Category Archives: DNA

Cleveland It was in a cellar that I found my roots. Davina Shuman, a relative I never met, graciously gave me a glimpse of the family I never knew I had.

The Levys were a conservative, Jewish family from Cleveland. Their patriarch, Harry Levy, is my great-grandfather. In the spring of 1930, one of his four daughters we don't know which gave birth, out of wedlock, to my mother. Davina, one of Harry's legitimate grandchildren, says no one ever knew about this baby.

"It would be scandalous, really, in those days, for this family," Davina said.

My mom died knowing none of this. She was raised by another couple. There was no formal adoption or paper trail. So if not for DNA testing, my ancestry would have remained a secret. My results revealed two relatives, leading me to some new discoveries.

A recent survey showed about a quarter of the people who take these tests find some kind of surprising result. Or in my case, two surprising results. The test was more definitive regarding my grandfather. He was an Irish Catholic railroad worker named Frank Black.

His other daughter, Carol, is my new aunt. My uncle is also named Frank Black. Together, they told me all I needed to know about my grandpa. Frank said he had five wives. Carol said he was a drinker. Not exactly the astronaut or war hero I was hoping to find.

"We were the apples that fell off the tree and rolled away," Carol said.

It certainly does make you question who you are. I grew up an Eagle Scout who went to Catholic school. Now I find my grandpa was Casanova, and the Levys were Jewish.

"If your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish, no question," Davina said.

But my new relatives all told me none of that matters.

"I just want you to come for Thanksgiving," Davina said.

Look deep enough into your past and odds are you'll find a family tree full of flowers and broken branches and a lot of leaves you don't recognize. But I think it's important to embrace it all because whatever is there, it's exactly what your tree needed to grow the perfect you.

To contactOn the Road, or to send us a story idea, email us:OnTheRoad@cbsnews.com.

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How a DNA test revealed the family I never knew - CBS News

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We know that Tia Mowry-Hardrict, one half of the famous Mowry twins of course, is the child of a Black mother (Bahamian by the way) and a white father (European, Irish as far as she knew), but she shared some new insight into where her family comes from by revealing her recent DNA test results.

She didnt specify who was behind the particular DNA test she did, but she did show fans the steps she took from start to finish, sharing the results of her test four weeks later on her YouTube show, Tia Mowrys Quick Fix.

As it turns out, her fathers people are British, Irish, German, French and Scandinavian.

As for her moms side, Tia found out that her mothers people originated from West Africa, specifically Ghana and Nigeria.

What up my Nigerians! she remarked. One of my really, really good friends is Nigerian. Its just so amazing to really know the fine details of where your ancestors were from.

Still, the 41-year-old actress said she did the test because she wanted to find out more about where her father came from.

One of the main reasons why I wanted to do this is because as Ive gotten older, Ive been more intrigued with who I am and where I come from, she said. Ive always known some information about my moms side, but I didnt know a lot about my dads side. My dad is white and when my mom and my dad got married, on my dads side, there wasnt a lot of support until now.

Shes since found family members on her dads side on social media, even meeting a second cousin in person. Shes also gained, through her results, a great sense of pride in her ancestors and their show of strength, from the Irish migrating to the U.S. during their great famine to her Nigerian and Ghanaian predecessors overcoming slavery. At one point, Tia teared up when breaking down the gratitude she has for both sides of her family.

I have both sides of me that are just badass, she said. That explains why I am such a go-getter and why Im jut so aggressive in whatever I want and I just dont give up.

She also learned about her susceptibility to certain health issues because of her familys background.

My results said slightly increased risk for late onset Alzheimers, she revealed. I got chills because my great grandmother, she actually passed from Alzheimers. She ended up getting it when she was in her 90s.

She also found out that she has increased risk for Type 2 diabetes, which she said explained in a sense why she ended up with gestational diabetes when she was pregnant with her daughter, Cairo. Instead of freaking out about what was shared, Tia confidently said that she was glad to have the information.

With that information I now can do whatever I need to do to try to prevent that from happening, she said of the different health issues shes at risk for.At first I was really nervous about receiving this because you just never really know whats going to be revealed, she added. But again, as Ive gotten older, Im really starting to believe that knowledge is power. So the more information I know, even though sometimes that can be scary, you can do something about it.

