Someone I know had a baby as a teenager and gave it up for adoption. This was many decades ago.
A couple of months ago, her sister gave her DNA to one of those ancestry sites and they gave her back a list of possible hits as ancestors as well as current relatives. Well, a name came up that was not a known family member. She went to the person’s web page and he looks just like the first woman’s son, born of her husband whom she married a few years after the teenage indiscretion.
He has the same birthday as the baby boy given up for adoption.
A family member, by marriage, just found her birth mom year before last via DNA. The test led to a first cousin who agreed to help - remembered something about an aunt who had given up a child. When she asked the aunt, yes she had given up a daughter and all the data matched up. They requested confirmation from the unwed mother’s home (which would give no info out until after they found each other) & they also confirmed the adoption details, etc. Sometimes these reunions don’t work out/are unhappy, but this turned out to be a good one. They’d both been looking for each other for years.
I will tell you an interesting DNA story. One day about a year ago I got a call from my youngest daughter, she wanted to have lunch with me on Saturday. I said ok and met her there. She told me that about a year earlier she had submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry dot com just to see the map of where she had come from. I told her that was a waste of money since I had provided her with our family history for several generations, all the way back to the 1400’s, anyway she agreed and after she got the report put it away and forgot about it.
Several days prior to our meeting she had gotten a communication from Ancestry.com that there was a person who wanted to contact her because they had some similarities in their DNA. She gave permission and the person contacted her. Well the person said that if you have over 30 matches in your DNA then you are related and if you have over 40 then you are a close relative. This person had over 900 matches.
The person asked if my daughter would get her mother and father to provide DNA samples to see where the relationship is. With my daughters mother there were 0 matches, with me there were 1700 matches and Ancestry.com explained that could only be if we were siblings.
We set up a time to meet. She lived in the Indianapolis area and I lived in the Louisville, KY area.
It turned out that she was adopted as an infant. She knew little about her birth mother’s circumstances except that she was a nurse in a Louisville Hospital (the same hospital where I was born) and had a relationship with a young soldier returning from the European theater of the 2nd World War. When she found herself pregnant she left town without telling the father she was pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption.
My father came home from the war at the same time this happened. This woman is about 2-1/2 years older than me and looks very much like my one year younger sister. She also looks a lot like my fathers mother. I am a musician. I sang with The Louisville Bach Society for 25 years and play piano and organ. In college I played trumpet in a dance band. My little sister has taught music in high school and is currently teaching music courses at the University of Maryland. My new half sister earned a scholarship to Julliard school of music and is pianist and organist.
She is definitely part of the family. While my father died several decades ago I really wish he were alive so I could needle him about what he did.
DNA is changing the world.