 Great. Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our last speaker for Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2020 Belfast. And before I do, I'd just like to thank our sponsors, Family Tree DNA, who have sponsored these two days of DNA lectures and have done so since 2013, when we first started this series of conferences. And also I'd like to thank all the my fellow ISOG volunteers, many of whom are manning the Family Tree DNA stand downstairs, and who have provided such great free advice for a lot of people attending the conference. Cahill, Mackle Gunn, will be talking to us about Never Give Up, Miracles Do Happen, and this is a story about adoption. And the column, Cahill himself is a molecular biologist. He was industrial principal scientist in London with expertise in sample preparation, assay design, development, amplification technologies and bioinformatics. But in his spare time, he runs the Mackle Gunn DNA project, and also the Fermanah-Monahan border DNA project with Peter McWilliam. So here to talk to us about Anshon Cor. To talk to us about this wonderful adoption story and the fact that miracles do happen, please give a warm welcome to Cahill Mackle Gunn. Thank you very much, Morris, for inviting me to speak. And thank you to all of you for coming today, despite the severe storm, Dennis, right side. The title might be a little bit enigmatic in that it uses some Spanish, which I'll go into later. But the title was given to me by the adoptee in question. I told her, I'm going to do a presentation about your story. What do you think the title would be? And this is what she gave me. So this is what she wanted to have it herself. It all happened in 2018, October, when I was talking about the health applications of DNA in GGI 2018 in the RDS. And when I was returning from that, I flew from Dublin into London-Stanstead and I was taking the train from London-Stanstead into Tottenham Hill and then continuing on into west London to go to work. And I got a message on my Facebook, which said, you show up on my family list on 23 and me. What city do you come from? I'm looking for more family. Do you have great grandparents who were called Samuel and Audrey? Maybe they had a daughter named Susan, who will now be about 70 with Best Wishes Julia. So I took a great interest in this and this is my aunt Efna. And because my father died in the 90s, I tested as many of his siblings as I could so I could take my own genealogy back further into time. Now, Efna was born in Fermanah like myself and she spent her formative years in Belfast and then subsequently moved up to Donegal. Now, this is Julia. Now, Efna and Julia had a 11.2 centi Morgan match in chromosome 15, which 23 and me was calling fifth cousins. Now, you may take a look at Julia and you may think where she's originating from. Some people in Cambridge say that she looks Eastern European, but that isn't the case at all. This was the 23 and me relationship that was posted between Julia and Efna. There was a little tiny little segment on chromosome 15, just one virtually clinging on by its nails to the cliff edge. So normally you would look at that and you think, well, I'm not going to do too much with that, but this is why miracles do happen. And this was the ethnicity result. So in Britain, she was coming out as coming from sort of the Northwest Lancashire direction and also in the midlands. The London is just because there's so much migration to London and people don't know where they originally come from. So you get always tend to get a lot of hits in London. On the Irish side, she gets a very strong hit in Mayo, which is close. But the Dublin is the same as London. For Britain, you get a lot of people moving there, forgetting where they came from and therefore claiming they're from Dublin when they're actually from Mayo. Many heritage gives this. Again, Irish, Scottish and Welsh, 70, 7.8%. And English, I should go back here and show down here. She was giving British and Irish of 90%. And these things here are just probably mixing into the English or perhaps the Irish. But Julia is from Spain, hence the Spanish in the title. For the Spanish people that might ultimately see this, it'll give them a better feel for what the talk is about even though it's in English. So she was born in Spain. She grew up in Spain and she considered herself to be Spanish until the time she did a 23 and me test, which came back as 90%. 90% British and Irish were effectively 100% British and Irish. So this is something of a conundrum. How did this happen? So Spain, I don't know how many of you know, but in the Franco era, there was the issue of the nationalist administration taking babies of children from Republican families and unknown to the parents, forcibly adopting them into nationalist families. And over that, this is what it's called in Spanish. Spanish, niñas, roburas, por el franquismo. And there were about 300,000 such children, which is rather a lot. And this lady here is one of the most prominent of these who's been sort of leading the way to using DNA to identify. And she is in this madrigal. Also, there was a, I was in contact with a Spanish journalist who was interested in Julia in case she was one of these stolen babies in Spain. I mean, Julia was adopted in Spain. And the initial thinking was that she could be a stolen baby. But that didn't sit well with the British Irish ethnicity call. I mean, you could think that there were some British and Irish in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. And maybe it's that way, but that seems rather unlikely. So we had to think, what happened? This is an advertisement from the InfoJeans.es website with a couple of success stories in this having discovered by DNA that she was a stolen baby from this issue. And of course, there was Julia. We have to go on to Julia more later. So the Spanish adoptee community use 23 in me, and they also tend to use my heritage as well. So Julia had already uploaded to my heritage, probably facilitated by the fact that they have both companies have Spanish websites. So it's easy for them to use. Now, more information could be gained by uploading Julia's data to other databases. So I initially helped her to upload to FT DNA, which was a little bit of a problem because she had a version 5 23 in me kit that needed to be converted using DNA land imputation, which might not be available anymore. I haven't looked in a while and a executable called DNA kit studio. So I uploaded that to family 3 DNA. I also uploaded her 23 in me data to jet batch. Now, the initial issue with this route was that she had no X chromosome or SNP data and everybody was her X match. So but what you do is you interrogate all these databases and try and find high matches to try and figure out what happened. So on 23 in me itself, these were her close similarities. There was one here, 1.55%, which is quite high. Another one just over 1%. And the name Sweeney was coming out within the family names of some of her close matches. My heritage give this again another high match that didn't respond and a couple of others. And there were two adoptees on that list. And again, the name Sweeney is coming out FT DNA. Again, there's another two adoptees and some of the high matches that are also present in my heritage. This was jet match. Again, we see the adoptees and we see the people coming in from the other databases. And we do have one higher match coming in from ancestry that we would not otherwise seen. So early on I tried to speculate how Julia could be related to me. So one of the things I did was I searched on Family Tree DNA with all my ancestral names to see if anybody had a family tree that was matching Julia and matching my ancestral names. And there was a Fitzpatrick in Drum Lane Parish of Turbot County Carbon just over the border from Fermanagh, where my fourth great grandmother was a Fitzpatrick from that area. And on top of that, there were additional intermarriages of macogons to other Fitzpatrick. So that's quite an intermingled area. There were no other