Excerpt from The Lost Family by Libby Copeland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The third category of people have no inkling they're about to find anything surprising, and this is often the most disruptive way in which DNA testing plays out. These people do not start out as seekers. Instead, they test because they want to find out where their forebears came from. They test to find out if that old family story of a Native American ancestor is true. They test because they want to know whether they're like that guy in the AncestryDNA commercial, who thought he was one thing and turned out to be another: "I traded in my lederhosen for a kilt!" he declares, happy in his certainty. They test because they got a kit as a gift for Christmas— and then Easter dinner becomes awkward, because the test has revealed something strange. Perhaps a stranger has appeared in the DNA database who might be an aunt or a niece or a grandparent or a half-sibling, based on the shared genetic material, and now everyone is asking questions. Perhaps a family's understanding of its heritage is muddied by a pie chart offering one's "ethnicity estimate," and the question "Why is it saying I'm half-Greek?" becomes a curiosity, which becomes a nagging doubt, which becomes a family conversation no one will ever forget. Then, these people, too, become obsessives, trying to solve the mystery, finding possible relatives through Google and Facebook searches, and then offering to buy and ship DNA kits to those people if they'll agree to test.

Well, some of them do. Some of them, presumably, back away slowly, like a hiker who spies an old grenade from a long-ago war on a beach. Those people don't tell their stories. Who could blame them? Those people don't have stories; they have DNA results they'd rather not have seen, and which they may prefer not to believe.

The seekers filled my inbox and my ears over the last few years with their questions. What sense could they make of a secret kept for so many decades? How much of the past did they need to go back and footnote in light of this new knowledge? How many conversations were, in retrospect, lies of omission? If old taboos— about being the child of an extramarital relationship, or the child of adoption, or being conceived via sperm donor— were a thing of the past, why was it that the shame surrounding these origins felt so palpable even now? And how now to treat these strangers who'd come abruptly into their lives, these strangers with whom they shared genetic material? Are these people "family," and if not, do we need a new category to describe them? Is it always better to know these genetic relatives exist? Is it always better to know the truth? Should they invite the truth over for Thanksgiving dinner?

Secrets, we are all discovering, have a propulsive power all their own, and time and complicity only make them more powerful. Once you decide to keep a secret, the secret maintains a circular logic, even when circumstances change. Many seekers say the fact of the secret is the thing that nags at them, more than the nature of the secret itself.

DNA testing has brought the past forward to the present, forcing us to grapple with decisions made long ago in different, often desperate, circumstances. It forces us to think about the people whose truths have been hushed up for decades— the teenager consigned to a home for unwed mothers, the medical student who contributed his sperm, never dreaming that sperm would become a person knocking on his inbox five decades later. Some seekers are in their eighties and nineties, just discovering siblings they've spent their lives without. Some are left with only questions, and there is no one left to ask.

"I had no clue that I was adopted," says a seeker named Linda who discovered this blunt fact at the age of fifty-one, through a DNA test. When Linda figured out the identity of her biological mother using puzzle-solving techniques well-known to seekers, she learned the woman had just passed away, and that she would never have answers to certain things. "Did she ever think of me? Did she ever look for me?"

Excerpted from The Lost Family by Libby Copeland. Copyright © 2020 by Libby Copeland. Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.