Home > Author > Libby Copeland
1 " Linda would say that she was so excited to have half-sisters that she didn't fully appreciate how her story posted a fundamental threat to their story. "
― Libby Copeland , The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Uncovering Secrets, Reuniting Relatives, and Upending Who We Are
2 " People thought they could get away with everything, she says– and indeed, they did until genetic genealogy came along. In Moore's view, DNA is an equalizer, a revelatory force with the power to right past wrongs. "
3 " ...if the philosopher Françoise Baylis is right– if identity is something we work out in constant conversation with the rest of the world, a kind of story we tell, shaped by our beliefs and desires and fact-checked and validated by others–then the only person who could have said who [anyone] is [that person]. "
4 " We are connected to other human beings on this earth– genetically, historically,' Winn says. 'It's like magnets, I may not know where the other end of the magnet is, but I'm being pulled to it. How can we answer anything about ourselves if we don't know what our roots are, if we don't know who are people are? "
5 " Should parents have an expectation of privacy if they relinquished their children decades ago when the culture was radically different, when psychologists said the best thing for a child was not to know his or her biological family? "
6 " DNA testing poses questions that people in the adoptee community have thought about far longer than such testing has been around. Will my birth mother/father/half-sister be happy to know me? And more broadly, what is that person to me? What do we mean when we speak of 'family'? How much does genetics get to tell us about who we are? "
7 " Seeking out genetic information... may allow adult adoptees, who had no choice in whether to be adopted, or by whom, to exercise their autonomy in making meaning out of it. "
8 " Some of the stigmas seem so dated that you'd think these secrets couldn't hurt anymore, but they do. Because, in fact, out of those secrets came people– people who can sometimes still sense the shame that surrounded their hidden identities. "
9 " Time is the enemy of secret-keepers, because with time comes the inevitable revelation, one way or another. "
10 " The fundamental lesson of the DNA age is that the past is not over. We may feel we are leading modern lives, having left behind certain tragedies and injustices, certain mistakes and anachronisms, but it is all still there. "
11 " The questions of what makes a family are as old as families themselves; only now, in this new era, many more families than before are grappling with them. "
12 " The power of the DNA revelation is that it provokes questions about the past, which seems suddenly not like the past at all. It makes you question fundamental truths. It provokes an accounting—of a life in an orphanage, or a time when a couple was having trouble conceiving, or when a young unmarried woman went off for a mysterious vacation and returned many months later. It invites revisions to things we long ago analyzed and incorporated into our personal narratives. It suggests the past is never over, but a living thing that can be amended. "
13 " The rise of genealogy and DNA testing may be making it increasingly difficult for white Americans to engage in historical amnesia, to fantasize about their own family histories without ever considering how slavery might have figured into them. "
14 " The concept of race as distilled into popular culture is the product not only of scientific research but of history, culture, and politics as well– the product, in other words, of flawed human beings. Columbia University sociologist Alondra Nelson has described the concept of race as “a way to sort human communities in such a way to justify social inequality; this sorting is neither natural nor inevitable.” [Boldface added] "
15 " What happens when the seeker finds? When an adoptee or another seeker has identified her long-lost kin, what does she do with that information? No chart or browser extension can answer this question, nor can algorithms predict how the people she’s identified will react to being found. This is when some seekers prowl the Internet, looking for clues into whether they want to know these strangers in all but blood. It is, of course, breathtakingly easy to figure out your father’s career on LinkedIn, his political leanings on Facebook. Social media makes it possible—once you’ve discovered who your father is—to learn what he is. "
16 " Recreational genetic testing can suggest ancestral homelands and migration patterns that point to a family’s true history, hidden for decades or centuries, prompting testers to reexamine not only their own families but their beliefs about race and ethnicity, too. "
