Latest / Stories That Live In Us / The Adoptee, The Next Door Neighbor, and The DNA Twist No One Saw Coming | Episode 125

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The Adoptee, The Next Door Neighbor, and The DNA Twist No One Saw Coming | Episode 125 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: I was sitting in a conference room with a man who had been adopted at birth.
• 0:05
  Crista Cowan: He had given me his DNA match list, and I had spent hours going through his DNA matches and census records and newspaper articles.
• 0:15
  Crista Cowan: And as we were sitting there, I handed him a piece of paper with the name of his older brother on it.
• 0:24
  Crista Cowan: And he nervously took the piece of paper, looked at it, paused, and then laughed out loud.
• 0:34
  Crista Cowan: Because it was a name he knew.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: And that isn't even the only twist in the story.
• 0:42
  Crista Cowan: Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family.
• 0:51
  Crista Cowan: Welcome to Stories That Live In Us.
• 0:54
  Crista Cowan: Some of you have heard me tell the story about how I got started in family history.
• 1:03
  Crista Cowan: Here's a little recap for those who haven't heard it.
• 1:06
  Crista Cowan: My parents were going to school at Brigham Young University when I was born, and they were taking entirely different sets of courses.
• 1:16
  Crista Cowan: My dad was an accounting major, my mother was an English major, they had a newborn, and so they decided they wanted to take one class together every semester.
• 1:26
  Crista Cowan: Well, at BYU, you can actually get a degree in family history.
• 1:30
  Crista Cowan: So there were a lot of family history classes they could choose from.
• 1:34
  Crista Cowan: That's what they decided to do.
• 1:35
  Crista Cowan: One class every semester that they took together, bringing me with them in family history.
• 1:42
  Crista Cowan: As part of that, they would also drive up to Salt Lake City one Friday a month and do family history research in the library there.
• 1:51
  Crista Cowan: My dad would shove me under a microfilm reader in my baby carrier, and he would tell me stories about the things that he was finding.
• 1:59
  Crista Cowan: So it's no wonder that my parents take full credit for my career.
• 2:03
  Crista Cowan: I didn't get here right away, though.
• 2:06
  Crista Cowan: It was a journey.
• 2:07
  Crista Cowan: So I started with my first computer when I was 12 years old with the very first DOS-based family history program on it, doing the data entry of all the family history that my parents had collected over the years.
• 2:20
  Crista Cowan: Then, when I was 17 and went away to college, I worked in a library that had a family history section, and I got to help people with their genealogy.
• 2:30
  Crista Cowan: It became a passion of mine long before it became my profession.
• 2:35
  Crista Cowan: I've been here at Ancestry since 2004, which feels like a whole lifetime in and of itself.
• 2:43
  Crista Cowan: But in 2012, there was a change in family history that kind of disrupted everything.
• 2:51
  Crista Cowan: That's the year that Ancestry launched our autosomal DNA testing.
• 2:57
  Crista Cowan: Now, when I first tested, people would ask me, why are you taking a DNA test?
• 3:03
  Crista Cowan: Because don't you already know your family history?
• 3:06
  Crista Cowan: And I would explain that I did know my family history, but that I wanted a layer of genetic evidence to put over all the other evidence that our family had spent decades collecting.
• 3:18
  Crista Cowan: And that's really what it was for me in those early days as new DNA matches rolled in.
• 3:26
  Crista Cowan: Well, if you've listened to the episode from season one about my new Aunt Carol, you know that there was a very big surprise we discovered through DNA in our family.
• 3:41
  Crista Cowan: It wasn't like some discover that they have another parent or another grandparent that they didn't know about.
• 3:48
  Crista Cowan: It was that we discovered somebody who belonged in our family that we didn't know was missing.
• 3:55
  Crista Cowan: And that kind of changed my perspective about how we deal with each other when we find DNA matches that are unexpected.
• 4:07
  Crista Cowan: So every Sunday night for the last 10 years, my dad and I get together over FaceTime, sometimes in person, and we spend four or five hours going through some of the new DNA matches that have come into our match lists over the course of the last week.