names giving matches to this precise area. So we could speculate therefore that someone from Julia's line had married into the Fitzpatrick's. This is my fourth great grandfather's gravestone. He was Hugh Macogon. He died in Bell Turbot in 1846. Here is the inscription. And for the second time today we have Brecquiaisant in Passet. Again, this was Bridget. She was born in 1782 and died in 1876. And we're thinking that a sibling of Bridget could be in Julia's line somewhere. No documentary evidence at all for this because it's too far back. So the next thing we had to do was try to identify Julia's English 3 using a hospital document that a historian called Celine Zicola had obtained from the hospital in Gerona. Now on this we had locations. We had names. This is Truncated. This is also Truncated, but we knew the phone names and we knew that they lived in Coventry. So using this name information and these databases managed to pull out a family 3 starting from a position of 0 and ending up with a 3 on the maternal side with hundreds of individuals going back to the 1700s by piggybacking on other trees in ancestry as you do. And of course all of these were found by document databases not by DNA. So the next challenge was to find her mother and the living members of her biological family. So this involved growing Julia's 3 forward to the present. So using databases to compile a 3 of the marriage and children of Susan G. Then using the electoral register and social media to establish their whereabouts and contact details. A candidate for Julia's half sister was identified in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. After less than 2 days effort. The question is who to contact, how to contact, or how do you do this? This is a really difficult thing to do. But they really were sisters. So this picture here sort of shows the terrain in Cambridgeshire. And if you notice my read like background is supposed to symbolise both Firmana and Cambridgeshire just out of interest if anybody was wondering. So based on the forward looking part of Julia's 3 from the databases did a lot of work sleuthing which is a word that Donna uses for identifying people in the social media. So that was the lady I just showed you in 2 days effort. And so we had Julia, Rafael, the Spanish journalist, others and myself all searching, all sleuthing social media for a couple of weeks trying to figure out who Julia's mother and siblings could be. Now the complicating factor was that Julia's mother had moved away from Coventry down here and the clue was in Caroline's Facebook profile. She'd been born in Warwickshire but had grown up in Leicestershire. So all my focusing of efforts on Warwickshire was a complete waste of time should have been looking in Leicestershire. And that was the 2 day step. So we were trying to locate Susan G in Leicestershire which was far more successful. So I found Julia's mother's address on Find My Past to the west of Leicester, sent a message to Julia just as much as I'd done with her sister. You know you paste in the photograph into a Facebook chat. She says, who's this? I say, this is your sister. Wow. So this address was pasted into Facebook. What's this? Oh that's her mother's address. So we have the address. We have the name. So how do we reach out? I mean I did try to phone her mother's sister-in-law and it was if I was doing a cold call and I got nowhere. So that was my first attempt. I gave up with that. So this lawyer in Spain who's very prominent in the adoptee community in Spain had written a letter ready to go off to her mother but of course you're scared about sending a letter. It's really a difficult thing to decide what to do. So what Julia did, she had been observing all of Facebook. She'd been figuring out who her mother's children were and she figured out that her half-brother's partner was called Charlotte and she sent a message to Charlotte saying this is the story. Charlotte spoke to her partner, Mark, who then spoke to her mother. So we have the story confirmed. So now we have Susan and this is Susan here. Enjoy for contact after more than 50 years. So these two have a lot of catching up to do. This for the Spanish folks is Susan, the mother of Julia as you most of you are probably a guest. So Black Friday came and I bought a total of four Family 3 DNA kits for a family finder. I used three of them for my own cousins and I used one of them to visit Leicester. I took the train to Leicester just before Christmas. This is Susan here. As you can see she's holding her Family 3 DNA envelope ready to go off to the post office. She and I walked to the post office and I posted it. So I explained to Susan how Julia and I had become connected and I explained how we managed to find and how the whole process worked. I explained how Family Finder worked and then we posted the kit for Houston. And in January the result came back. Mother, daughter, clear cut. So if you're wondering about the date here that was because Family 3 DNA eventually caught up with version 5 of 23andMe and I re-uploaded and that was the date of that upload. So we're certain that we were really certain of the relationship and now we have it absolutely confirmed by DNA. So this is the the chart that runs the Spanish 23andMe user group for the adoptees and he's announcing here that now Julia has found her mother. It's translated down here and he's saying here para mi para mi un hero that is me. I am apparently a hero which made me feel quite good. So the next thing to do was to find Julia's paternal site. So Susan stated that the name of Julia's biological father was a gentleman called E. Colleen. None of the DNA databases were giving a match to anybody called Colleen although Sweeney from Sligo was a prominent name among some of the high matches. So how to find Julia's paternal site but at least we had names to work with. So in February 2019 I found an E. Colleen with the correct demographic. He'd been born in Lancashire and he was living in Warwickshire. Julia contacted his daughter and I followed up with multiple people of the same name existing. Despite the type's correct timeframe this was not Julia's father. So it was a wild goose chase. This is what wild goose chase is in Spanish but at least these Colleen family had a family tree done for them which they knew nothing about. So somebody's gaining all round with this. So then in early May 2019 I started to look for Colleen Sweeney couples in the public family trees. This was based on the hypothesis that Julia's parental grandfather was Colleen and the grandmother could have been Sweeney due to the number of matches that were cited in that name. And this was the exact search function pretty much. Found a tree matching this criteria on ancestry and the tree owner just happened to match DNA to matches shared with Julia. Did the social media slew thing again and sent messages to Julia's half-brother Sean and his wife and daughter. The wife got back to me. Sean's DNA was on ancestry. Julia's was on 23 in May. If one of them had taken the other test it would have both found each other instantly. As I said his wife replied to my message straight away and connected with Julia straight away and here's Julia announcing on the Spanish 23 in May user group that she found her father's family and if you read this she's thanking me. I'm almost her brother a great professional many hours of time and she's talking about where is it sleepless nights which is a clear case as Andrew Kane mentioned yesterday of Gene Zombia. So now she's in contact with her brother Julia also had information on her father this is him El Padre de Julia unfortunately he had passed away in the 1990s just over a year after my own father passed away so there's something in common as well and this now she has a family three she has her mother's family three and now she has her father's family three and now she has a family three with 5 000 individuals on it starting from a grand total of zero so her half brother's daughter uploaded her DNA to Jetmatch and FT DNA which resulted in a 1166 centi