The whole video was very interesting, because who doesnt love to learn about all things ancestry? Check out her DNA results from her own mouth below:

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Tia Mowry Breaks Down In Tears After Finding Out Results Of DNA Ancestry Test - MadameNoire

PHOTO:Duncan Hull

Salesforce created the customer relationship management (CRM) software market as we know it today, and with the rise of Salesforce CRM for B2B sales teams, CRM became a sales tool that tracks opportunities through various sales stages. But CRM's humble beginnings date back to the 1980s, when the market for contact management software was starting to heat up. ACT! was a key player in this growing market, followed by companies such as Goldmine that competed with ACT! for a share of a massive market opportunity. The technology soon morphed into salesforce automation, and in the '90s was firmly established as an irreplaceable tool for sales teams.

CRM was later reclaimed by marketers and B2C brands to bring together customer journey data. If all that data was on one CRM, theoretically, marketers could gain insights from the data and use it to power automated engagement. However, CRM posed some limitations (limited integrations, no real-time capabilities) and this demand for insight into and activation of centralized customer data is what gave rise to customer data platforms (CDPs).

CDPs excel at creating a single view based on customer journey data from multiple sources, then cleansing, deduping and stitching it together to provide marketers with accurate data from which they can derive important customer insights to make important business decisions, and use this data to intelligently orchestrate experiences across channels.

As CRM platforms evolved, they diverged into two disparate types, operational and analytical:

Related Article: Customer Data Platforms Shine Where CRMs Fail

We, and other CDP vendors, owe a lot to the popularity of analytical CRM platforms. In many ways, CDPs are essentially an analytical CRM advanced to meet the scale, configurability, and real-time needs of todays enterprise brands. CDPs are now more popular than ever, growing 65% in 2018. According to the CDP Institute, industry revenue reached $740 million, up more than 50% from 2017. By the end of 2019, revenue was expected to exceed $1 billion.

One of the key reasons CDPs have gained so much market traction is because of the need for an analytical CRM, which is capable of handling real-time web events. The idea of an analytical CRM / customer data platform is not a new concept. In one form or another, it has existed for the last 50 years, defined as customer databases or marketing databases.

In the past, these traditional databases coupled with marketing service providers have been somewhat able to meet the analytical CRM needs of marketers. But as the size, shape and currency of customer data exploded with the growth of the internet, use of smartphones, and thousands of marketing tools and customer engagement channels, a traditional database with a services team enhancing it was no longer sufficient. This, plus the need to compete with Amazon by providing hyper-relevant customer experiences, paved the path for the CDP.

Todays customers now have endless transactional, profile-based, and event data sets that are important for marketers to understand. And this massive size of data, along with the need for marketers to be able to leverage data in real-time which traditional analytical CRMs didnt support drove analytical CRM systems into the cloud and was the impetus for the CDP industry.

The market for CRM platforms and CDPs diverged and now serve different purposes and use cases. Whats new about CDPs is they are built on modern SaaS architecture to be infinitely scalable, with high performance, and to support real-time use cases while giving marketers, data scientists, business users and anyone within the organization who needs it, direct access to customer data and intelligence. CDPs are the best that an analytical CRM has to offer, with all the benefits of an extensible SaaS platform, fast data processing, and modern APIs.

Related Article: Keep Your Eye on CDP Platforms: They'll Be Worth $1B by 2019

Omer Artun is the Chief Science Officer at Acquia. He was previously the founder and CEO of AgilOne, which was acquired by Acquia in December 2019.

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Customer Data Platforms and Analytical CRMs Share the Same DNA - CMSWire

Fossilized bones and teeth arentthe only source of ancient human DNA.

The genetic material also sticks around in birch pitch chewing gum, which can hold enough DNA to piece together the genetic instruction books, or genomes, of long-dead people, researchers report December 17 in Nature Communications. By analyzing a 5,700-year-old chewed wad of pitch from Denmark, the team obtained the genome of an ancient woman, and determined that she probably had blue eyes, dark skin and dark hair.

Ancient humans likely chewed the pitch made by heating birch bark to make it pliable, working cells from the mouth deep into the sticky substance. Birch pitch is relatively resistant to bacteria and viruses as well as water, which would have protected the DNA from decay, the researchers say.

The team also recovered DNA frommicrobes that may have lived in the womans mouth, including from olderversions of Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis, and bacteria that cancause pneumonia or gum disease. Duck and hazelnut DNA were also identified, andmay be remnants from a recent meal the woman ate before popping a piece ofpitch into her mouth.

Scientists have gleanedinformation about ancient humans mouth microbes and diets (SN: 10/4/17)from dental plaque in fossilized teeth (SN: 3/8/17).But thats been built up over many years, says study coauthor HannesSchroeder, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. With the chewing gum,its kind of like a snapshot of one moment in time.

