Long Lost Family - TV prog - Foundling Special Episode

[NarcissistMum]

Did anyone see the long lost family special episode on Monday?

They used foundling DNA and matched them to others on a database to try and track down relatives.

What is this database? Is my DNA stored somewhere? I thought it was just DNA of convicted criminals kept on a database.

Does this open the floodgates for people to track down absent parents and/or siblings?

It’s genealogy websites, people uploading their DNA in the hope of finding distant or missing relatives.

What Georgie said.

Have a read of this thread in Telly Addicts www.mumsnet.com/Talk/telly_addicts/3518007-Long-Lost-Family?msgid=85230518, where a number of posters have expressed concern about the DNA databases on genealogy websites these days. Although the LLF team clearly ensure that contact with foundlings' parents/siblings is handled sensitively.

Back in the day the idea of DNA matching, plus the internet, was literally inconceivable and so a birth mother (or birth father) who wittingly abandoned a baby to its fate would never imagine they could be traced decades later.

I'm adopted, but not a foundling, and haven't watched the programme yet (I recorded it, as I do many LLF episodes), so I can't comment on any of the individual stories on that episode.

The direct-to-consumer genealogy websites were used, e.g AncestryDNA, which sponsor the show & have more than 10 million on the database, internationally.

Most who have at least great grandparents born in UK, for example, will have at least fourth cousins on the databases, sharing a set of third great grandparents with you, the test-taker. You are unlikely to be away of all your fourth cousins living today, but they’re out there.

If you can figure out the right lines of descent & get other possible relatives to also test, a pattern will eventually emerge and a likely foundling parent, etc, can be identified. It’s a matter of time.

AncestryDNA use an algorithm to establish where in the UK you might be from e.g Yorkshire & north. Further clues. Most foundlings have a mother who was local to the area where they were discovered.

Aware not away.