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Friday, December 7, 2018

If You Don’t Want to Deal with Family Skeletons, Don’t Look in the DNA Closet

A reader wrote in to a newspaper columnist asking what he should do about the results that he found. The columnist gave him some sound advice. Dick Eastman, who writes a blog took the information and provided more sound advice. You can find his original blog article on his Eastman's Online Genealogy 

See a copy below:

Amy Dickinson is an American newspaper columnist who writes the syndicated advice column Ask Amy. In a recent column, she published a letter from a reader asking how to handle a family surprise: upon having her DNA tested, the writer discovered he had a half-sibling that he was not aware of previously. He then shared this bit of information with her family, including with both of her parents.

The information was not well received.

You can read this rather interesting letter and Amy Dickinson’s advice in a number of newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press at: http://bit.ly/2QxfdL6.

Comment by Dick Eastman: I certainly cannot compete with Amy Dickinson’s nationally-syndicated advice column but I will offer one piece of advice to genealogists: If your research finds a something that was previously not widely known within the family, you might want to stop and consider the implications before you broadcast that information to your relatives. Do you really HAVE to tell everyone? or anyone?