Morgan match therefore confirming the relationship so with all of this Julia was able to get her father's family history in Rivers Town County Sligo from the 1800s to the present day then in September of 2019 I was contacted by Muriel and David of the Cambridgeshire Family History Society who told me there was an opportunity to speak on BBC Radio Cambridgehire on this and I had an interview by this guy Chris Mann on the radio in Cambridge back in September now the interesting thing about Chris and Mann is that the man is descended from the KF Ness clan gun now there is a lot of confusion between KF Ness clan gun and the Maclegons of Fremanna which very frequently ends up aglicised to gun and there are people in the United States who think there are one one or the other and vice versa and that was just an interesting thing that happened as a result of that interview so I was watching Facebook in September 2019 and I see all of a sudden that Julia's mother is flying to Zaragoza in Spain where Julia is and so the mother and daughter are reuniting the first time since birth uh Susan then in October the following month the pair of them flying together back into Stansted and they're probably driving about 10 miles away from where I am but if you're relying on children that are busy work schedules and they have to go from A to B directly they can't be making do to detours up into North Cambridge so this is Susan and Julia together and Julia got to meet a whole pile of family in Leicestershire and as you can see they're actually quite similar it's quite striking so when she met her brother and this is him and you can see the similarity there too she found out that she had eight brothers that she knew absolutely nothing about and this was the brother which she who she met in Sussex so she got also traveling about Britain she got to see quite a bit of her ancestral country so here we have the family similarities Julia's brother and father and mother and daughter and I think you can all agree there's a quite a lot of similarity between them and I have been rather quick but in terms of acknowledgments I'd like to thank Salim Zikola Muttas for providing the documentation that gave us the names to to find the English side Enrica Villatoris for writing the letter that didn't get sent Raphael Stepania for discussions and Miguel for discussions and the families and the close matches and last I'd like to thank Julia for letting me join her on her fantastic voyage of finding her biological family and just last month my V523 and me came back and lo and behold there was a tiny match between me and Julia as well so just goes to show from the very tiny matches families can very occasionally be found and the conclusion is never give up because miracles do in fact happen thank you very much thank you how how did Julia get to Spain what's that part of the story can you reveal everything well I I asked each member of the family for permission to use their photographs and I promised them I wouldn't go into any of the personnel personal stuff just for their for their privacy sure sure sure but that's fine but I do know you do a question was for a couple comments as well how many people actually in the audience have found an adoptee among their DNA matches so there's quite a few people quite a few people and how many of you have ended up helping that adoptee find their biological families so quite a few people have found yeah and I think that's that is something that is going to be more of a feature as time goes on that more and more of us will find out we actually do have an adoptee somewhere in the family I know I've got two in mind one from 1920 when Great Aunt Mary went to Alaska to go fishing and she got more than she expected another one from the 1940s who was probably still around and did turn up at one of my Great Aunt's doorstep and said I'm related to you I think I'm your first cousin and I'm the daughter of Lucy so-and-so and the Great Aunt said no she'd never had any children she was never married I'm going to give her a call right now she phoned Lucy said you never had any children did you no great okay fine go away now and so that poor old adoptee was turned away the door so different times different attitudes as well any questions comments yes Debbie did any of the other family know about Julia beforehand was that something you'd like to say Julia was secret they did know the siblings didn't know the parents did the parents did know her brother didn't know but wasn't surprised let's move swiftly on so this was was this the first time you actually helped an adoptee yes and have you been bitten by the bug absolutely I mean it become you know it's par for the course now if you're doing genealogy I think one of the one of the issues he raised is very very pertinent it's very very difficult to know what's the best way of getting in touch with the immediate family once you actually can identify the most likely target and there was a lot of discussion going around there never really is a right answer but you finally settled on Julia getting in touch with her half brother's partner yes we then got in touch with her half brother I mean the concern was you know if you write if a solicitor like writes a letter to the mother and the husband knows nothing about it and intercepts it what can happen so there was a great reluctance to post that letter yeah well anybody else had that kind of experience Jared just comment out on it was the Spanish government supportive for helping to solve these issues of the 200 000 children um well I didn't particularly consider this issue because it wasn't relevant in Julia's case we might perhaps consult the press to see what the answer to that question is because I don't you know several Irish brigades that's right I know we could have similar situations but in this particular case it was not due to um an Irish brigade in Spain at all it was much more recent than that I'm often contacted by matches who are adopted and I don't often know where we're connected besides advising them to get on a dead match is there anything else I should be telling them get on to every database they can every single one the key thing for me was looking for common surnames among the matches of which in this case Sweeney was glaring out from the matches okay because then you know if you have two then you can start plugging them into three searches or marriage searches or like that hi um it isn't actually a question it's a comment if that's okay uh my name is Donna Shea I'm a social worker within the field of post adoption I work for a wealth of trust um I guess she might anticipate that um out of some anxieties around the ethics involved and some of it's not seeking to establish a police state but I do think that there's a need to be very cautious haven't worked for over 20 years uh with uh birth mothers the doctor children I think I can from some experience and also haven't conducted some research in the field as well so I would love to see some means of taking this forward I think it's really exciting I think it's it offers wonderful opportunities but I think from an ethical perspective I think we should be looking at some form of collaboration with people within the field with experience in the area of post adoption so it's not seeking to shut anything down we work with adults but I do think I've seen that the first time sometimes um just the damage that could be done the collateral damage from all of this and it's just so that I would just like to urge some caution in it all but to say that certainly it's really exciting and uh you know I just hope we can collaborate rather than see it go ahead and a fashion that creates you know on to all that's said okay I think that's a very pertinent uh comment and it's something that I think anybody who's been involved with this work um will feel the same way because you know certainly I work a lot with adoptees I get referrals from Bernardo's and from Tesla and it is wonderful to have them still on the case because they have the experience of working