Latest / Stories That Live In Us / The Fabric of Who You Are | (with Diahan Southard) | Episode 33

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The Fabric of Who You Are | (with Diahan Southard) | Episode 33 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:02
  Diahan Southard: And he said there will be a point in the future where anyone will be able to take a DNA test and we will be able to tell them where they're from, Not just on the country level, not just on a state level even, but we'll be able to tell them like to a village where their family is from.
• 0:21
  Diahan Southard: And we're seeing that now and it's incredible.
• 0:28
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:33
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:37
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:45
  Crista Cowan: If you have taken an Ancestry DNA test, you know that it tells you a lot about yourself.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: It gives you information about your origins 500 to 1000 years ago.
• 1:00
  Crista Cowan: It gives you information about the journeys your ancestors have taken within the last 300 years, and then it connects you to thousands of cousins, people who walk around with little bits of DNA that match little bits of your DNA, and all of this, two decades ago, was pretty much unheard of.
• 1:23
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is one of my dearest friends.
• 1:26
  Crista Cowan: Her name is DDiane Southerd and from the beginning of consumer genomics, she has been on the cutting edge.
• 1:33
  Crista Cowan: She now runs a company called your DNA Guide where she provides education around genetic genealogy, and she is a brilliant educator and a lovely storyteller and one of my favorite human beings.
• 1:49
  Crista Cowan: She not only got into genetics and has been part of that industry from the beginning, but that very scientific exploration and journey brought her to some very personal discoveries.
• 2:08
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited for you to hear my conversation with Diane Southard.
• 2:12
  Crista Cowan: Diane, I'm so glad you're here.
• 2:14
  Crista Cowan: You are one of my favorite people and I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
• 2:19
  Crista Cowan: So thank you.
• 2:21
  Diahan Southard: I'm just pleased to be part of this.
• 2:22
  Diahan Southard: I love what you're doing.
• 2:24
  Diahan Southard: I love the whole idea of it.
• 2:25
  Diahan Southard: You and I have talked about this before.
• 2:27
  Diahan Southard: It is one of both of our passions, so I just I love, I'm grateful I can be a part.
• 2:31
  Crista Cowan: Fabulous.
• 2:32
  Crista Cowan: Well, I want to hear and I think our listeners want to hear about your journey into family history.
• 2:37
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, well, it's interesting because most of the people that I meet that are in genetic genealogy came from genealogy to genetics and I came from genetics to genealogy.
• 2:47
  Diahan Southard: So it was really unexpected for me to end up where I am.
• 2:51
  Diahan Southard: But I trace it back to my high school English teacher.
• 2:55
  Diahan Southard: Do tell yes.
• 2:57
  Diahan Southard: So he told all of us graduating seniors that the best thing we could do for our lives, our career, our future, is to, when we got to college, find a professor who's researching something we were interested in and get involved.
• 3:09
  Diahan Southard: So I ended up at Brigham Young University and I wanted to do something with DNA or you know something like that in the field, but there was no actual genetics department.
• 3:21
  Diahan Southard: So I went to the microbiology department and there's's.
• 3:25
  Diahan Southard: I can picture it now there's this very nice secretary sitting behind this desk and I walk up to the desk and I say, can you tell me what are the areas of interest of all the professors?
• 3:35
  Diahan Southard: What are they researching?
• 3:36
  Diahan Southard: She had a list, which I thought was very prepared, of her yes, and so I looked on the list and it's like, you know, virology, bacteria, and I was like no, no, no.
• 3:48
  Diahan Southard: And then there was archaeogenetics.
• 3:51
  Diahan Southard: I was like, hold up, I don't even really know what that is, but it has the word genetics in it.
• 3:56
  Diahan Southard: So I was like, yes, this, how do I find this professor?
• 3:58
  Diahan Southard: And she said, oh, dr Scott Woodward.
• 4:00
  Diahan Southard: His office is just down the hall.
• 4:01
  Diahan Southard: And so I did.
• 4:02
  Diahan Southard: I walked down the hall, I knocked on his door and asked if he needed any help with his research.
• 4:07
  Diahan Southard: And there you go, and there you go.
• 4:09
  Diahan Southard: Yeah.
• 4:10
  Diahan Southard: So archaeogenetics was, you know, the genetics of ancient remains.
• 4:14
  Diahan Southard: So he was involved in a project.
• 4:16
  Diahan Southard: There's this huge cemetery outside of Cairo, egypt, but there was no town and no one knew any of these people were hundreds of burials and this was a multidisciplinary study.
• 4:30
  Diahan Southard: They had textiles, they had, you know, archaeologists, like all the people were there and Scott was doing the genetics.
• 4:38
  Diahan Southard: And so I jumped in and we were doing mitochondrial DNA which traces a direct maternal line.
• 4:44
  Diahan Southard: So we were testing allrial DNA which traces a direct maternal line.
• 4:46
  Diahan Southard: So we were testing all of the bone samples, so we would get tooth samples.
• 4:50
  Diahan Southard: So, just in case you want to dig up a body, get the teeth, get the femur bone, and there's an occipital bone right in the back.
