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Who Left a Baby at Our Doorstep?
How a surprise DNA match redefined our family story.
One Tuesday in 2017, I woke up to find a baby girl on my family’s doorstep. There was a note pinned to her basket that said, “My name is Suzanna and I belong to you. Please figure out how I fit in.”
Okay, it wasn’t an actual baby. But that’s exactly what it felt like the day I checked the DNA matches I manage and saw the mysterious Suzanna as a “Close Family” match to my mother-in-law and her sons. The mystery, it turns out, was decades in the making.
DNA testing in families is a wonderful, if tricky at times, tool for anyone working on their family tree. And Suzanna’s extraordinarily high amount of common DNA meant that she was either a half-sibling, niece, or granddaughter to my mother-in-law, Evelyn. (Because Evelyn was close to 90 years old, I eliminated the possibility of Suzanna being an aunt or a grandmother.) Suzanna was also a likely first cousin match to my husband and his brothers.
Given that all known family members were accounted for, we had no idea how this woman could be a close relative. Evelyn’s sister had 5 children, but had never been sent away with a secret pregnancy (as happened back in her day). Evelyn’s only brother never married and died when his plane went down in WW2. As for Suzanna being a…
