TCNJ

36 The College of New Jersey Magazine John Adams. "When I was younger, my grandma would always casually mention, 'We're related to John Adams, the President," says Hope Yuhas '19. "But we all shrugged it o," she says. "We thought she just liked the idea." Then, for Christmas 2016, her family bought her grandparents a DNA kit from Ancestry. When she got her results back, Yuhas' grandmother added her own family tree to the site's family history records, then started digging for family connections. Her search, says Yuhas, led to a direct connection to Elihu Adams (1741–1775), brother of John. That makes Yuhas the great-great-great- great-great-great-great-niece of the second President of the United States. Jealous gun-toter. Felicia Steele, professor of English, says she submitted her DNA sample to 23andMe "largely for health reasons." But her search also revealed a criminal element in her family history. In 1891, her great-grandfather, William J. McCord, shot and killed a man in Sedalia, Missouri, who, according to one newspaper, "had been paying pronounced attentions to Mrs. McCord." "That was upsetting," Steele says, "but it helps me understand why some generations are alienated from one another." Revolutionary War ancestor. Brooke Woodward Buchan '19 spent three years poring over family history records at Ancestry, and even took a DNA test to help determine her status as a Daughter of the American Revolution. While the test did not confirm her family's link to a soldier in the Revolutionary War, the site's records did connect the generational dots to her great-great-great-great-great- grandfather on her father's side, Enos Woodward, a Massachusetts native who fought in the war and later settled in Pennsylvania. The DAR confirmed her status last spring. Buchan Yuhas Steele LOOK WHO I'M RELATED TO! CAN 23ANDME AND ANCESTRY RESULTS DIFFER? Yes. They use dierent criteria to assign you to groups. You might be assigned as 10 percent Chilean from Ancestry and only 3 percent from 23andMe based on how each company assigns markers to distinct populations. Ask Prof. Nayak COULD MY TEST RESULTS BE WRONG? We're dealing with probability so your answer is contingent on a technology used to identify variants that has a one percent error rate. One percent of, say, 600,000 is a big number; it can result in misclassification. Ask Prof. Nayak to Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, to meet her husband, David, and her three daughters, including Kelly. Their welcome came with no strings attached. "When she opened the door and walked in, I thought, 'Oh my god, she's so beautiful,'" Kelly says. "It was such a strange feeling to see someone for the first time and feel so much love. We hugged and kissed immediately." TCNJ MOM continued from p. 35 As for Torsiello, he says he'd like the whole world to know that he's finally found his eldest daughter. "That was the one thing that bothered me since I was 16 years old," Torsiello says, referring to his age when Lisa was born. "And now it doesn't bother me anymore." "I feel like my life is complete," Endres says. "It's the first time I've looked at the situation outside of myself and thought, 'Maybe they needed me.'" Endres' birthfather Fred Torsiello

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