• 4:57
  Diahan Southard: Those are the best sources of DNA, just in case you happen to be digging up your ancestors, yes.
• 5:03
  Diahan Southard: So he would bring these samples back to the lab and we would test them.
• 5:07
  Diahan Southard: And really his passion was how can we identify these people?
• 5:12
  Diahan Southard: And while we could do a little bit to identify their relationships to each other, we could tell oh, this is a family, like there's an adult woman and then there's two children, and they're both share her mitochondrial DNA.
• 5:25
  Diahan Southard: So we could say they're probably a family unit, but there was no way to tell who they were in the world.
• 5:31
  Diahan Southard: And so Dr Woodward started talking about the need for a database, this idea that if we had a database full of people's DNA with their actual family history, we would be able to identify these missing people in Egypt.
• 5:47
  Diahan Southard: And so he became kind of an ambassador for this idea of a genetic genealogy database.
• 5:53
  Diahan Southard: What year was that?
• 5:55
  Diahan Southard: So this is in 1999.
• 5:56
  Diahan Southard: Well, 1998, 1999.
• 5:59
  Diahan Southard: And then this idea was picked up by a local Utah philanthropist, james Sorenson.
• 6:05
  Diahan Southard: And the way that Scott tells the story is that Mr Sorenson called him at like two in the morning, okay, and said I want to build a database of all of the Vikings because Mr Sorenson, being a Sorenson, was uh, was interested in this Viking research.
• 6:23
  Diahan Southard: And so Scott said, well, we could try to do that.
• 6:27
  Diahan Southard: And so he pitched him this idea of building a worldwide database and told him how, by doing that, we would actually be able to solve Mr Sorenson's question, which was how are all the Sorensons related and how does my family fit in?
• 6:40
  Diahan Southard: And so Mr Sorenson said, yes, let's do that.
• 6:46
  Diahan Southard: And such it was born.
• 6:48
  Diahan Southard: And such it was born the Sorensen Molecular Genealogy Foundation.
• 6:51
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 6:52
  Crista Cowan: And it's so interesting that it's a Sorensen that did it, because Scandinavian names are all patronymic, so you're not going to be related to all the Sorensens, but somehow that was enough to get him interested to be able to make that offer.
• 7:05
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's really cool.
• 7:08
  Crista Cowan: So what did you end up majoring in in school?
• 7:11
  Diahan Southard: So my major was in microbiology, with a minor in chemistry just cause you only had to take one more class and you got a minor.
• 7:17
  Diahan Southard: And but really my major became genetic genealogy.
• 7:23
  Diahan Southard: I just didn't know it.
• 7:24
  Diahan Southard: We were, we were pioneers.
• 7:26
  Diahan Southard: We were building the first structure, the first ideas, the first database really for genetic genealogy.
• 7:34
  Diahan Southard: And so I ended up spending my college weekends traveling all around the country.
• 7:40
  Diahan Southard: While other kids, I'm assuming, were partying and having fun on their weekends, I was lecturing and collecting blood samples from willing participants, because back then we were taking blood.
• 7:49
  Diahan Southard: So I would travel and I would show up at these groups of people a lot of them in LDS churches and hundreds of people would come to learn about this technology.
• 8:01
  Diahan Southard: And from the very beginning I was in front of people trying to explain why this was important, why we needed to do it and why they should give me their blood sample and their four generation family tree.
• 8:14
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, I was one of those early participants.
• 8:18
  Diahan Southard: Really, where did you give yours?
• 8:19
  Crista Cowan: In Orem, in Orem, utah, in Orem, utah, yeah, and I remember like talking to my family about it too, because I because even then I knew that they were onto something and I knew I didn't know what the end goal was, but I knew that my family, like my DNA, was going to expose information about my family, and so I had a conversation with my parents and with my grandparents and and I was like I want to participate in this.
• 8:43
  Crista Cowan: I think this is really cool and and I hadn't even gotten into professional genealogy as a career yet, but I had been doing family history long enough that I could see that this was something for sure.
• 8:54
  Diahan Southard: Well, you were one like way ahead of your time then, because I doubt anybody thought of that but you, so way to go.
• 9:04
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it was exciting to imagine the possibilities.
• 9:06
  Crista Cowan: And then things move very quickly after that.
• 9:09
  Crista Cowan: So you graduated and you joined Sorenson as your career.
• 9:13
  Diahan Southard: Right.
• 9:13
  Diahan Southard: So, yeah, right, it was perfect timing, as so many things in life are.
• 9:17
  Diahan Southard: So I worked for the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation until I graduated from BYU, and then we were kind of in limbo.
• 9:26
  Diahan Southard: I applied for a couple of other jobs, you know, trying to further my career, waiting to see what would happen with Sorenson, and it turns out, just at that time they started to move the foundation out of BYU and into its own kind of private entity up in downtown Salt Lake City where Sorenson Companies already had a building, and so I was just thrust into this new, actual company and so I helped assemble the lab equipment and I helped, you know, the office space, like adjusting desks and things like right, literally from the beginning of this company, I found myself in a room with a CEO, a CFO and a marketing director who had no idea even what DNA was, and I had to try to explain to them what we do so that they could sell it.