with adoptees and they know the horror stories and how things can go wrong and of course when you're a genealogist working with your matches and it's exciting to find match and of course that gets communicated to the adoptee as well and certainly I found it very very useful when there are long delays in activity in the adoptee research because it gives them a chance to stop and single off the walls um and that you really do find that sometimes I'm running around the room trying to catch them because they're excited just just getting away with them but the nature of the search is probably similar to the documentary research is that there's a huge amount of activity and then nothing for months and months and months and then a new finding that a huge amount of activity and great excitement and then nothing for months and months months oh emotional rollercoaster completely um so it is all very very difficult and I think it's wonderful to have a social worker in the background who can temper which way and advise on what the depth way forward is but of course a lot of the people a lot of adoptees that we find in our matches they maybe haven't contacted a social worker and certainly I know in in the south waiting lists for social workers is two years and that encourages people to take the more direct DNA route rather than going down the traditional route um and how we reduce the weight in this is of course very very difficult um but I'm sure a lot of my colleagues here will have stories of how things went wrong or they see the adoptee doing something and it's like you really shouldn't do that because you don't you're not putting yourself in the shoes of the birth parents or the biological family so it's very very it's a very difficult situation and that's why when you know you are agonizing about okay we we know who the family is how do we get in touch with this family who we've never met who don't know us from Adam and tell them we have found your family secret well in this case Julia had a lot of support from the Spanish adoption network I don't know what quite what they call themselves in Spanish she had the support of a of a lawyer she had the support of many people she had support of you know all those many people that are with the stolen babies and in the end she decided herself what she how she wanted to contact and she would ask me I would seek if she wanted me to do it she'd give me permission to do it but it was in her ball was in her court and that's fine up to a point but I find myself because I have to kind of make a judgment going on how realistic is the plan of action from the adopter's point of view and sometimes you know I'll encourage them to use your own words and if you draft an approach then I look over it now and give you some advice and I do find myself making some major suggestions to encourage that even advanced there's issues sometimes of the emotional journey for the person and because if you ask someone to commit a lot of themselves to paper ahead of an approach and there's what is then perceived as a second rejection that the impact from an emotional perspective you know is mammoth so you know there's it's a complex area of work and it absolutely it's very exciting but I do and I also take your point that in the head of the moment people can make approaches they think they'll be entirely diplomatic when they say they're doing family research or whatever and you know what they knock on doors and I can relate from personal experience just how that plays out because people are stupid with long memories and you know the slightest suspicion those triggers sometimes and the impact emotionally can be quite devastating so that's not to want to shut it down because there's nothing more pleasant more enjoyable when it works out it's a lovely thing to be you know it really is a privilege to be involved in that but I do say you've got to be very mindful it is an emotional mind field how do you see me talk about collaboration so how would you see that evolving or how would you like to see it evolving in the future so for what what what organization do you work for in the Belfast? Belfast Trust Belfast Trust and do you have any genetic genealogists on staff? We have a research area and Kathleen would work in conjunction with ourselves so counseling and undertake research for the social workers here in the north all of our trusts of the volunteers would you say DNA or what? Well we've done that in the last four hours Well it's looting Yes it's looting, yes it's come to to looting Not looting but you know research and I don't know about that Yes it's an evolving area it's an evolving area and I think we do have to be careful because there are times when the whole thing goes wrong and I'm sure we've got lots of examples of that Debbie you put up your hand Yes well I was just going to say that I think maybe even in our way of just seeing them that there is a system with an adoption contact register so that anyone who's adopted they can register on this and the mother can register and they can decide whether or not they want contact and they can change that at any time but I presume there's no such system in Spain or I don't know what the situation is in Ireland so that's but but also with the the don't conceived can you describe them some work there's just like a sort of similar situation there and people can actually they can get a counselling session with a qualified person when they want to actually access the information about their birth parents so it seems to me that there needs to be some sort of sort of intermediary systems so that people can decide whether or not they want contact and that they get that professional support at the time when they want contact I think it's just a risk of disaster and in that case it's worked out well they're going to have all these well-meaning genealogists coming to get involved and all getting carried away there's things can and do go wrong without that professional support Have you heard of any fire stories? Michelle did you want to say something? Just that there are separate adoption contact registers for England Wales, Scotland the Republic and Northern Ireland they all have adoption contact registers so if anyone has been adopted within any of those countries that should always be a first port of call and if you find a birth parent or family member has registered with them then you will get some information from that and you will find out straight away whether they wish to have any contact before you try to make some sort of an approach of course things get a lot more difficult when there is no information and those people haven't registered as many people have not and there are also I always say this when talking about this subject the many many many you know hundreds of thousands of cases where someone has not been adopted but does not know their parents generally their father is and that support that exists for adoptees doesn't exist for those people so it is a complete minefield at times as several people have said and how to make contact is is a very very important subject and in general I would always recommend that you try to make contact with the birth parent directly as opposed to a child or a relation another relation in the family because you simply don't know the situation and that birth parent may have spent decades hiding this secret and they may be absolutely desperate about that fact and then somebody comes along and tells their son or their or some or their cousin or somebody oh she had a baby you know and that that is an exceptionally emotional thing and I think if that birth parent is alive then all effort must be made for the birth parent to be the first contact so that they have that chance to make those decisions about contact with their child and if they do want to do that about how they tell their family about this child so that that would be the the number one thing that I would want to say about contact you do quite a lot of research with adoptees where do you get most of your referrals from are they