Member-only story

At 53, My Mom Found Her Family She Never Knew Existed

Kirstie Taylor
5 min readOct 7, 2019

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Old family photos that my mom collected

Several years ago, my parents told me they were getting each other DNA tests. My dad joked, “Maybe your mom will have .00002% Southeast Asian in her, who knows!”

If anyone knew though, it would be my mom.

I remember growing up entertaining my mom’s keen interest in our genealogy. I would come into her office, finding love letters from my great-great-grandfather to my great-great-grandmother scattered across my mom’s desk. I’d sit on the floor, helping sift through piled-up black and white photos of relatives. My family even took a trip to tiny villages in eastern Germany to take photos of our relative’s graves during my summer vacation in middle school.

My mom belonged to Ancestry.com before it was cool. She was pen pals with distant relatives most people would never even knew they had. She knew her lineage, and she knew it well.

The circumstances that my mom grew up in were odd, though. She was twelve years younger than her closest sibling; born just under a year before her first niece. Instead of growing up playing with her brothers and sisters, my mom played hide and seek with her nieces and nephews.

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Kirstie Taylor
Kirstie Taylor

Written by Kirstie Taylor

Want to feel confident and secure when dating? Grab my 30-day dating guide, "From Anxious to Secure." kirstietaylor.com/guide // IG: @kirstietaylorr //

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