• 10:14
  Diahan Southard: And it was, you know, looking back, of course, now, having my own business, thinking all of that foundational groundwork that was laid for me to understand how a business works and how marketing works, and all of the things that have to go into creating all that we did.
• 10:30
  Diahan Southard: I was right there, learning it all along, and it's really a miracle to look back and think how I had no idea then.
• 10:39
  Diahan Southard: But I was learning how to build a company and how to build a product and how to sell that product, and so we became one of the very first direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies.
• 10:52
  Crista Cowan: I love that, and at the time were they still just doing mitochondrial DNA.
• 10:56
  Diahan Southard: We were doing mitochondrial and Y-DNA and then the actual foundation was still researching how to use autosomal DNA.
• 11:03
  Diahan Southard: They were doing lots of testing and projects and lab runs and all the things trying to work with the database of information.
• 11:11
  Diahan Southard: We had to try to do what we knew it could do, which is so the promise that Dr Woodward gave to all of us when we were just starting out on the project.
• 11:20
  Diahan Southard: We were sitting in the basement of the Benson building on BYU campus and there was probably I don't know 10 of us there working in the lab and he sat us down and said, okay, this is what we're going to do and he explained how the database would work and he said there will be a point in the future where anyone will be able to take a DNA test and we will be able to tell them where they're from.
• 11:39
  Diahan Southard: And we will be able to tell them where they're from not just on the country level, not just on a state level even, but we'll be able to tell them to a village where their family is from.
• 11:52
  Diahan Southard: And we're seeing that now.
• 11:54
  Diahan Southard: And it's incredible that future view that he had about what this technology could bring.
• 11:59
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, so here we are two decades later.
• 12:01
  Crista Cowan: Within a decade after that, other companies had launched, including Ancestry, ancestry dipped our toes in the Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA space.
• 12:11
  Crista Cowan: In the early days, ancestry ended up purchasing the Sorensen database and then launched autosomal DNA testing in 2012.
• 12:20
  Crista Cowan: And from your perspective, how did autosomal DNA testing change the face of what was happening?
• 12:26
  Diahan Southard: Oh, it was incredible.
• 12:27
  Diahan Southard: I mean, I remember again giving all of these presentations and I remember my script well enough to know that we used to say all the time yes, well, you are limited to only a direct maternal or direct paternal line, but there's still so much we can do.
• 12:41
  Diahan Southard: You just have to find the right person to test.
• 12:43
  Diahan Southard: You know, we were always so trying to be so positive about it, but honestly, it was not great.
• 12:48
  Diahan Southard: It was not great because of its limitations, but also not great because of its inability to clearly define relationships.
• 12:57
  Diahan Southard: You could say, yes, we're related, but it was in such a huge timeframe that you couldn't take a lot of action on it.
• 13:05
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, we could be sisters or we could be 20th cousins, and it was really hard to tell the difference, and so autosomal was so needed and it was part of the vision at the beginning.
• 13:16
  Diahan Southard: It just took a long time to get there.
• 13:18
  Crista Cowan: So now here we are.
• 13:19
  Crista Cowan: You know, two decades more than almost three decades after all of that stuff started really, you know, gaining some steam.
• 13:26
  Crista Cowan: And Ancestry at least has more than 25 million people who've taken the autosomal DNA test.
• 13:32
  Crista Cowan: And one of my favorite stories is from working on the television show Long Lost Family.
• 13:39
  Crista Cowan: I was training a new person to do the genetic genealogy with us and I sat her down and I said, okay, like here's how this works, and we're gonna like walk, I'm gonna show you one and then we'll do one together and then you can try it yourself.
• 13:50
  Crista Cowan: That's kind of how we do that.
• 13:52
  Crista Cowan: And I sit down and the closest match is a second cousin and I thought, okay, this will be a good case to work on, like to really show her.
• 13:59
  Crista Cowan: And we had it solved in 22 minutes and I remember thinking, well, that wasn't very effective as an educational tool, but it was so exciting to recognize that even by then and this was several years ago, with the number of people in the database, we could start reconstructing those family relationships in a very real way.
• 14:18
  Crista Cowan: And so for you, in your experience, you have also had a personal connection to genetic genealogy and I would love to hear that story.
• 14:27
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, well, it's a great story and it's it's a story that began before I realized it was beginning.
• 14:33
  Diahan Southard: So my parents are the most supportive, cheerleading parents ever Like.
• 14:40
  Diahan Southard: I can't remember a time when I wasn't encouraged in whatever direction I wanted to go in.
• 14:46
  Diahan Southard: They were always my biggest cheerleaders and I remember, um, you know, all sorts of scrapes I got myself into, but they were right behind me.
• 14:56
  Diahan Southard: Yes, let's do that.
• 14:57
  Diahan Southard: So when I started this whole you know, traveling in college and collecting blood samples and things like that you know my parents would come visit for Christmas or other holidays and my mom would come in the lab with me and I drew her blood.
