The Lost Family

How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are

By: Libby Copeland

Narrated by: Cindy Kay

A deeply reported look at the rise of home genetic testing and the seismic shock it has had on individual lives

You swab your cheek or spit into a vial, then send it away to a lab somewhere. Weeks later you get a report that might tell you where your ancestors came from or if you carry certain genetic risks. Or the report could reveal a long-buried family secret and upend your entire sense of identity. Soon a lark becomes an obsession, an incessant desire to find answers to questions at the core of your being, like "Who am I?" and "Where did I come from?" Welcome to the age of home genetic testing.

In The Lost Family, journalist Libby Copeland investigates what happens when we embark on a vast social experiment with little understanding of the ramifications. Copeland explores the culture of genealogy buffs, the science of DNA, and the business of companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, all while tracing the story of one woman, her unusual results, and a relentless methodical drive for answers that becomes a thoroughly modern genetic detective story.

The Lost Family delves into the many lives that have been irrevocably changed by home DNA tests - a technology that represents the end of family secrets. There are the adoptees who've used the tests to find their birth parents; donor-conceived adults who suddenly discover they have more than 50 siblings; hundreds of thousands of Americans who discover their fathers aren't biologically related to them, a phenomenon so common it is known as a "non-paternity event", and individuals who are left to grapple with their conceptions of race and ethnicity when their true ancestral histories are discovered. Throughout these accounts, Copeland explores the impulse toward genetic essentialism and raises the question of how much our genes should get to tell us about who we are. With more than 30 million people having undergone home DNA testing, the answer to that question is more important than ever.

Gripping and masterfully told, The Lost Family is a spectacular book on a big, timely subject.

©2020 Libby Copeland. Published in 2020 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS, Inc. All rights reserved (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Wonderful Insight

I’m a recent NPE and I loved hearing other stories about people whose lives were changed from DNA testing.

Interesting and timely read!

Really enjoyed this book! Libby Copeland did a nice job in explaining genetics and genealogy in a way that was simple, but also highlighted the nuances well. Really interesting read for anyone considering DNA testing.

Catnip to genealogists

Well written, deeply engaging survey of the advances in genetics, DNA and the companies that make it easy for us to build our family trees. And if that is not intriguing enough, there is a family mystery woven through the book. Great read.

Wonderfully written!

Libby did a wonderful job of keeping the reader interested. She wove together detailed scientific information, revealing stories, and psychological issues that arise when DTC testing doesn’t go as planned.

Fine

A lot more scientific information than I was expecting. The main story is split up so it was a little hard to follow listening to it, figuring out who's who. Even some of the smaller stories were hard to keep names straight. The narration was fine. Overall it was fine, I only chose it as a book to read with my mother who had her own DNA mystery.