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When I sent DNA samples to genetic testing services last year searching for my birth family, I had no idea it would launch me on an adventure across three continents.
In 1961, I was adopted at birth in California. Over the years, I've searched for my birth family on and off, but have always been stymied by sealed records and tight-lipped officials. In the last decade, however, home DNA testing and easy online access to official records have changed the game.
I spit into plastic tubes (one for each of the two big players in this industry in the United States: 23andMe and Ancestry.com), dropped them in the mail, and waited, anxiously, for the results. When the email arrived, I was stunned.
After a lifetime believing I was a basic White American, I learned that was only half true. My birth mother was born in Iowa. But it turned out my father was North African.
I reached out to anonymous DNA matches through 23andMe and Ancestry's messaging systems, but no one replied. Then came weeks of research using Ancestry.com and various public records databases until I was able to identify both my parents and find contact information for a handful of their close relatives.
I discovered my birth father had been born in the mid-1930s in Casablanca. Romantic visions of Bogart and Bergman (fictionally) escaping the Nazis swam in my head.
Records showed he had emigrated to the US in 1959 and ended up in San Francisco. My mother had been raised in San Diego, and also moved to San Francisco right after high school. But why had he left Morocco? What brought her to San Francisco? I had to know more.
After days of imagining the best and worst, I drafted scripts for what to say to genetically close family members who most likely had no idea I even existed. Then I apprehensively reached out.
To my great relief, my mother's and father's families both welcomed me with open arms -- despite their shock at discovering I existed.
I learned quickly that both my biological parents had died, and was deeply disappointed I had forever missed my chance to meet them. Would things have been different if I'd searched harder earlier?
But I was thrilled that all their siblings were still alive.
From my new family, I pieced together a rough sketch of my parents' stories: On opposite sides of the world, they had both butted heads with difficult parents and left home at the first opportunity. They both wound up in one of the most free-thinking places on Earth: San Francisco.
He worked as floor installer in the city's North Beach neighborhood -- where she was a cocktail waitress and dancer. I pictured them meeting while he installed floors in a nightclub where she was working.
By all accounts, it must have been a very brief affair. My father was living with a girlfriend, and my mother's sister says she never once heard my mother discuss my father in any way. Other than the sister and her mother, no one else in her family was told she was pregnant. My father's family says they are 100% certain he was never told, either.
There were other big surprises: I was told my mother never had another child -- or even a serious boyfriend -- for the rest of her life. On my father's side, I was shocked to learn I had a half-brother and -sister and dozens of cousins in France and Morocco.
They invited me to visit. I booked a trip to meet my father's huge, welcoming family.