referred from an adoption agency or is it just they come to you as members of the public in general they come to me as members of the public and I would love it if that was referrals from adoption agencies instead I would prefer that but so many simply don't go that route and I always encourage them to contact adoption authorities to check adoption registers to get their original paperwork to seek out social workers to seek out counseling to make sure that they're in the right place to be taking on this work I always say I'm a DNA detective I'm a professional genealogist I don't say I am a count I don't say I am a social worker I am not and therefore this needs to be a collaborative process and there needs there are different people with different skill sets and different experience and expertise and it shouldn't all just be down to one person now those of us that work on cases like this know that it is a very emotional thing to do and that we get very very involved in the process for the adoptee or the person with an employee or the person with an unknown parent or parent we get very involved in in trying to get that answer for them but at the end of the day we have to try to remain as objective as we can to try and think about the other side of the equation and there are all sorts of things that can be happening on that other side of the equation and I have many amazing stories like I was just told of fantastic reunions and people who were so happy to find each other and I have you know meddling ones where people were a little bit cautious and things petered out after a while and the contact didn't really keep up and all the way down to horrendous rejections and you can just get everything on this spectrum when you work on cases like this and I'm in complete agreement about how delicate it is and how much we have how carefully we have to proceed and how carefully we have to think and lots and lots of I do lots of social media sleuthing but it's it's important to to be very very sure before you start hitting send buttons or messages to anyone I was just going to add I don't think some of the problem that's in this room because most of the genetic genealogists in this room we've run privacy panels ethnic ethics type panels where we're trying to teach people about the ethics of what we're doing and why we're doing it and how to deal with it for me this is the road genealogists that don't come to these conferences that are part of the group that are working together to try and make this better to try and get the right support for adopters and people we're working with and and that for me is a problem and I think we have to try and stop those road genealogists I don't have an answer but I just wanted to throw in that I think there's there's that the issue for me the danger for me is not these three people the students the people that think they know how they're doing this identifying wrong parents for me is the worst thing ever I'm breaking up a family and maybe if I did find wrong people I don't have an answer I think one other issue of course is that a lot of the time after the reunion you've got a honeymoon period but two years down the line it may be that they just send each other Christmas cards the type of contact is quite minimal so it's very interesting when you compare the excitement of the chase so to speak with the aftermath which is okay I know now and I don't really know these people in fact we had my ex flatmate Dolores Quinlan um talking about her adoption experience in Dublin last year and she's done a little she's a psych therapist who discovered she was an illegal adoptee at the age of 48 years old and um it's a wonderful presentation that she did was available now on Family Tree webinar but um she did a little survey then of six people who have used DNA to find their family and one of them made a very very interesting comment it was like okay I found my family but now I feel I don't belong to two families I don't belong to the family that adopted me and I don't belong to the family that is my biological family because I just don't have anything in common with these people so the aftermath of the reunion I think is also very important time where we need to do more research on it and we also need to have that ongoing support for adoptees past the reunion period into the aftermath period as well. Candy you wanted to make a comment on people on Facebook uh there is a group that they are helping adoptees and all you know try to find their parents but they they have special people that um look everything up for them that they still give the adoptee the choice of how they're going to and they ask for advice all the time and there are some horror stories on there that you know people are just you know crying and uh and then other things they they call them their search angels and they uh just so happy and everybody's so a lot of uh men who had fathered a child and didn't know if they never got married they never had children and all of a sudden now they do have and they're thrilled and then other times they were uh uh sperm donors and uh they could have several children and anyway it just gets so complicated I like to read them except for the sad ones but uh it's out there and people try to warn against you know moving too fast and saying the wrong thing and sending letters and having phone calls because I can't even imagine well it's very true because dna detectives has over a hundred thousand people in that facebook group but that the search squad is another one of these facebook groups um so like you say it is out there and it's happening all the time but as with a lot of you technologies they run ahead of us and we're left trying to chase after them to catch up so I was just going to make one quick comment because I think um although dna detectives doing a brilliant job with in america um when they've got a big problem with closed um sealed adoption records I think people are coming into the genetic genealogy scene groups like that and then bypassing the usual systems certainly in the UK where they can actually get the paper record that they're being encouraged to to go the dna route before using the dna records um and because of the you know sheer volume of american testers and all the adoptee reunion stories people are reading about that's the way people think that they should be going and they don't realize that there is sometimes support available elsewhere and they could find out about having to do the dna at all right true right true of course we have these wonderful long lost family stories on the television where every reunion is a happy one and that's not necessarily the case um there's a marriage program tb3 adoption stories where they actually covered a much broader spectrum of results and outcomes including the lady who came over from new jersey contacted the social worker social worker moved to the birth mother the birth mother wrote back saying I don't want anything to do with her and she had to go back to new jersey and that was the end of that so here's a situation where the birth parents don't know but because the birth mother doesn't want anything to do with her she has to just forget about it really um we have two questions we've got heavy down here and I'm going to yes to people up here as well generally um seeing over your first talking about um the um about the first group reading um was um like legally um adopting doing it legally that way I thought the first start that um was actually like in America like um it belongs for the since um so so our american families are going to come over to like big memories and all this stuff and with it um so a case to them the american families I was wanting to notice it's that it's not happening to me again and if it did well would be work is the best year coming online and thanks to them organizations contacting us um help them to help them to find their families over here so yeah no I think yeah I think what the the case of the franco children um is that similar to what we've had in ireland where apparently