• 4:26
  Crista Cowan: And it sends us down rabbit trails and it sends us up branches of our tree we haven't spent time on in ages.
• 4:33
  Crista Cowan: And it's really fun to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together.
• 4:38
  Crista Cowan: But every once in a while we get a match who has a tree attached, and nothing in the tree makes sense to how they might fit into our family.
• 4:49
  Crista Cowan: Luckily, Ancestry has some tools that make it easier to figure out.
• 4:56
  Crista Cowan: One of those tools allows us to look at how much DNA those matches share with each other, and we can kind of figure out at least what branch of our family tree they fit on.
• 5:07
  Crista Cowan: Well, one Sunday night, several years ago, my dad and I were going through a new set of matches on his mother's side of the family tree, and we found one of those matches that just didn't make sense based on the family tree they had attached.
• 5:23
  Crista Cowan: And then we clicked through to his profile page.
• 5:27
  Crista Cowan: His test was actually managed by his wife, and there was a small notation there that they were looking for biological family.
• 5:36
  Crista Cowan: Very quickly, my dad and I were able to figure out which branch of my grandmother's family tree this man was connected on, but we didn't have all of the pieces.
• 5:48
  Crista Cowan: So I sent a message to his wife.
• 5:52
  Crista Cowan: And I just said, It looks like you're related to us on this branch of our family tree.
• 5:57
  Crista Cowan: I would love to help you figure this out if you're interested in helping.
• 6:04
  Crista Cowan: I have spent a lot of my career here at Ancestry since 2012 figuring out DNA puzzles for other people.
• 6:13
  Crista Cowan: Maybe even more than I've spent time figuring out DNA puzzles for myself.
• 6:18
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if you remember the television show Long Lost Family, or if you've ever heard of the Paul Fronzak case, or any other number of big DNA mysteries that have come out in the news.
• 6:34
  Crista Cowan: I have worked on a lot of those projects.
• 6:36
  Crista Cowan: I cut my teeth on Paul Franzak's case.
• 6:40
  Crista Cowan: I was one of the lead researchers on Long Lost Family when it was on the air for those four years.
• 6:47
  Crista Cowan: And so I've learned how not just to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but also how to communicate information to people who might not be ready to hear it just yet.
• 7:01
  Crista Cowan: So when I send those messages out to people, I always try to be careful because I don't know what they know and what they don't know.
• 7:10
  Crista Cowan: There was some indication that they were looking for biological family, but I didn't know if they had an unknown father, or if they were adopted and they knew they were adopted, or if they had taken a DNA test and just found out yesterday that their dad wasn't their dad.
• 7:28
  Crista Cowan: So I always approached that carefully.
• 7:32
  Crista Cowan: I instantly received a message back that same night.
• 7:37
  Crista Cowan: And that doesn't always happen.
• 7:39
  Crista Cowan: But this man, responding on his wife's account where his test was managed, said that he would love my help and then proceeded to share information about when and where he was born, what we call non-ID for adoptees, which is the information they're usually given by the adoption agency.
• 7:59
  Crista Cowan: Stuff like your birth mom was this old when you were born, and your birth father was this old, or they are this ethnicity or that ethnicity, or here's some medical information about their families of origin.
• 8:15
  Crista Cowan: He had very little of that.
• 8:19
  Crista Cowan: He knew that his birth mother was not a teenage pregnancy.
• 8:25
  Crista Cowan: He knew that she had older children when he was placed for adoption, and he knew nothing about his biological father.
• 8:35
  Crista Cowan: So I went to work.
• 8:37
  Crista Cowan: He shared his DNA match list with me and asked me to let him know if he found if I found anything.
• 8:42
  Crista Cowan: So I started digging into his DNA matches.
• 8:45
  Crista Cowan: I was able to separate them, maternal side and paternal side.
• 8:49
  Crista Cowan: I realized I was related to him on his mother's side of the family.
• 8:54
  Crista Cowan: And because I had already identified which branch of my grandmother's family tree he was connected on, I put the pieces together on that side pretty quickly.
• 9:04
  Crista Cowan: I discovered that his biological mother had indeed been married and had several children, and then she had gotten divorced.