• 15:10
  Diahan Southard: I'm not a phlebotomist, but I drew her blood and we processed it in the lab.
• 15:15
  Diahan Southard: She extracted the DNA out of it.
• 15:16
  Diahan Southard: She wanted to do all the things she was all in, and so, again, she was just doing it for fun and to be a part of what I was a part of.
• 15:24
  Diahan Southard: But then her sample was part of the database.
• 15:26
  Diahan Southard: It just took its place among all the other samples that we collected and so it moved along with us.
• 15:32
  Diahan Southard: It moved along to relative genetics, it moved along to ancestry eventually when it was sold there, and so it's kind of already a part of things before we really took that initiative to become part of something, not even recognizing what it would become.
• 15:47
  Diahan Southard: When I first started working with the samples, I was doing just mitochondrial DNA testing, and so we had this procedure where we would try each sample for the top five most popular haplogroups, that's what they're called these deep ancestral groups for mitochondrial DNA, what they're called these deep ancestral groups for mitochondrial DNA, and they're.
• 16:05
  Diahan Southard: You know, h is one of the names of it and like 50% of people were in H.
• 16:09
  Diahan Southard: So you start with H, you eliminate 50% of your samples and you take the other 50%, you try them for J and K, and my mom wasn't any of them.
• 16:18
  Diahan Southard: I was like, okay, am I doing something wrong?
• 16:20
  Diahan Southard: Did I, you know?
• 16:21
  Diahan Southard: So I would go back and double check my lab work, and it took me a long time to actually get her mitochondrial DNA type, which was a W, that's.
• 16:29
  Diahan Southard: That is super rare, right, very rare.
• 16:31
  Diahan Southard: So this was, you know, early, early days of the internet, and so I started Googling where does haplogroup W come from?
• 16:39
  Diahan Southard: And the highest propensity was in Poland.
• 16:43
  Diahan Southard: And that was the very first spark of curiosity I had ever had about who my mom's biological family was.
• 16:50
  Diahan Southard: We had just never wondered.
• 16:53
  Diahan Southard: We didn't.
• 16:53
  Diahan Southard: My mom didn't grow up wondering she.
• 16:56
  Diahan Southard: She really was so curious, loved and cherished in her adopted family.
• 17:02
  Diahan Southard: She was the only child of my grandparents, because they could not have children, and she was worshiped.
• 17:08
  Diahan Southard: I mean, my grandma could not stop saying amazing things about my mom all the time, and so she just never I don't think she ever wondered, and that's odd, I know, for adoptees, but I just think she was just so satisfied and happy and her identity was with the people that she had grown up with, and so this was my first huh, who did she come from?
• 17:33
  Diahan Southard: And I think for her as well, it was the first wonder moment, and so then those moments just kept building as we continued on, and in 2007, when 23andMe started their autosomal DNA test, I was working in the industry.
• 17:48
  Diahan Southard: I needed samples, I needed data so that I could practice, so that I knew how to teach people, and so I asked my parents to test, and they were willing, and so they tested, and for the first time, we saw DNA cousins, which was, again, not something I was really prepared for, and neither was she to see a list of people that shared your biological heritage was actually groundbreaking.
• 18:12
  Diahan Southard: Even though most of them were distant, it didn't matter to us.
• 18:15
  Diahan Southard: These were her first genetic relatives and it was really shattering, yeah.
• 18:20
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's so interesting because I think there's people even today, even, you know, 15, 20 years into this, who take a DNA test because they want to understand their ethnicity or what regions of the world they're from, and it doesn't occur to them that that cousin matching part of the product exists and that that's going to show up and that that's going to connect them with people.
• 18:41
  Crista Cowan: And I think everybody does have some degree of emotional reaction to that.
• 18:45
  Diahan Southard: I think so, and I think it's not just for adoptees, right, it's for everyone.
• 18:49
  Diahan Southard: Because you come into the test with a question usually oh it'd be cool if I knew how much Italian I had, or something and then you see this list of people, and most of us don't know most of the names and, and yet we understand they belong to us in some way that we haven't yet defined, and it's really powerful.
• 19:07
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and it's interesting because for some people it's the puzzle of the thing, right, this giant list of matches, and how do I put this 50,000 piece puzzle together to figure out how it all works?
• 19:17
  Crista Cowan: For some people it's really burning important identity questions that they're trying to resolve and for some people I think it's just, you know, kind of a curiosity, and sometimes that curiosity grows and sometimes it wanes.
• 19:30
  Crista Cowan: But in the case of your mom, as you saw, that list of matches that was meaningful for you.
• 19:35
  Crista Cowan: What was her reaction?
• 19:36
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, she also was curious and again for the first time, I think, really thinking, asking herself the question do I want to know this?
• 19:46
  Diahan Southard: Do we want to go down this path?
• 19:48
  Diahan Southard: Is this something that is worth figuring out for us?
• 19:52
  Diahan Southard: And we talked about it and mostly she was of the opinion well, let's just keep going and see where it leads.
• 19:59
  Diahan Southard: So our closest match at 23andMe was a second cousin.
• 20:03
  Diahan Southard: See where it leads.
