a bunch of dead ends. Unless we travel to Akron, Ohio… get a lawyer, go to court, ask a judge to open it, and have the judge agree… we are basically stuck. And that seems like an expensive idea, if it doesn’t end up working out.
So, my mom mails her kit in, and gets an email letting her know that her results are ready. She opens the email, goes to her Ancestry.com profile and guess what?!?!?! It says there is a direct match!!!! She showed me that this match is a parent or a son/daughter. Now, she doesn’t have any kids floating around the world, because she know where to find me, so this was the moment she had been waiting for! She had a direct match. She said her heart was beating out of her chest. She’s telling me the story, my heart is beating out of my chest. We are finally going to find out who her parents are. I will know who my grandparents are. I will get to meet cousins and aunts again, like I did with my biological fathers family! It’s going to be the best. She finally clicks on this match to reveal the name of her immediate family. *Click* Page is loading, and boom! There it is! You are a direct match with: Jose Chavez. At first I was like, whoa! I have the same name as her dad. And then it hit me: that is my name. Linked to my profile that I never visited because we had our results printed. Dang.
But, if you want to look at the bright side, we do have some third and fourth cousin matches. That means there is a starting point to potentially find my mom’s parents, right? And, most importantly, we know this DNA kit really works. I didn’t know my mom did it. She didn’t know I had done it, and it matched us. Cup half full! 🙂
