CONNECTCOMMENTEMAILMORE

Les Arsenault spent 30 years looking for his family.

After his adoptive parents died by the time he was 20, he felt alone in the world.

“I had no idea who I was,” said the 56-year-old, who now lives in Kirkwood.

He launched his own search, placed ads in three local newspapers near his hometown of Gloversville, reached out to New York State Department of Health Adoption Information Registry and even contacted nationally televised talk shows.

Then for his 55th birthday, Arsenault’s sister-in-law presented him with an AncestryDNA kit. A month later, he was sitting around the dinner table with the two brothers and sister he never knew about.

As direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits have become mainstream, affordable options for families around the globe scouring sites like Ancestry, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA, the number of stories like Arsenault’s is growing and it’s particularly helping families in New York circumvent some of its stricter adoption records policies.

While Arsenault’s adoption had always been shrouded in mystery — his parents didn’t confirm he was adopted until neighborhood children started spreading the rumor when he was 8 — Lori Hoban, who grew up in Newark Valley and now lives in Rochester, can’t remember a time when she didn’t know.

Her brother, Scott Jackowski, whom she met for the first time this spring, didn’t give much thought to his adoption until he was in his thirties. He’d never told anyone, even his children, he said, because “it never really was a big deal.”

But then the Apalachin native, who’s now 47 and lives in Conklin, started looking. And, like Arsenault, he hit road blocks.

New York adoption hurdles

Adopted children in New York are given an amended birth certificate at the time of their adoption. It lists their adoptive parents, not their biological parents, and details of their birth — If passed, a bill introduced in 2017 would require certified copies of the original long form birth certificates to be issued to requesting adoptees within 45 days.

Through the years, Jackowski and Hoban, 49, had each pieced together minimal portraits of their parents, based on information from the Adoption Information Registry and Family and Children’s Society and Tioga County Department of Social Services, the two agencies through which they were adopted.

More: Remembering Megan Santa Croce, 23-year-old BU grad, teacher

Their mother was a clerical secretary of German and Irish descent in her 20s when she gave birth. Their father was a tradesman and carpenter. He was married, she was not. 

Jackowski joined online adoption forums hoping to reach someone who might know something, but with little concrete information to go on besides when and where he was born — June 7, 1971 at Ideal Hospital in Endicott — he didn’t make any headway.

Then Jackowski’s older brother, who was also adopted — Jackowski also grew up with two younger brothers — took a 23andMe DNA test, and Jackowski followed suit.

Six weeks later he was inside a Dunkin’ shop when his phone lit up with an email notification. In his excitement reading through the list of possible connections he nearly missed the most striking one: a DNA match of 48 percent; his sister, Lori Hoban.

Shock of a lifetime

DNA discoveries can permanently alter a person’s life. 

In 1980, Christopher Sievers was adopted at birth from a home for unwed mothers in Texas and raised outside Philadelphia.

In March, he took an AncestryDNA test and found his biological family lived in the Southern Tier.

Four months later, Sievers, his wife and daughter drove to New York to meet his family on a Saturday.

That Sunday, they attended a church service with his maternal grandmother — Sievers parents are deceased — at Catatonk Baptist Church, where the then-retiring pastor asked Sievers to take over his job. He did.

More discoveries: 23andMe test introduces Johnson City family to long-lost sister, adopted in 1950s

The Sievers family packed up their lives and moved to Owego, where Sievers is now the pastor at Catatonk Baptist Church and he says the village feels like home, “because this is where I would have grown up, if I were not adopted.”

“I know now that there was a purpose for me going through all the many years of not knowing were I belong,” Sievers said. “I realized that this was my calling.”

Jackowski and Hoban have found the same peace since discovering each other.

They text almost every day, and Hoban has been down to visit Jackowski and the rest of her family a half-dozen times in the past five months.

They don’t share many hobbies or interests and if you ask them, they don’t look alike — though Hoban’s adoptive mother would beg to differ — but having a biological sibling has changed them profoundly, enough that they had matching tattoos put on their arms with an arrow to represent protection and moving forward, along with Roman numerals indicating May 6, 2018, the date they found each other.

“Now that I’ve met him, I feel more complete,” Hoban said.

Jackowski also said the discovery, after so many years without answers, has put him at ease.

“It has put me in the right direction,” he said, “and has definitely given me even more purpose in life.”