a lot of the children from the mother and baby homes were sold to american couples for example what actually happened with these 300 000 children that were abducted um and why why were they abducted and what happened to them afterwards as well as the whole process what I am not an expert in this by any means but how it started was if a woman from a republican family and I mean a republican in the Spanish civil war since um was in prison and delivered a baby then that baby would the mother was told the baby was dead and the baby was adopted to a nationalist family again the Spanish civil war context um such that the population was shifting towards the republican side that was their intention and a continued correct correct for the fascists yes that's right and have they how many of these children have they identified I haven't read the literature on this because I was particularly focused on Julia's story and this was just a background to Julia's story rather than a particular focus for me sure okay we have a question back here my name is those I'm from India I like to talk with you after the meeting I need to go ahead okay there you have another client I don't get a question or a comment here all right fine and Patty yes you wanted to ask something now make a comment I've been involved in maybe 10 or 20 adoption cases and the two that come to mind for the situation has been most difficult afterwards and the two where the birth parents subsequently married each other they kept the fact that they had a child before marriage secret from the other children and they found it far more difficult to break the news than somebody who had a child is a single mother with a different father or whatever in one case I met the adoptee and her full sister who had met each other and came to Ireland together but couldn't tell the birth mother that they were going off on holidays together and looked like twins that got on like house and fire but they were keeping secrets from the birth mother in the other case I got a phone call purporting to be from a friend with the birth mother saying keep out of the story or we technically proceedings against you but please can I have the phone number of the girl in Australia is it always more difficult when the couple subsequently marrying they have to come out and confess their secrets or I just got a small sample with the two very similar results this is where we need a lot more um a lot more research to be done on this type of thing and there just isn't that kind of uh quantitative research that has been done but is there it's quite but I think that is a much point which you make public um as I said I worked in post adoption over 20 years now and I've worked in numerous cases where the parents went on to marry and I think that does throw up additional I think people would initially think oh that's all right and that makes it okay and I would concur with you my experience would be what makes it much more difficult I have a family member who had her daughter adopted when she was 16 or 17 and they adopted the contact a few years ago having been married working as a social worker in your life work and got in contact and very warmly received because she was wanting to be in contact with her for a long time they lived very closely together beside each other practically and um but there was a killing off period from the adopt D not from the mother it was devastated when this happened and it's still devastated but there's this killing off period and still is and has two grandchildren and is really really distraught but doesn't get to see them now she's subsequently moved further away but you know um the thought that she missed out in all those years of the grandchildren as well as the daughter but her mother is still alive her adoptive mother is still alive and they finally she thinks that's not really a good idea to post contact but I mean after all that hard work getting in contact then to them and disrupting lives and then to sort of have this killing off very hard very hard I'm actually engaged in research in terms of longitude and the like at the minute I think you're quite right in terms of expectations even where I'm sorry we're getting off points slightly but I think sometimes what happens is that you know the motivations are very different and I think in some instances and you can't generalize but I think certainly in terms of reunion for some adopted adults it's around the curiosity it's about medical information it's about no other history but if there are differences in terms of and we don't like to talk about social class but demographics however we like to style it but you know in terms of what sustains a relationship and it's a much more motive situation I think some of the time for the birth mother because she's carried the baby she's had bad experience and but they reunite I think sometimes the expectations are more of a reconnection you know close in the circle whereas for the adopted person it's much more in the vein of yes they want questions answered they want to know where they are but in terms of their expectations of their relationship I think they're looking more you know well there's different research shows different things but really an extended family relationship at best or a friendship as opposed to a mother-daughter mother-son relationship I don't think that's I think most adopted people will tell you categorically their mum is their adopted mum that's the person that brought them up they're not looking at another mother there is there is yeah we are supposed to be having an expert panel meeting now but I think the discussion is so interesting but we're just going to continue the discussion because I think a lot of these similar seven questions would come up in in the expert panel now somebody else Derek Daryl you had a comment to make as well I have a comment to make because I do some of these adoption reunions and I think it's the expectations from both sides and I think for the adopted they have to be told first of all going in that you're not going to go into this child this mother's child and for the mother I think you have to tell them this child's already a herring mother and what you're going to have to do is to be open-minded enough in whatever relationship that you have you have to be appreciative of that it's extremely difficult as a search angel to go and do this work and find out that the parents have been married since six months after the child was given up and there's full brothers and sisters out there but the parents don't want the brothers and sisters to know that there's another child floating around I have a very difficult time with it I've cried many a night over and adopted I've cried many a night over a mother hoping for a child but I think it's our responsibility that we're going to stick our toes in that water and we have the responsibility to tell both sides of it you have to be open-minded you cannot go into it looking for my mother my mother loves me and is going to be hallelujah she may not be she may just want to be real and you have to tell the adopt or the mother this child may not want to have anything to do with you she or he just wants to know where they come from they already have parents and that's extremely extremely difficult we we have to remember we're human beings we're not just a family a mother we're not just a daddy we're not just living doctor we're human beings and we have to look at those faces as a human being case by case I think the the it's interesting you mentioned the adopt the birth mother because certainly down south I have been referred to birth mothers who are close to 80 and both of them had to give up a child for adoption 60 years ago in both cases they were never told the gender of the child so they never knew if they gave birth to a boy or girl one of them after 12 months of the database her son suddenly appeared so they were reunited in this particular case she knew that the child was alive and had been adopted but it's just to make the point that it's not just the adoptees