• 20:06
  Diahan Southard: Um, so our closest match at 23 and me was a second cousin, and so I reached out to him and asked him just basic hey, who's your family?
• 20:11
  Diahan Southard: Kind of questions.
• 20:12
  Diahan Southard: And he his response was very thoughtful, especially for as early on as this was.
• 20:17
  Diahan Southard: He said well, I recognize that my connection to you may reveal information about my family and their life choices and I really need to think about this.
• 20:30
  Diahan Southard: And I really appreciated that response from him that he knew that, as you did, like, the things that you're choosing to do with your DNA don't affect just you.
• 20:40
  Crista Cowan: Right, yeah, absolutely so.
• 20:42
  Crista Cowan: As you're starting down this path and you're starting now to reach out to other family members of your mom's, were her parents still living at the time, or was there conversations that way that?
• 20:51
  Diahan Southard: were had.
• 20:52
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, so that was actually one of her big requirements is that we didn't start doing anything until my, my grandmother had passed away.
• 20:58
  Diahan Southard: My grandfather passed long ago, but my grandmother was still alive.
• 21:01
  Diahan Southard: She lived to be a hundred and it my mom was very clear we do not do anything while grandma is still alive.
• 21:08
  Diahan Southard: I don't want her to ever feel like I ever wanted a different life than I had.
• 21:12
  Diahan Southard: And so we, we literally sat on everything until my grandma passed.
• 21:16
  Diahan Southard: But once she did, I think my mom felt more confident moving forward and and honestly, it was probably more just to support me, right, because I needed to learn how to solve these kinds of mysteries so that I could help other people solve these mysteries.
• 21:30
  Diahan Southard: And so it was just, it was very slow, it was piece by piece, it was here a little and there a little.
• 21:37
  Diahan Southard: And you know, as Ancestry offered their DNA test, I said let's test here.
• 21:41
  Diahan Southard: As Family tree DNA offered theirs, I said let's test here.
• 21:45
  Diahan Southard: It was very slow, very methodical, very put, pick it up, put it down kind of research.
• 21:53
  Crista Cowan: Okay, so after that first second cousin reach out and his thoughtful response, we love.
• 21:58
  Crista Cowan: We love when they respond, Um, like how long was it from that time till you started making real connections or real discoveries for her?
• 22:07
  Diahan Southard: Right.
• 22:07
  Diahan Southard: So with him, with the second cousin at 23, and me, he did finally decide to share with us and help us, and so he provided his family tree, which again a second cousin.
• 22:16
  Diahan Southard: They share great grandparents.
• 22:18
  Diahan Southard: So I knew my mom had four great grandparent couples, so his one of his great grandparent couples should be one of my mom's great grandparent couples.
• 22:24
  Diahan Southard: So his one of his great grandparent couples should be one of my mom's great grandparent couples.
• 22:26
  Diahan Southard: And then it should be easy to figure out, you would think.
• 22:30
  Diahan Southard: But, um, it turns out he he's a part of a really large group of people, uh, from, um, well, they're German, Russians, and they immigrated into North Dakota almost exclusively, and there's this huge, huge population of these individuals.
• 22:52
  Diahan Southard: And so when I started looking at his family tree, it was like you know, everyone's one of 10 or 11 or 12 kids, and I was immediately overwhelmed Like there's no way that we could figure out this kind of connection just with genealogy alone.
• 23:07
  Diahan Southard: We would need many more DNA matches and we didn't have them at that time.
• 23:11
  Diahan Southard: And so, again, that was a point where we were like this is cool, and even just knowing that little bit that my mom's family came from this very culturally rich population.
• 23:20
  Diahan Southard: We did lots of fun research together.
• 23:23
  Diahan Southard: Hey look, they did this and this and just about the population in general and honestly, that was enough for her to feel like, oh, that's an interesting place where I come from, that's an interesting legacy that I have, and that was enough.
• 23:36
  Diahan Southard: She didn't need to know the individual names of the people.
• 23:38
  Diahan Southard: It was enough to be identified with this population or culture.
• 23:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that connection, I think, is, for me, one of the most interesting things about watching people on their DNA journey is this idea that, oh, I'm connected to this ethnic group or this ethno-religion or this group of people that I knew nothing about prior, but somehow that's in me, yes, yeah, I love that.
• 24:01
  Crista Cowan: So while you're going on this journey with your mom parallel, not only are you increasing your genetic skills, but now you've introduced genealogy into it for yourself.
• 24:11
  Crista Cowan: And how confident were you in the genealogy skills were you gaining, or were you reaching out to genealogists for help at this point?
• 24:19
  Diahan Southard: Well, mostly I was just focused on my business and on learning how to do the DNA part, and I I know now, looking back that I was picking up a lot more genealogy as I went than I thought that I was, and I was becoming a lot more proficient than I thought that I was, because the two are so intertwined you really can't do one without the other, and so I didn't realize how much I already knew and how much I was learning.
• 24:44
  Diahan Southard: But really, from that point where we found that first second cousin, we it laid low for a long time before we got another close match and our next close match we found at Family Tree DNA and I reached out to that person as well and she was very responsive and it turns out I found her also on Ancestry.
