DNA and Me: Solving Personal Mysteries

By Kait Carson

Last December I opened my email and discovered a message with the subject line ‘cousin’ from a Gmail account I didn’t recognize. Hello, red flags. The only reason I didn’t delete it immediately was the sender included my original family surname. One I hadn’t known existed for years. Still, something about the message arriving so close to the holidays made me think of: 1) the millions of bogus AI marketing emails that clogged my inbox daily, and 2) the bogus inheritance emails seeking either a finder’s fee or bank account numbers. I left it to marinate in my inbox, unopened, for a week or more.

As a bit of background, my family history is convoluted. My mother’s maternal side is well documented. My cousin is a genealogy buff, and she’s taken the family back to the early 1800s. Not much mystery there. Her paternal side is a different story. In a ripped from the headlines moment, my grandfather was U.S. born because my French great-grandmother visited her husband’s Italian family in the states, either because of a miscalculated due date or by design. Who knows.

My paternal grandmother’s heritage is an open book. She maintained contact with her middle-European family throughout her life. My paternal grandfather, the side of the family my ‘cousin’ represented, is an entirely different story. My grandfather never spoke about his life prior to his arrival in the U.S. On census forms he variously styled himself as German, Austrian, or Czech. He spoke German, and that was my father’s cradle tongue, so German made sense, but our family name was Hoyo, and there is no ‘y’ in the German alphabet. There was no record of him coming through Ellis Island or Castle Garden, which could have offered a clue to his origins. The only tidbit he did share was that when he came to the U.S., he went to Wyoming, where he married and had a son named John. The boy was taken from him as an infant when his wife died.

The knowledge of a potential cousin with the original family surname led me to open the mysterious email. Rather than discovering a possible cousin with a connection to the American West, I discovered a possible cousin with a connection to modern Slovakia with an insatiable thirst for genealogy. He’d compiled quite a dossier of facts and newspaper clippings about his extended family, and about my more limited one. His great-grandmother, who would have been my grandfather’s niece,shared some photos she had received from family members in the U.S. before WWII. The collection included photos I had seen in my father’s personal photo collection, and newspaper clippings that were new to me. Including one of my parent’s wedding announcement, complete with a photo of my mother. Gobsmacked doesn’t describe my feelings.

All of this, and a really great sale, encouraged me to have my DNA tested. I’d been on the fence about testing, but I took the plunge. My results have come back, and while I’m still digesting them, there were some surprises right on the first page. My results returned only six regions. As it turns out, I have no German heritage on my father’s side, and no French heritage on my mother’s, but I am 1% ‘Germans in Russia’ on her side. That was a startling development. The testing also turned up a handful of cousins in the American West. Intriguing, but I’m not sure what I’ll do with the information.

 The results were different to what I had been expecting, and exposed many of the stories I grew up with as false. Oddly enough, I think that’s part of the charm of being an American. When our ancestors came to this country, they had a golden opportunity to recreate themselves. Arguably, that was part and parcel of the Great American Dream, and their re-creations became intertwined in the fabric of their descendants' lives until the myths became reality.

Have you taken a DNA test, and did you find any surprises? Would you consider taking one?

Snoopy's Poop Scores Crime Coup

That was a headline announcing the arrest of a suspect in Indiana for a triple slaying. It came about when the suspect stepped in dog poop at the scene of the crime, and when he was apprehended later, he claimed he’d been nowhere near the site. However, not only did he leave a foot print in the poop, there was just enough found on his shoe for the DNA of the only dog on the property to be a match.

The match was made in a small, three-person laboratory at UC Davis – the only accredited forensic lab in the country dealing with animal evidence. They use the same techniques and tools as human labs, although they use primers specific to the animal evidence being tested.  Urine, hair, poop, saliva or other animal evidence left behind can help solve animal cruelty, animal attacks on humans and human crimes like robbery, rape and murder where an animal left a mark behind. Beth Wictum, the lab director said “Some studies show you can’t go into a house where there’s a dog or a cat without picking up some evidence.” For instance, in one case the woman’s dog relieved itself on the tire of the man who tried to sexually assault her. Even though she couldn’t pick him out in the lineup, the dog’s pee on the tire linked him to the scene.

My California rag doll cats watching TV

Once upon a time, animal evidence might have been overlooked, but today’s investigators automatically collect any animal fur, hairs, feces, urine stains and tissue samples found at a crime scene. They also take mouth swabs from pets after they defend their owners against attackers, and increasingly they check the blankets, rugs and sheets wrapped around homicide victims.

On Christmas Eve 2002, Kevin Butler was murdered in his home by two men who broke into his apartment and started to beat him. His pet cockatoo – named Bird after basketball great Larry Bird – tried to come to his rescue. He repeatedly dove down on the attackers, clawing at their skin and pecking their heads. The police found Bird dead, stabbed to death with a fork, but the blood trails Bird created as well as human DNA found in Bird’s beak, matched the prime suspect and helped put his owner’s murderer behind bars for life.

This lab doing such great work is in a humble setup; one trailer parked on a dusty side road on the fringe of the Davis campus. The three lab technicians; Beth Wictum, Teri Kun and Christina Lindquist, have access to databases from years of research at the wider Veterinary Genetics Lab, which includes databases of dogs, cats, horses, cows, llamas, sheep, goats, pigs and alpacas. They help solve animal abuse cases, ownership disputes and have even debunked some Bigfoot cases proving the fur came from a bear or a chimpanzee.

In my first book, The Blue Rose, the police chief sent cat fur in for DNA testing. Because my books cover a one week period and DNA testing can take months, I gave him a longtime friend from college days, who works in a DNA lab and rushes everything through for him. Hey, it’s fiction. What else can I say?

Have you ever included animal DNA testing in your stories?