that are looking for their biological parents it's frequently the biological parents that are looking for the adoptees as well are there comments and questions uh johnny pearl and then Claire Mike down just a really quick one it's funny for me hearing this discussion because I had have done kind of maybe three cases in the last year and I realized just because why this was why it was relatively easy for me and that's because in all three of those cases there was no living parents so it becomes a much drier uh completely different experience and of course it's still you start to be really sensitive you start to make decisions who do you contact and how do you contact them but in one case yeah I mean the lady's 80 years old and she's just keen to find out is there a history of heart disease where this is coming from uh am I really um obviously when you start a case you don't know whether the parents can be alive or not so everything still applies uh it's just funny that from the obviously I know about all this stuff to be honest I'm new to the DNA detectives group because I can't deal with the onslaught of emotion every day either happy or sad I like to have it there so I can go and look for discussions but I can't actually deal with it on an everyday basis uh but uh yes it's really really good discussion to have so we think about this stuff because when you go into a case I always go in head first oh you know I want to help people who match with my family because I feel like I'd be apparatus to do it and obviously it's it's very rewarding but yeah I know it's this tough so yeah thanks everyone um and we had a comment from Claire as well actually mine is a question oh we got a question and it's on a totally separate topic that's okay so I have a new match with the contact me this weekend and uh she's 33cm more than matched in my aunt and I was saying I'm not sure we're going to have to figure that out you know Ireland and so on but uh she doesn't match my aunt at all I'm dead much I could not be which website is she on we're both on family tree DNA oh small segments I'm gonna give this to Donna explain yeah family tree DNA they add up all the tiny bits of DNA to give a total sense to Morgan's you will find if you go and look at the chromosome browser you only want to count segments greater than 70 Morgan's right you'll probably find out yeah yeah so she won't show as a match on another site that do all that before they give you the mattress that's really useful thanks it raises another important question or an important point is that we're we've been talking about how we help adoptees but of course adoptees can go out and do the whole thing themselves and there's probably a lot more adoptees that are trying to do it themselves than are getting in touch with you know really good genetic genealogists who can give them a helping hand so in in that sense it's the you know that the situation is running away from ourselves even more um so I'm just wondering in the in what would you like to see in the best case scenario in terms of social services what kind of support would you like to see for social services I just think it doesn't have to be out of the rower and I think probably going forward the idea is because isn't it wonderful that science my allies you know got uncertainty to be removed and so that's that's a real gift but I think um it's like any you know anything that involves relationships people we need to be mindful of the impact and we've touched on that a lot today I think there's a real opportunity here going forward to actually build to collaborate and actually in ways that would have been unheard of I mean it was wonderful to hear Julia's story and to think the outcome you know it's please don't think for one minute that um I see this other one something really um exciting something that um certainly from a social work point of view um it's lovely to be able to have confirmation and it's an additional tool but I I do think the danger I see it sometimes when people have gone off on their own account they've made a mess of things and then they approach an agency to see if we can patch things up and then I think that's really difficult um so it's kind of getting from an education um to get the message out there that look nobody's trying to police this we're trying to assist um and you know you can do that from a genealogical perspective and also from a social work perspective from a counselling perspective and you know let's collaborate almost and get people the scaffolding that they need to help them go forward to do yeah should please add a comment this is just the point of view generally and the advertising for the organisers for it's adopt n i and we support uh adults who are involved in adoption triangle the support groups counselling and one-on-one that support those anybody that's just not convinced online so adopt n i adopt n i now do you have um support groups and is there a capacity for genetic genealogists to come and maybe talk to a support group or something like that or i actually um i spoke with martin mcdowell um earlier um because i would be involved in terms of training for post adoption workers and we would meet on twice a year and i've already spoken to martin with a view if he would come along and speak to social workers and so um um we absolutely so i did that before i came in here today to see if we could work together i'm glad that you're in safe hands you're definitely in safe hands with martin um and we actually met with social workers at double as well because they had a training day and we talked to them about genetic genealogy and we talked took them through the process as well so they are aware of what it can do and occasionally now i'll get referrals from outside of tisla and bernardo's because it was all of the different adoption agencies in ireland as well um i've got another question about the contact preference register um and then we'll come to you jill um there is a contact preference register in south but in the north it are the records closed that are in the north adoption records are closed um adopted adults um so if you were born before december of 1987 under our legislation you would like to have a counseling session with a social worker um ahead of getting your your details and you can then access your information people born after december of 87 they can actually access the birth cert without the need to have any involvement from social services what i would say to people is that if you will approach the likes of the post adoption team and both last or adopt mi we can actually then access what records are held so that going forward you're going forward with the information in terms of what was the story of the time you can bring that information up to date with research ahead of and then use an intermediary to make an approach so that would be certainly what i think would be best practice um and obviously the dna the internet all links adults are a role to play these days but i think the danger is that sometimes people go off and you know they're on a mission and you'll have met that and you know they're blind to anyone else's needs except their own unfortunate life absolutely um the other thing of course is that if you can access your records you were born after 1987 your parents probably had facebook account and there's nothing to stop anybody for me about dna just coming to get their birth certificate and live with the genealogy and you'll find the marriage record and you know you might even be able to trace them down but you probably come across that as well i mean i think the sad thing is that the thinking behind the legislation and the need to have a counselling session was because essentially let's face it what happened quite rightly in my view with the 1987 legislation here was that we moved the goalposts for generations of birth mothers you know there's literally hundreds of birth mothers like there in ireland who were assured that once they signed consent to the adoption that would be the end of the matter now the we