• 25:08
  Diahan Southard: So people were starting to test at multiple places and so it was helpful to see people in more than one place.
• 25:13
  Diahan Southard: It was helpful to see people with family tree information in more than one place, and this woman became a huge part of the search for us.
• 25:22
  Diahan Southard: She was clearly related on the other side.
• 25:27
  Diahan Southard: So we had this man at 23 and me related on one side of the family and this woman at family treaty and ancestry related on a different side and her side was all like Texas Southwest kind of heritage as opposed to these German speaking Russians from North Dakota.
• 25:45
  Diahan Southard: So very different lines, very different cultures, and so that was exciting now to have this second piece and she was very helpful and it took us a long time to figure out how we were connected to her, but she was an excellent genealogist and she had a lot of people on her family test, which was also really, really helpful.
• 26:04
  Diahan Southard: And yeah, so it turns out we thought she was a second cousin to us but it turns out we are multiply related to her and so she looked much closer than she actually turned out to be later.
• 26:18
  Diahan Southard: But that's a whole huge other long story.
• 26:22
  Crista Cowan: Is there a short version of that story.
• 26:23
  Crista Cowan: Is it like?
• 26:24
  Crista Cowan: was she a double first cousin or?
• 26:26
  Diahan Southard: So the short version is that we think that and I still don't know who my mom's dad is, but we think that he was also adopted, and so we think that he is the product of a relationship between an older man and his wife's sister's daughter.
• 26:47
  Diahan Southard: So, okay, okay, so not actually related, but it's his niece.
• 26:51
  Crista Cowan: Raised as his niece, yeah Right.
• 26:52
  Diahan Southard: But not like related to him, and so we think that my mom's dad is actually their child, and so then this woman is a descendant of this man and his wife, and so then she's related through both sides.
• 27:06
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, and there's lots of that.
• 27:07
  Crista Cowan: I say this often on the podcast which is families are messy.
• 27:11
  Crista Cowan: All families are messy in their own way and families have always been messy.
• 27:16
  Crista Cowan: That's nothing new and nothing reveals that.
• 27:18
  Crista Cowan: I think, faster than DNA as you start getting into things.
• 27:21
  Crista Cowan: My mom discovered a half sibling through DNA testing that she didn't know she had.
• 27:25
  Crista Cowan: This particular half-sibling was raised as my mom's first cousin, so my grandfather had an affair with his sister-in-law that produced a child.
• 27:32
  Crista Cowan: That entire generation is deceased so we don't know if any of them even knew.
• 27:37
  Crista Cowan: But now I have a new aunt and I adore her and my mom has, you know, reconnected with her dad's side of the family and and it was messy and hard to get through that.
• 27:47
  Crista Cowan: But once we got through it, like there's been really beautiful things that have come from that and and you start to realize at a really like core level that we're not responsible for other people's choices but we are responsible for how we treat each other and move forward.
• 28:03
  Diahan Southard: And so watching my mom go through that experience really informed the way that I look at stories like this and try not to pass judgment or right, because lots of things happen that are messy, messy part, because it's it's hard to, especially as a teacher and instructor, to have a really fantastic story and then everybody thinks, well, that's great for you, but mine didn't turn out that way and the beautiful thing about my mom's family is that on the dad's side is very messy and we're still have a lot of unknowns, but on the mom's side it is beautiful and powerful.
• 28:41
  Diahan Southard: So we she, my mom was visiting me in Florida for Christmas and I was working and she was sitting on the couch near my office chair and I just pulled up Ancestry to look at some things and I realized that my mom had a new, very close DNA match.
• 28:59
  Diahan Southard: And you have that moment where you know what you're looking at and you just can't believe it and you're kind of blinking and refreshing the page.
• 29:08
  Diahan Southard: Is this what I think it is?
• 29:09
  Diahan Southard: And it was.
• 29:10
  Diahan Southard: It looked to be a half sibling to my mom and I look over at her on the couch she's just reading, yeah, and I feel the weight of the moment, like we are so close now to to relationships, now Like these aren't second cousins, these are very close people.
• 29:28
  Diahan Southard: And I look over at her and I said, mom, it looks like you have a new DNA match and she looks up from her book.
• 29:35
  Diahan Southard: Oh really, I said, yeah, come here.
• 29:39
  Diahan Southard: And so we looked at as much information as could be found and it wasn't much.
• 29:43
  Diahan Southard: So this match had only initials and had a very small tree.
• 29:49
  Diahan Southard: And so I asked her what do you want me to do?
• 29:53
  Diahan Southard: Do you want me to reach out to this person and see if they respond?
• 29:56
  Diahan Southard: Do you want me to just try to look around and see what I can find?
• 29:59
  Diahan Southard: And she said, sure, try to look around and see what I can find.
• 30:05
  Diahan Southard: And she said, sure, let's contact him.
• 30:05
  Diahan Southard: And so I crafted this really nice email where I was trying to be really positive and just um, I think what I said was my mom's.