• 9:14
  Crista Cowan: And then she had gotten pregnant.
• 9:17
  Crista Cowan: And she placed him for adoption.
• 9:20
  Crista Cowan: And then a few years later, she had gotten married again and had more children.
• 9:27
  Crista Cowan: She had a set of older children, she had a set of younger children, and she raised all of them, but she had placed him for adoption.
• 9:37
  Crista Cowan: And I didn't understand the story or fully why, other than that she was a single mom back in the 1960s, trying to raise her children the best she could, and maybe she just couldn't raise him.
• 9:51
  Crista Cowan: Then I dug into the father side of the family.
• 9:56
  Crista Cowan: And what I uncovered was that this man's biological father had been her boss.
• 10:06
  Crista Cowan: He was married, had a family of his own, and she had been working for him at the time that she had gotten pregnant.
• 10:15
  Crista Cowan: I put all those pieces together through newspaper articles and city directories, the timeline timeline out, and now I had to decide how to share this information.
• 10:29
  Crista Cowan: Both biological parents were deceased.
• 10:34
  Crista Cowan: So there was nobody in that generation still living to give him any additional information or answers.
• 10:42
  Crista Cowan: But his oldest siblings on his mom's side were old enough to have remembered that their mom had been pregnant.
• 10:53
  Crista Cowan: And so I thought maybe if I could put him in touch with them, they might have some information for him.
• 11:00
  Crista Cowan: This is the point in this process where I usually start to get really nervous.
• 11:08
  Crista Cowan: Because again, I never know what people know and what they don't know.
• 11:14
  Crista Cowan: Sure, these older siblings were old enough to have remembered that their mom was pregnant, but I didn't know what they had been told.
• 11:21
  Crista Cowan: Did they know mom had placed this child for adoption, or had they been told that the baby had died?
• 11:27
  Crista Cowan: Did they even really remember that she had been pregnant, or had they blocked that out?
• 11:32
  Crista Cowan: Had they been raised in good circumstances or traumatic circumstances?
• 11:36
  Crista Cowan: Did they have good feelings about their mom or not?
• 11:39
  Crista Cowan: We don't ever know what we're walking into.
• 11:43
  Crista Cowan: And when I I've got somebody on the other side of this that already is a little bit nervous, maybe a little bit desperate, maybe longing for information, and sometimes longing for a relationship.
• 11:59
  Crista Cowan: I have to think about how to present the information in a way that I'm not causing any additional harm in that circumstance.
• 12:10
  Crista Cowan: So I think about it sometimes for days, even after I've figured out the answer.
• 12:17
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes I go diving into newspapers and yearbooks and Facebook, trying to figure out all of the pieces of the puzzle, trying to see if there's any additional information I can gather that will help me feel a little more confident and help me present the information in a way that helps them feel a little bit more comfortable about what they're walking into.
• 12:39
  Crista Cowan: So I went diving into the Facebook pages of these older maternal siblings.
• 12:47
  Crista Cowan: And as I was looking at the Facebook page of the oldest brother, I realized that his name seemed vaguely familiar.
• 12:56
  Crista Cowan: He lives in the next town over from me, but that couldn't be it.
• 13:01
  Crista Cowan: Then I started looking at his family members.
• 13:03
  Crista Cowan: I wanted to piece together like, was he married?
• 13:06
  Crista Cowan: Did he have children and grandchildren?
• 13:08
  Crista Cowan: And yes, he did.
• 13:09
  Crista Cowan: And as I was looking through the list of his children in Facebook, I realized that one of his daughters was Facebook friends with my sister.
• 13:18
  Crista Cowan: So I immediately ran upstairs.
• 13:21
  Crista Cowan: My sister and I live together.
• 13:22
  Crista Cowan: I live in a mother-in-law apartment in the basement.
• 13:25
  Crista Cowan: And I ran upstairs to my sister and I said, Who is this person?
• 13:30
  Crista Cowan: And she said, You know her.
• 13:32
  Crista Cowan: She was my college roommate.
• 13:34
  Crista Cowan: And I said, Do you know her parents?
• 13:36
  Crista Cowan: And she said, Yeah.