recognize through um research um that obviously identity is closely linked with the knowledge of one's past and you know i don't need to tell anybody in this film about the significance of the past so we get that now in a way that we maybe didn't when the legislation was passed but nonetheless we do need to be very sensitive to the impact because birth mothers were told to go ahead not to tell anybody you know the whole shame around um you know conception i'd said of marriage um and you know we're now 2020 but can i say to you many many many of the birth parents primarily birth mothers but i've also worked with birth mothers they're still locked in the era when the child was conceived the shame that they were made to feel is still palpable you know so um please please be sensitive about your consideration and of course you never know the circumstances of the conception because there could have been violence involved and you know you could be walking into a quagmire you know you never know why you're going to put your foot there jill you had a comment um i was i work as this on a voluntary basis as a searcher for birth link the charity in scotland and that puts people in touch and adoptees and that and i was just going to say that even if people identify people through dna it's still possible to go back to birth link and have that connection and the contact made and get the support so it is important to remember that that even if we're helping people to identify who the end person is that it doesn't need to be dashed into and it is often better to have an intermediary not drop the nuclear bomb in somebody else's family and we have a comment here i'm going to come around the other side uh i will try in english uh i i will do my best yes forgive me um well i wanted to talk about a specificity in france uh with a statistic which could be interesting uh in france we have a specific case which is a non-mother which means that a mother can give birth to her baby and decide it to give absolutely no information it's totally anonymous nesusics but the world i think it could be some kind of chendu birth well it's very particular in france and at the beginning it was meant to um to try to not have a mother killing her baby it was to say you can give birth anonymously totally anonymous when don't kill your baby you are protected but that's why it was meant then uh we have to remind that uh you the european union has uh law omission uh the right to the origins which means that everyone of everyone has the right to know these origins it's international law you are the right to know that doesn't mean that you are you have the right to know the person you have the right to know your history that's not the same then the french government has no ever have a choice to make uh with the ministry of health a specific uh establishment conseil national taxis with origin personnel to help the adult to find their birth patterns and the recipe of the chendu babies then they have statistics about 10 years of being doing so over 10 years then for the chendu babies they try to find the mother when the the adults come and say i want to know now i want to know for half of the demons the agency could do nothing because the records were empty or destroyed for half of the records for the other half of the records they have enough informations to contact the mother and they contact the mother and they ask them you decided to give a totally anonymous 20 40 years ago now it's an adult who wants to meet you what do you decide half of the mother did agree to meet the head that's very interesting does that figure surprise people that half of these mothers who gave births to chendu babies or chendu babies completely and honestly half of them later won't expose in fact was of those that we could identify which was half of the total half of them did want to actually have contact with their adult child is that surprising no no it it has implications of course as well because if half of the mothers are interested in contacting being contacted by their children that will probably encourage the children to take DNA tests in France where it's always a little bit difficult to do DNA testing and to try and find their biological parents that way and of course only the mothers were asked where the fathers asked would they be interested in having contact with this chendu baby i think we there could be a subject about psychology of that because i don't know a lot of adoptive to talk about because i plan to help them of course but with a theoretical how to say a way of being with psychologists and so on it's very you understand but it's very sensible sensitive but in fact when i ask adopted i say well you are family or mother and your father does that does it interest you and in fact not so much they are it's really the link with the mother who is important and telling to say she has given giving birth to me and she has not rejected me but she has give me away and this is very crucial for them it's a mother it is probably a common theme is that adoptees are more interested in finding out who their mother was than who their father was and i think that's probably quite common that they go initially for the finding the great mother and then you might mention what are you interested in finding a birth father and it's like an afterthought well sure if you can find it you know but it is very much an afterthought um well we're coming towards the end but we have time for another couple of comments i was just going to comment we've been talking a lot about the the mothers and children but we haven't mentioned anything about the wider extended family and there's a whole vast network involved and quite often when these family secrets are covered up you end up with some members of the family knowing others not knowing and then you've got this whole nightmare of you know which other family members to contact do they know do they not know and i don't quite know what the answer is for dealing with these extended family networks and i know that with the np gateway they have even have special groups set up for you know say if you're the partner of an adoptee um because it impacts on on you because you've got this partner who's now suddenly dealing with this big emotion experience and there's no support network for any of these other members of the extended family i don't know what people think about that and what i think that's a very good point and certainly um when i've dealt with families and the news gets out then there frequently is this large debate which can be very um stressful for people is you know the more distant cousins take the adoptee has the right to know and of course the immediate family is what we've got to protect a mom so there really is that conflict and that conflict can still over into the extended family especially if you're approaching the adoptee via a second cousin and then a first cousin and then the next step is well you know suddenly somebody's half sibling turns up in the their list of matches and what do you do then and that happened to one of my adoptees she wasn't sure how to approach her father who was identified by her biological father is um uh biological father sister appeared among her matches and immediately got in touch with her so the cat was out of the bag and i think on that note before the objective we hope this is for you today but thank you all very much for your um for the wonderful discussion we've had i think it's very great that's because it's very very useful to share these these um posts and discussions and of course let's not forget the wonderful presentation that started this all off from there are at least two people in the room related to junior one of them is me well thank you all very much for attending and thank you for uh uh contributing over the last two days thank you to family treaty name for a wonderful conference thank you to all the iSoC volunteers for um helping to organize this and hopefully we'll see you all again next year so safe travels see you back in belfax in 2020 my pleasure