That void has also been filled for Arsenault, who lost his adoptive parents young and knew, based on records from the Adoption Information Registry, that there were siblings out there to be found.

“My wife, Suzy, laughed watching all of us around the dinner table, laughing and joking,” he said of their reunion. “I’ve always wanted that.”

As the family story goes, Arsenault’s father, Frank Sweet, was injured in a workplace accident and the Sweets were put on welfare, but their benefits were discontinued when Arsenault, their youngest of six children, was born, so he was given up for adoption.

Since Arsenault has met his Sweet family siblings, Leonard, Liz and David, there have been vacations, a trip to see a great-niece perform in a dance recital and a family wedding at Christmas.

“What a wonderful Christmas present,” Arsenault said, “family.”

Moving forward

Arsenault’s parents and two of his siblings died before he could meet them.

Direct-to-consumer DNA testing has surfaced only in the past decade, meaning mysteries dating back generations are being solved long after some key players are gone.

That’s the case for 55-year-old Dan Klein, of Danby, whose biological cousin, Alice Plebuch, took several DNA tests and discovered a mistake had been made Sept. 23, 1913, at Fordham Hospital in the Bronx. Her father had gone home with the wrong family, switched with another baby. 

More: How to run with kids: Your Turkey Trot, Elf Run and other questions answered

Plebuch’s father had grown up Irish Catholic, though by birth he was Jewish, and the other baby had been raised Jewish, while unknowingly Irish.

Both died long before the discovery was made, putting Klein, who is Plebuch’s second cousin, and his family — Klein’s mother and brother took DNA tests in 2016 revealing Plebuch’s genetic connection to them — in the unusual position of introducing Plebuch to the many family members she’s never known, sharing photos of cousins hundreds of miles from where she lives in the state of Washington and of their great-grandparents she’d never seen.

“We also feel happy that we played a role in filling in some of Alice’s invisible past,” Klein said. “For us, we had a cousin who was switched at birth. For her, it was her father.”

Before DNA

Without DNA testing like AncestryDNA, 23andMe and the rest, stories like Klein’s and Plebuch’s wouldn’t exist.

Bill Sebring is used to traditional modes of research. As town historian in Romulus, the 69-year-old is used to sifting through census documents, death certificates and any other scraps of information he can find to piece together the evolving story of the small Finger Lakes town.

He’s done the same as his family’s self-appointed historian.

But without the DNA test he took to see whether he had any Native American ancestry, as his family had long believed, Sebring, who’d always been single and had no children, would never have met his daughter and three grandsons.

He got an email one day from someone living in Colorado asking him a few detailed questions about where and when he served in the military, and suddenly he was flying out to Colorado to see his grandsons. Life’s more expensive now, he says, with all the gifts he sends them and the amount of food he needed to stock the fridge when the boys came to visit, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Now I find out I not only have a daughter, I get three grandsons to go with it,” he said. 

Chrissy Sutton, 52, of Elmira, has exhausted just about every resource imaginable in her search for her family, except DNA. She was adopted as a 5-year-old, knew her father’s last name was Granger, and would later discover her mother’s last name was Geer. 

She’s frequented the Steele Memorial Library to search its genealogical database, scoured obituaries for family names and posted messages on Facebook groups. She’s been able to track down seven siblings, all but one sister.

“I don’t know how I’m going to find her, but I’m determined to find her,” she said. “I tell people all the time I’m a good detective.”

The DNA test she purchased, she said during a phone interview, is sitting next to her.

She hasn’t opened it.

With any family history, there are questions left unanswered. Arsenault’s parents died before he could meet them and Klein’s ancestor will never know his true heritage. Jackowski still wants to know more about his parents and details surrounding his adoption and Sutton continues to search for one last sister. 

“(Finding my sister) lifted a fog,” Jackowski said. “Finally, a piece to the puzzle. It just makes me want to know more.”

Has your family made a discovery thanks to DNA testing? Email ksullivan3@gannett.com Follow Katie Sullivan Borrelli on Twitter @ByKatieSullivan. Support our journalism and become a digital subscriber today. Click here for our special offers.

Loading…

Loading…

 

CONNECTCOMMENTEMAILMORE

Read or Share this story: https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/connections/2018/11/21/dna-tales-finding-long-lost-relatives-family-ancestry/1918086002/