• 13:38
  Crista Cowan: Remember that year I spent Thanksgiving at their house?
• 13:40
  Crista Cowan: And we've we've been friends for, you know, almost 30 years at this point, right?
• 13:45
  Crista Cowan: What is happening?
• 13:48
  Crista Cowan: She said, Why?
• 13:51
  Crista Cowan: And I proceeded to tell her that her old college roommate was the daughter of a man who was the oldest brother of this man that I was trying to help find his biological family.
• 14:06
  Crista Cowan: And then I had to tell my sister she couldn't tell anybody until I let this man know and let him have first contact.
• 14:15
  Crista Cowan: Because when you're helping somebody find biological family, you, as the researcher or the family member in this case, because these were our distant cousins, you probably shouldn't be the one to break that news.
• 14:30
  Crista Cowan: You probably shouldn't be the one to reach out to the family.
• 14:33
  Crista Cowan: Because if the family decides to reject this information or this relationship, you don't want to have taken away the only chance that that adoptee has to have had a conversation with a family member.
• 14:50
  Crista Cowan: And that's always a delicate dance.
• 14:53
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes they want you to make contact, and then you have to figure out how to navigate that.
• 14:57
  Crista Cowan: But in this case, I hadn't had a conversation.
• 15:00
  Crista Cowan: And so I didn't want my sister to spill the beans.
• 15:04
  Crista Cowan: So put her under a gag order and asked her not to say anything.
• 15:09
  Crista Cowan: Then I dug a little bit more into the biological father's family.
• 15:15
  Crista Cowan: Now remember, he had been married at the time that the child was conceived.
• 15:21
  Crista Cowan: He had children.
• 15:23
  Crista Cowan: And again, we don't know the circumstances.
• 15:36
  Crista Cowan: Maybe he and his wife were separated at the time.
• 15:38
  Crista Cowan: Maybe they had gotten divorced and remarried, and I just hadn't found that record yet.
• 15:42
  Crista Cowan: I had no idea what the circumstances were, again, nor what we would be walking into.
• 15:48
  Crista Cowan: But I found all of the children, all of his children were older than the man who I was helping.
• 15:57
  Crista Cowan: And so they wouldn't necessarily have known, though, that their father had gotten someone pregnant.
• 16:07
  Crista Cowan: The father might not even have known that he had gotten someone pregnant.
• 16:12
  Crista Cowan: And that's the thing I always have to remind myself is that women know when they've given birth to a child, but men don't always know when they've fathered a child.
• 16:21
  Crista Cowan: And so we have no idea what this group of people knows or doesn't know.
• 16:26
  Crista Cowan: But I again went on Facebook, looked up information, dug into white pages online, got some contact information for some of them.
• 16:36
  Crista Cowan: So the day came.
• 16:38
  Crista Cowan: He lives locally, so I asked him if he would come and meet me so I could tell him this information in person.
• 16:53
  Crista Cowan: I don't get to do that very often.
• 16:55
  Crista Cowan: Usually people that I'm helping are across the country or around the world, and I'm doing it over email or Facebook.
• 17:02
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, I just shared on Facebook with a woman this last weekend that I had found her biological father.
• 17:09
  Crista Cowan: And the like she, like the effusiveness that was coming back at me through Facebook Messenger was lovely.
• 17:17
  Crista Cowan: But she also had questions.
• 17:19
  Crista Cowan: And then she emailed me or messaged me back a few days later and had more questions.
• 17:23
  Crista Cowan: And it was kind of this like awkward back and forth uh experience.
• 17:27
  Crista Cowan: But because this man was local, I knew I could sit down with him in person and deliver the news in a gentler way, in a more controlled way.
• 17:36
  Crista Cowan: I could pay attention to his body language and his vocal inflections in such a way that I could deliver the news and adjust my delivery based on how he was receiving it.
• 17:48
  Crista Cowan: I didn't want to overwhelm him, but I also wanted to make sure that he understood what I was sharing with him.
• 17:54
  Crista Cowan: So he agreed to meet me, and we sat down in a conference room.
• 18:00
  Crista Cowan: And I had written down on a piece of paper the 11 names of his siblings, the paternal siblings and the maternal siblings.
