Reunited

How DNA testing is bringing families together

- Sarah Treleaven

IN 2018, JEFF HIGHSMITH OF TEXAS started a Facebook page on behalf of his family. The page had one objective: to find Melissa Suzanne Highsmith, Jeff's sister. At just 21 months, she had been abducted from Fort Worth by her babysitter 51 years earlier and the family was desperate for answers.

In addition to the Facebook page, they made flyers with baby Melissa's face and age-progression photos that indicated what she might look like now, in her 50s. Remarkably, they were convinced she was still alive all these years later and determined to be reunited with her.

They knew that more tools were now available to help locate missing persons-such as genealogy kits with DNA tests. And so, the family bought kits from 23andMe, and then uploaded the results to a public database called GEDmatch.

It seemed like a shot in the dark, but it worked. In November 2022, the Highsmith family found Melissa through a key DNA match: Melissa's daughter. By pulling the threads of DNA matches, triangulating connections on a much bigger family tree, they zeroed in on the baby snatched so long ago. The family reunion was a joyful one. Melissa described being found as "the most wonderful feeling in the world."

The story of Melissa Highsmith and her family got global news coverage. But it's only one of many cases of people being connected by DNA analysis. In Canada, siblings separately adopted from Romania when they were babies were reunited in their 50s when both took a DNA test to learn more about their biological health; turns out they had spent much of their lives within a 30-minute drive of each other. And two sisters-one in the United Kingdom, the other in the Netherlands-met for the first time in 75 years after learning that they have the same father.