• 30:12
  Diahan Southard: So fantastic, like you'll want to know her, but if you don't, it's okay, we just want to know.
• 30:18
  Diahan Southard: You know some answers.
• 30:20
  Diahan Southard: And then you know I hit send and then you know, for like the next two days you're like refresh, refresh, refresh and no response.
• 30:28
  Diahan Southard: You know the worst.
• 30:29
  Diahan Southard: And so you know my mom leaves and you know months go by and she would ask me occasionally so, have we heard anything?
• 30:37
  Diahan Southard: And I said no.
• 30:38
  Diahan Southard: But you know, a lot of people don't get their messages.
• 30:40
  Diahan Southard: They don't log into ancestry.
• 30:42
  Diahan Southard: It's not that he's rejecting you, he probably hasn't even seen it.
• 30:45
  Diahan Southard: She goes okay, you know.
• 30:46
  Diahan Southard: And then, a few months later, I was talking to my sister and she was like Dian, I can't believe you did that, like mom is, she's already gone through enough.
• 30:56
  Diahan Southard: You know, she's an older sister, so she knows better.
• 30:59
  Diahan Southard: You know, so she knows better.
• 31:00
  Diahan Southard: You know,
• 31:00
  Crista Cowan: hey, I'm an older sister.
• 31:02
  Diahan Southard: Well, anyway, I started to feel bad, and this is April now, and I was supposed to be teaching some young adults, actually some teenagers, about genealogy and I wanted something fun, you know, engaging, to get them into it, and I thought, well, maybe I'll tell them part of this story.
• 31:20
  Diahan Southard: And so I started to look around a little bit, using that little tiny tree that he had, looking for information, and I ended up finding an obituary for someone on his tree, and the obituary listed out all the names of this woman's children and the initials that I had matched one of the children in the list, and I thought, oh, I think I have his name.
• 31:47
  Diahan Southard: And not only do I have his name, but I have where he lived.
• 31:50
  Diahan Southard: And so I was like, okay, well, with a name and where he lives and theoretically he's still alive.
• 31:56
  Diahan Southard: I could just use the white pages and I could call him up.
• 32:01
  Diahan Southard: And so I went to one of those shady people finding websites because I couldn't.
• 32:07
  Diahan Southard: The white pages wouldn't load.
• 32:08
  Diahan Southard: Oh no, like this is like modern times.
• 32:11
  Diahan Southard: And it was like would not load.
• 32:13
  Diahan Southard: And so I was like one of those shady websites and I was like I don't know, like do these people steal your credit card and my husband's?
• 32:19
  Diahan Southard: Like we have like credit card protection, just like, put the credit card in there If they steal it.
• 32:24
  Diahan Southard: Fine, we need the phone number.
• 32:25
  Diahan Southard: I was like, okay, so I did.
• 32:27
  Diahan Southard: I found the phone number of this person who I think is my mom's half sibling, who's taken a DNA test, and I dialed the number and it went to voicemail and I just said hi, I think we might be related, so I'm just interested in chatting with you about that.
• 32:44
  Diahan Southard: Here's my phone number.
• 32:45
  Diahan Southard: And he called back like right away, wow.
• 32:51
  Diahan Southard: And he said, oh, I'd love to meet new family.
• 32:54
  Diahan Southard: Who are you?
• 32:55
  Diahan Southard: I was like, well, I might be your name.
• 32:59
  Diahan Southard: Did you recently take a DNA test?
• 33:02
  Diahan Southard: He said, yes, actually I did, and I said okay, and I kind of explained to him a little bit and he just sat there in silence for a second.
• 33:08
  Diahan Southard: He says let me get my wife.
• 33:09
  Diahan Southard: And so his wife gets on the phone and we kind of repeat it again and he says well, I guess I want to talk to your mom.
• 33:18
  Diahan Southard: I was like she would love that, and so then I I connected the two of them and they chatted and it was, it was beautiful, and within so that was in April, within a month, they had organized a massive family reunion and I flew up to Washington state and my mom and my dad drove over um across the state to Spokane and my sister came and my daughter came and we met my mom's three half siblings and learned the story.
• 33:48
  Diahan Southard: Um, it's really beautiful actually.
• 33:50
  Diahan Southard: So her mother, uh, grew up in this large family in North Dakota and married a man and had three kids and he became abusive, um, alcoholic abusive, and she finally got brave enough to divorce him at the same time that her father passed away and like in the same year.
• 34:10
  Diahan Southard: And so then she and her mom and her disabled sister and her three kids pick up from North Dakota and they move to Washington State where her other sister is living.
• 34:18
  Diahan Southard: They move into this like two or three bedroom house with her sister, her sister's kids, her sister something.
• 34:23
  Diahan Southard: So many people in this house.
• 34:24
  Diahan Southard: And, um, my grandmother's name is Catherine and Catherine started working.
• 34:29
  Diahan Southard: She worked two jobs and she just tried to live and support her family and somewhere in there she got pregnant.
• 34:36
  Diahan Southard: So my mom is the youngest of four.
