Montez Brown Discovers His Birth Mother By Transferring His 23andMe Raw Data to Family Tree DNA

As many of you know, I always recommend that adoptees "fish in all three ponds" for close relatives. This means getting your DNA into each of the autosomal DNA databases - 23andMe, Family Tree DNA and AncestryDNA - if at all possible. The story below is one of the best arguments that I have seen so far for transferring 23andMe raw data to Family Tree DNA's Family Finder database as soon as possible!


As one of the administrators of the "Adopted DNA Project" at Family Tree DNA, I recently received this message: 

Montez Brown has left the Adopted group.
Reason for Leaving: Amazingly, when I transferred my 23andMe raw DNA data to FTDNA, I found my Birth Mother on FTDNA.

Wow! I asked Mr. Brown for more details and this is what he shared:

I FOUND my Birth Mother on FamilyTreeDNA.com (Friday, 26 Jul 13)!!! This is soooo crazy! My emotions are running HIGH right now! For 46 years I've felt the same void that most Adoptees feel by not knowing who they are or where they came from. I've always thought that it would be easy to find my mother if I should ever look for her because of the circumstances that surrounded the adoption, but I never really took the initiative to find her. I guess my own life trials and tribulations took precedence. It was only six weeks ago that I decided to start the quest for my identity using DNA testing via 23andMe.com. To gauge my expectations, I focused primarily on discovering the makeup of my Ancestry; any additional discovery would be a nice bonus, i.e. finding family members that might lead me to my biological parents. After connecting with a couple of distant cousins on 23andMe, I decided to upload my 23andMe raw DNA data to FTDNA.com. After one week, I received an email notification that stated I had family matches waiting for review. I immediately logged on FTDNA.com to check out what I thought would be more cousins, but to my surprise I had a "Parent/Child" match. After performing a quick search on the email that was included in her profile, I suspected that the match was MY MOTHER! I found her telephone number online and immediately contacted her. She was very excited and pleased that I had finally tracked her down. We connected with each other instantly. Amazingly, this was all done online within a 6-week time period. I realize this type of discovery is an exception to the rule, but NEVER say NEVER, and don't ever give up on your quest! 

Mr. Brown also goes by the pen name of Montez DeCarlo. You can read more about his amazing story here.

Tim Discovers Birth Father and Confirms Identity of Birth Mother Using Both Y-DNA and Autosomal DNA Testing at Family Tree DNA

Tim knew he was adopted since he was very young. He grew up, married and had two daughters. His daughters married and each had grandchildren of their own without Tim ever searching for his roots. Last June, one of his daughters and her husband started thinking that maybe it was the right time to try to figure out the identity of Tim's birth parents. Tim had thought about it off and on throughout his lifetime, but figured he would just never know.

Tim's family encouraged him to submit a sample for Y-DNA testing at Family Tree DNA. The results came back in late August 2012 and he matched several men with the surname Vick who descend from Joseph Vick. (The family has an organization: Joseph Vick Family of America.)

His son-in-law, Sheldon, tells us that by researching Colorado's adoption laws they learned that they could unseal Tim's adoption records through the Colorado Confidential Intermediary Service. Even though the names of Tim's birth parents were falsified on his original birth certificate, the court records contained questionnaires that the birth mother had filled out. In these was found what turned out to be key clues to unraveling the mystery of Tim's origins - the name of the town where his birth mother was born and the mention of an uncle who had an unusual name.

The court-appointed intermediary researched the town mentioned in the adoption papers and contacted an author of a book about the settlers of the town. This author, Roger, ended up “knowing” about a son his aunt had given up for adoption. To make things even more interesting, Roger revealed that this aunt had a daughter (JoAnn) after the son who was given up for adoption and, in 2011, he had convinced her to submit a DNA sample to Family Tree DNA for mitochondrial DNA testing.

Sheldon describes his strategy and the results:
Due to knowledge of where Tim’s mother was born, I narrowed down lines of VICKs in the area and it boiled down to two brothers as potential paternal grandfathers of Tim.  We ended up (autosomal DNA) testing a grandson of each, and lo and behold – one clearly is a half-brother and the other is precisely in the range to be a 2nd cousin!!!

Matching DNA between Tim and his paternal half-brother (dark blue) and 2nd cousin (light green) at 23andMe

Tim and his half-brother on his father’s side share 28% of their DNA!! – and there’s another sister and brother on his father’s side as well.

Left to right: Tim's paternal half-brother H.C., Tim, Tim's 2nd cousin Gene

Next, they used the stored DNA sample of Tim’s presumed maternal half-sibling, JoAnn, to upgrade her original mtDNA test  to the Family Tree DNA's Family Finder autosomal DNA test. They also uploaded Tim's autosomal DNA raw data from 23andMe to Family Tree DNA's Family Finder.

Autosomal DNA matching between Tim and his maternal half-sister at FTDNA (in orange)

The results showed that Tim and JoAnn share 24% of their autosomal DNA, thus confirming that they are, indeed, half-siblings and that the intermediary's conclusions were correct.

Tim and his maternal half-sister, JoAnn

Sheldon continues: 
Due to DNA testing, Tim now has 4 siblings, at least 9 nieces/nephews and many, many cousins. The neatest part is that he has met most of his close relatives – AND, most importantly, everyone on both sides has accepted him as one of them.  We are truly blessed :-)  

Although Tim’s biological father died in 1986 and his mother died in 1992 (without ever telling her daughter that she had a brother out there somewhere), Tim has enjoyed a happy reunion with both sides of his biological family. It took a lot of cooperation from his presumed relatives and a well-thought-out DNA testing strategy, but the effort was obviously well worth this heartwarming outcome!

Adoptee Finds Her Birth Sister at 23andMe Through a First Cousin Match

Greta had searched for decades for her birth mother, Carolyn Palmer, without success. She had all but given up on finding her birth family when she joined 23andMe, but her dreams were realized when her DNA matched her to a maternal first cousin, Laura Oliver. Through that match, she learned that, sadly, her birth mother had died only months earlier, but that she had a living sister who was looking for her too.



I was aware of this reunion, but was unsure as to whether it would be made public, so I was happy to see that 23andMe published a story about it earlier today. Since there are many of these success stories thanks to DNA now, but most of them stay private, I wanted to quickly get this out to my readers.

Don't give up, adoptees...there is hope through DNA!