Woman Finds Siblings by DNA Testing

A woman who was adopted at birth has been reunited with her siblings after DNA testing.

Amanda Miller, from Boynton Beach in the US state of Florida, had a happy life with her adopted family but always yearned to find out more about where she had come from. In Florida, adoption records are sealed but she placed her name on a registry to make it easier for her birth family to find her.

However, when nothing came of that and her own searches reached a dead end, Amanda decided to turn to DNA testing. She swabbed her cheek with a cotton bud and sent off samples of her DNA to three different testing companies in America.

The genealogical testing firms had used analysis of her DNA to find a cousin living in Atlanta. However, she also discovered that her birth mother had passed away three years before from Alzheimer’s disease.

Armed with this information, she found her mother’s obituary, which contained contact details for her eldest sister, Linda Richards.

Amanda, aged 54, got in touch with Linda explaining that she could be her half-sister. She immediately replied and told her she had three half-sisters and three half-brothers, one of whom had died.

Results led to discovery of extended family

Amanda told the Palm Beach Post: “I went from a rather small adoptive family to a huge birth family.”

Linda was 14 years old when her mother put Amanda up for adoption in 1962. Their mother, Mary Frances Tidwell had just broken up with her third husband, Amanda’s father, and felt she would not be able to take care of another child.

Linda, who lives in California, said: “I sat and watched mom cry when she came home without the baby. I always knew I had a sister out there somewhere.”

Amanda has now been in email contact with her siblings, saying: “They’ve all been giving, loving and curious.”

DNA testing can identify whether two people are biologically related to each other. While the most well-known type of relationship DNA test is a paternity test, it is also possible to find out whether someone is related in another way.

Sibling DNA tests can confirm whether two people share a parent while maternity tests can establish whether there is a biological mother-daughter relationship.

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