• 34:39
  Diahan Southard: Wow and um, by the time we found them, catherine had passed away, but her youngest brother was still alive and we were able to meet with him and talk with him, and he's actually the one who paid for the time that my grandmother spent in this unwed mother's home in Seattle.
• 34:55
  Diahan Southard: She called him and she said I need money, and he didn't ask any questions.
• 35:00
  Diahan Southard: And he said I'll give you whatever you need and he sent the money.
• 35:01
  Diahan Southard: And it said I need money and he didn't ask any questions and he said I'll give you whatever you need and he sent the money and it was beautiful to connect with him and their whole family is just amazing.
• 35:12
  Diahan Southard: They are just so loving and so they just encompassed us and leaving that family reunion on the way home, I was like mom, how are you feeling?
• 35:21
  Diahan Southard: And she said I was like mom, how are you feeling?
• 35:24
  Diahan Southard: And she said you know I never felt empty before you know she never.
• 35:29
  Diahan Southard: She never felt like she was missing anything, but then, having this piece restored to her, she was more full than she'd ever felt.
• 35:34
  Diahan Southard: It was amazing.
• 35:36
  Diahan Southard: I'd never seen her like this.
• 35:37
  Diahan Southard: It was so beautiful.
• 35:39
  Diahan Southard: Wow, that's amazing.
• 35:40
  Diahan Southard: It's so interesting to me because I think sometimes we feel this urgency because time runs out and the fact that Catherine had already passed, but I also think things happen in exactly the way that they should.
• 35:55
  Diahan Southard: And so to know that she had these siblings that were so willing to embrace her.
• 35:59
  Diahan Southard: Did they remember their mom being pregnant?
• 36:02
  Diahan Southard: No, they don't.
• 36:03
  Diahan Southard: But you know, the oldest was a girl, but she was eight, and then the boys were boys, boys and little, and little yeah, has she been able to maintain a relationship with them.
• 36:16
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, she did up until she passed and it was a wonderful strength for her to have these brothers.
• 36:23
  Diahan Southard: They came to her dying bedside, held her hand, just like brothers would, and they were incredible people and they have been wonderful to me and my sister and my dad ever since and it's just.
• 36:37
  Diahan Southard: It has been a true restoration in our lives.
• 36:44
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 36:44
  Crista Cowan: So you went from working with Dr Woodward trying to identify bodies in a cemetery in Cairo to this really personal connection for your mom, where you were able to identify exactly who her people were, and the arc of that is a really beautiful journey for you.
• 37:04
  Crista Cowan: And now, of course, you have a full business that does this.
• 37:08
  Crista Cowan: So if people want to learn more about genetic genealogy or take advantage of the tools that you have available, where's the best place for them to go?
• 37:16
  Diahan Southard: Yeah, they can come to our website.
• 37:18
  Diahan Southard: It's yourdnagu idecom, and we're just all about helping you discover your own story.
• 37:24
  Diahan Southard: So we don't we don't want to do it for you, because I think that takes away that moment of discovery that is so powerful, that connects you to yourself and to your people in a way that can't be had in any any other form, and so we're really about providing the tools that you can do this yourself.
• 37:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, Thank you.
• 37:43
  Crista Cowan: And it's not just for adoptees, right?
• 37:45
  Crista Cowan: I think sometimes people get it stuck in their head Like I already know my family, so why would I want to take a DNA test?
• 37:50
  Crista Cowan: What would you say to that?
• 37:50
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, Well the.
• 37:52
  Diahan Southard: The first thing is, um, we don't know what we don't know, and um, dna is is very powerful, and it can help you find your three times great grandmother, and most of us don't know all of those, and so connecting even to more distant ancestors can be a really powerful way to see yourself and to understand your own story, to understand their trials and their triumphs.
• 38:17
  Diahan Southard: It is passed down to us all of those things, and it is in the fabric of who you are, and if you don't know it, you can't exploit it in the best way.
• 38:29
  Crista Cowan: Yeah absolutely, and then you know, I think, for me another side of that coin is I may know exactly who my all 16 of my great great grandparents are, but I may be the key to somebody else's discovery, and so I think there's there's things I can discover about myself always, but then there's also we hold pieces of each other as well.
• 38:51
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 38:52
  Crista Cowan: It's beautiful we do.
• 38:53
  Crista Cowan: Having shared this story and reflecting on your journey into genetic genealogy, what is it that you hope for the future?
• 39:01
  Diahan Southard: I think my biggest hope for the future is that the next generation will take up this cause, that they tend to think about legacy and we think about our families.
• 39:15
  Diahan Southard: More young adults, especially these teenagers.
• 39:17
  Diahan Southard: They need the foundation that family history provides, and we can't wait for them to get to retirement before they discover the power of it, and so my hope is that we, as an industry, can figure out how to reach people younger and get them involved in a way that will impact them positively for so much more of their life than just the end.
• 40:04
  Crista Cowan: Beautifully said yeah Well thank you.
• 40:06
  Diahan Southard: Thank you so much for being here.
• 40:07
  Diahan Southard: I always love talking to you.
• 40:08
  Diahan Southard: Yes, this is fabulous, thank you.