• 18:10
  Crista Cowan: And for the ones that I had contact information for or Facebook pages for, I had put that information on this piece of paper.
• 18:19
  Crista Cowan: And so we sat down and he was so nervous and sweet, but he was so eager to get this information.
• 18:28
  Crista Cowan: I told him, I have identified both of your biological parents.
• 18:34
  Crista Cowan: You and I are related, I think we're fourth cousins one time removed, through your mom's side of the family.
• 18:42
  Crista Cowan: And your mother and her mother are cousins on my grandmother's side of the family.
• 18:50
  Crista Cowan: And I would love, whenever you are interested, to tell you more about our ancestors on that side of our family tree.
• 18:58
  Crista Cowan: And then I proceeded to tell him that his mother had um been married and had children, and that she had been divorced, and that while she was divorced, she had been working for a man downtown in an office, and he had been her boss, and she had gotten pregnant by him.
• 19:21
  Crista Cowan: And that she had then placed him for adoption.
• 19:27
  Crista Cowan: A few years later, she had gotten remarried and had more children, and that she had raised those children.
• 19:35
  Crista Cowan: I told him that she had passed away several years early.
• 19:39
  Crista Cowan: And that's always a tricky part of the story, too, because when you're sharing that information, you're telling them, oh, I know who your mother is, and oh, she's passed away.
• 19:49
  Crista Cowan: So there's this joy and this grieving that gets mixed up in that moment that sometimes has to be navigated as well.
• 19:57
  Crista Cowan: He took it beautifully.
• 19:58
  Crista Cowan: He had kind of expected, knowing his age, and that it's possible that she had had passed by that point.
• 20:05
  Crista Cowan: It's always mostly heartbreaking when it had just happened, when the parrot had just passed, or they had just missed meeting them or knowing them.
• 20:14
  Crista Cowan: In this case, both biological parents had passed years before, years before DNA testing, even.
• 20:21
  Crista Cowan: And so he took it really well.
• 20:24
  Crista Cowan: And then I told him about his biological father and uh about his siblings on that side of the family, about the fact that he had been married and had stayed married to that woman until the day he died, and that I didn't know what they knew or didn't know.
• 20:41
  Crista Cowan: And so cautioned him that if he was going to contact the siblings on that side of the family, he might want to be a little bit more um circumspect or a little bit more cautious.
• 20:53
  Crista Cowan: And then I told him that when he contacted the siblings on his mother's side of the family, that his oldest siblings might remember that she had been pregnant.
• 21:03
  Crista Cowan: For all we knew, they might have been looking for him for years, but they also might not remember.
• 21:10
  Crista Cowan: And that the younger siblings might not know at all that he even existed.
• 21:15
  Crista Cowan: And he took that information in stride.
• 21:18
  Crista Cowan: You could tell he was still a little bit nervous.
• 21:20
  Crista Cowan: And then I slid that piece of paper across the table to him with those names on it.
• 21:26
  Crista Cowan: And he picked up the piece of paper, a little nervous, and he looked at it, and there was a long pause, and I could see his eyes moving down the paper, and then he laughed out loud.
• 21:44
  Crista Cowan: And I was very curious about that reaction because it's not a reaction I've ever had before from somebody in that situation.
• 21:52
  Crista Cowan: And I said, What?
• 21:53
  Crista Cowan: And he said, I know this man.
• 21:57
  Crista Cowan: And he pointed to the name of his.
• 21:59
  Crista Cowan: Oldest maternal sibling.
• 22:02
  Crista Cowan: The brother that my sister knew.
• 22:07
  Crista Cowan: And he said, He's my neighbor.
• 22:11
  Crista Cowan: What?
• 22:14
  Crista Cowan: He's been my neighbor for nine years, he said.
• 22:18
  Crista Cowan: We're friends.
• 22:19
  Crista Cowan: I know him.
• 22:21
  Crista Cowan: And it was such a tender moment for me.
• 22:25
  Crista Cowan: Gosh, I still get teary about it.
• 22:27
  Crista Cowan: It was such a tender moment for me to watch his just absolute delight in the fact that he knew this man and I could tell that he loved this man.
