S1E6 Unraveling Lauren

S1 E6 - Unraveling Lauren C - Lauren’s story is a reminder that family trees aren’t just diagrams—they’re living, shifting truths. And sometimes the truth has been whispering to us for years before we finally hear it. Lauren had been building her family tree since 1977. Cemeteries, phone calls, interviews, handwritten charts, decades of work, 68,000 names, and the belief that she knew exactly where she came from. But one DNA test changed everything. A “routine” ancestry test revealed that the cousins she couldn’t place weren’t distant connections—they were clues. And the man she’d called “Uncle Jack” her entire life wasn’t just a family friend. Hidden in her mother’s shorthand diaries was a decades-old secret that rewrote everything Lauren thought she knew about her parents, her childhood, and herself.

In this conversation, Lauren and Kara talk about:

• How a high-school genealogy project sparked a lifelong search for family truth
• The obsessive dedication many NPEs feel to family history and how it shifts after a discovery
• How her mother’s coded shorthand diaries revealed an affair and a tangled web of secrecy
• The moment her top or her DNA surprise
• Realizing her birth certificate father had always known she wasn’t genetically his and why mumps really were a big deal
• The complicated grief of understanding her parents' marriage and the emotional toll on everyone involved
• What it feels like to discover first cousins, siblings, and relatives hiding in plain sight
• Rebuilding identity after the foundations of your origin story fall away

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

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