• 22:38
  Crista Cowan: That they were not just neighbors, that they went to church together, that their um children had interacted with each other.
• 22:47
  Crista Cowan: His oldest children were the same age as his brother's youngest children.
• 22:53
  Crista Cowan: They had had um, they had had meals together.
• 22:56
  Crista Cowan: They had, I mean, like these men knew each other.
• 23:00
  Crista Cowan: And he said, This is this is gonna be a crazy conversation.
• 23:05
  Crista Cowan: He hugged me, he thanked me, and uh he left.
• 23:11
  Crista Cowan: And usually for me, in these situations, that's the end of the story.
• 23:18
  Crista Cowan: Because they go off and make these connections and have these relationships, and I'm just the person who did the research.
• 23:26
  Crista Cowan: And I'm usually okay with that.
• 23:30
  Crista Cowan: But in this situation, I was dying to know what happened.
• 23:38
  Crista Cowan: And so I let it ride.
• 23:39
  Crista Cowan: I let it ride for like a whole week before I reached out again through ancestry messaging.
• 23:48
  Crista Cowan: And I just said, just checking in, want to see how things went.
• 23:53
  Crista Cowan: If you've had any conversations lately.
• 23:56
  Crista Cowan: And again, an instant response.
• 24:00
  Crista Cowan: And he told me that he had talked to his oldest brother, that it was the most joyful reunion, that the oldest brother had, in fact, looked for him at one point, that he had failed and thought there was no way he was ever gonna find him, that he was so happy that he was the brother that he had been looking for.
• 24:25
  Crista Cowan: They had gathered the other siblings.
• 24:28
  Crista Cowan: Um, all of the siblings knew that he existed out there somewhere, and they were thrilled to get to know him and to have opportunities to uh develop a relationship with him.
• 24:39
  Crista Cowan: And then he told me that he had reached out to the father's family as well, to some of the siblings on that side, and that they had completely rejected him, that they did not believe him, that they did not believe that about their father, and that they wanted nothing to do with him.
• 25:02
  Crista Cowan: And that broke my heart as much as I understand it, it still breaks my heart every time I see that happen.
• 25:14
  Crista Cowan: People are gonna people.
• 25:16
  Crista Cowan: And as much as we sometimes put our parents or grandparents on a pedestal, they were and are human.
• 25:26
  Crista Cowan: And humans make mistakes.
• 25:29
  Crista Cowan: And so the fact that that they just couldn't wrap their brain around the idea that their father had had an affair or stepped out, or like we don't know.
• 25:42
  Crista Cowan: We don't know the circumstances, and we never will.
• 25:45
  Crista Cowan: Like, that's the thing when we find this information out later.
• 25:49
  Crista Cowan: We don't know if it was a consensual situation or a non-consensual situation.
• 25:53
  Crista Cowan: We don't know.
• 25:53
  Crista Cowan: We don't know any of the details.
• 25:55
  Crista Cowan: But the siblings on his father's side of the family were not even willing to wade into the messiness of that.
• 26:02
  Crista Cowan: And you know what?
• 26:03
  Crista Cowan: That's their right.
• 26:05
  Crista Cowan: And that's so hard.
• 26:07
  Crista Cowan: I firmly believe that everyone has a right to know who their ancestors are, to know who they come from, and to gather as much of the story as they can with the information they have available to them.
• 26:24
  Crista Cowan: But the reality is that nobody has a right to a relationship.
• 26:30
  Crista Cowan: And so I am thrilled for my fourth cousin one time removed.
• 26:35
  Crista Cowan: I am thrilled that he has reconnected with his mother's side of the family who knew he was out there and were looking for him and were thrilled to find him and establish that relationship.
• 26:47
  Crista Cowan: And I am still heartbroken for him that his father's side of the family wanted nothing to do with him.
• 26:52
  Crista Cowan: At least that was the case several years ago after he and I met.
• 26:58
  Crista Cowan: Now, I haven't followed up with him since then, so I don't know.
• 27:01
  Crista Cowan: Maybe hearts have changed, or somebody got curious, or some random nephew or niece took a DNA test and then turned around and asked their parents, hey, who's this guy on our match list?
• 27:13
  Crista Cowan: I don't know him.
• 27:14
  Crista Cowan: And maybe that opened up a doorway for communication.
• 27:18
  Crista Cowan: It happens more often than you might think.
• 27:21
  Crista Cowan: But I haven't wanted to press or ask or be nosy because really it's none of my business.
• 27:26
  Crista Cowan: I'm just thrilled when I can help people put pieces of the puzzle together.
• 27:32
  Crista Cowan: And so every Sunday night I sit down with my dad and we look at our DNA matches, and sometimes we discover somebody who was adopted out of the family.
• 27:43
  Crista Cowan: And I always reach out and I always carefully ask what they know and what they don't know and offer my help.
• 27:51
  Crista Cowan: And sometimes people take me up on it.
• 27:54
  Crista Cowan: Before you go, it is time again for one word, one story.
• 28:01
  Crista Cowan: Ooh, today's word is board game.
• 28:09
  Crista Cowan: So my family, when I was growing up, huge card game players.
• 28:17
  Crista Cowan: That was my grandparents' thing.
• 28:19
  Crista Cowan: They loved playing cards.
• 28:20
  Crista Cowan: We learned how to play hands and feet and canasta and I mean just all sorts of card games.
• 28:25
  Crista Cowan: My grandparents loved it.
• 28:27
  Crista Cowan: But as we got older, we we loved the board games, Monopoly and um Parchee, and I'm trying to think sorry and clue, right?
• 28:38
  Crista Cowan: Those standard board games.
• 28:40
  Crista Cowan: But as we've gotten older, I still get together with my siblings about one or two Sundays a month.
• 28:49
  Crista Cowan: And after dinner, we bring out the board games.
• 28:53
  Crista Cowan: And it is a very serious thing in our family.
• 28:56
  Crista Cowan: And we found a game that we love, and it is a game called Dominion.
• 29:02
  Crista Cowan: And Dominion is like a it's like a deck building game.
• 29:06
  Crista Cowan: Like you have, you have pieces and cards, and like it's just it's it's one of those complicated games that takes somebody like three times explaining it and five times playing it before you figure it out.
• 29:18
  Crista Cowan: And we fell in love with it, and then I realized that there were nine expansions to this game.
• 29:26
  Crista Cowan: And so for Christmas one year, I rather than I don't know what I was thinking, rather than buying one expansion for Christmas, and then one expansion for his birthday, and then the next expansion for the next Christmas.
• 29:39
  Crista Cowan: Nope, I bought all nine for my brother for Christmas one year.
• 29:43
  Crista Cowan: And they came in a giant box and they showed up on his doorstep and and we opened that box and we proceeded to play that game, I think that Christmas, for three days straight.
• 29:57
  Crista Cowan: And it is my new obsession.
• 30:00
  Crista Cowan: Um, it is my favorite board game, and when I can talk my siblings into playing it with me, they force me to pick which three expansions we're going to use at a time.
• 30:12
  Crista Cowan: Because if you try to use them all, it just gets way too complicated.
• 30:17
  Crista Cowan: But that is my board game story.
• 30:19
  Crista Cowan: I love a good board game, and it is one of my favorite ways to spend time with my siblings.
• 30:25
  Crista Cowan: So if you are watching here on YouTube, leave in the comments what your board game story is.
• 30:33
  Crista Cowan: If you're listening on a podcast app, share your board game story on Instagram or on Facebook.
• 30:40
  Crista Cowan: Be sure to tag me.
• 30:41
  Crista Cowan: I'd love to see your story.
• 30:44
  Crista Cowan: But more importantly than that, share it with your family.
• 30:48
  Crista Cowan: So, board games are how I love to spend time with my family, especially my siblings.
• 30:56
  Crista Cowan: My dad would still choose doing family history over a board game, though, any Sunday night.
• 31:02
  Crista Cowan: So I always have to jet out early from board games with my siblings to get home for my Sunday nights with my dad.
• 31:10
  Crista Cowan: And I love that time with him because you never know what you're gonna discover in those DNA matches.