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DNA from 5,700-year-old gum shows what one ancient woman may have looked like - Science News

For nearly 40 years, the murder of 21-year-old college student Helene Pruszynski has stumped Colorado detectives and left the only living member of Helene's immediately family, Stonington resident Janet Johnson, without answers.

But this week, Johnson finally received the phone call she had been waiting decades for: Detectives had used DNA to find and arrest a suspect in her little sister's death.

DNA from a used beer mug in a Florida bar helped detectives find and arrest the suspect 62-year-old James Curtis Clanton in Lake Butler, Fla., on Dec. 11 39 years and 11 months after he allegedly raped and murdered Pruszynski on Jan. 16, 1980, according to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office and Douglas County court records.

Pruszynski, a senior at Wheaton College and a native of Hamilton, Mass., had been in Colorado for just two weeks when she was abducted, raped and stabbed to death on her way home from her internship at KHOW radio station. Her body was found in a field the next day in Highlands Ranch, Colo. But until now, the stranger she encountered on her way home, who cut her life short, was a mystery.

DNA samples were taken from Pruszynski's body in 1980 and preserved, The New York Times reported, but investigators at the time did not have the technology to analyze them.With new technology and theassistance of genealogy servicessuch as United Data Connect, Ancestry.com and GEDmatch.com,investigators were able to build a group of suspects that included Clanton. In November, investigatorsfollowed him and observed himdrinking beer at a Florida bar. DNA swabs taken from a mughe was using matched the DNA profile of samples that had been taken from Pruszynski's body, the Times reported.

Now, Johnson, who has lived in Stonington for more than 35 years, knows that justice will be served for her family, and hopefully many other families through the use of new DNA technology that helped detectives finally find a suspect in her sister's case.

"It's a wonderful thing that they were able to find this animal," Johnson saidduring a phone call Wednesday. "I hope that other cases will be able to be solved using the same DNA technology."

Though what happened to her sister is still to this day "devastating and heartbreaking,"Johnson said shehopes this arrest will helpbringsome closure.

"I hope other families are able to get closure, too," Johnson said. "There is no peace in these situations, but at least closure."

Last week, investigators were able to track down Clanton in his Florida town using DNA collected at the crime scene. The break came after the department deployed more than 20 detectives to work on the case in Colorado and Florida over the past year, Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said atnews conference Monday.

Spurlock said that Pruszynski's case first went cold in 1980, less than a year after the investigation opened. It was reopened in 1988, said Spurlock, but quickly went cold again.

In 2013, Spurlock started a Cold Case Review team that aimed to home in on new technology that could help crack cases that had yet to be solved.

"We really started focusing on cold cases and started really focusing on things that we could use, and in many cases, it's DNA," Spurlock said.

Investigators said that there was a significant amount of crime scene evidence that was maintained and cared for over the years that ended up leading to Clanton, a truck driver who was arrested and taken into custody after stepping out of his parked truck.

Clanton, whose legal name was Curtis Allen White at the time of the murder, had just moved to Douglas County from Arkansas and was working at a landscaping business in 1980, investigators said. It was unclear when he legally changed his name, investigators said.

George Brauchler, district attorney for the 18th Judicial District in Colorado,said at the news conferencethat although DNA and new technology played a major role in breaking this case, it wasn't a magic key to unlocking it.

Theres DNA thats part of this case, a big part of this case, but dont misunderstand that its like Hey, we just entered DNA into some voodoo database and out popped this guy,' it wasn't like that," Brauchler said. "It was a combination of DNA existing, technology that was available, but then the dogged police work that was done...that helped put the pieces together for us to find that missing piece of evidence that helped tie it all together."

"I would say the technology was an undeniable part of this case but I don't want the public to think, 'Hey, we just came up with this new scientific method' and absent the hard work of human beings actually doing old-school police work and digging around that this would have just solved itself," he said.

Clanton was extradited from Florida over the weekend and is being held in Douglas County.

Brauchler said Clanton has been charged based on "various theories of first-degree murder," including first-degree murder after deliberation with intent, felony murder predicated on an underlying crime of robbery, felony murder predicated on an underlying crime of kidnapping and felony murder predicated on an underlying crime of sexual assault and then a standalone charge of kidnapping.

Charges weren't filed on the underlying crimes of robbery and sexual assault because the statute of limitations has run out on those charges, Brauchler said.

At the news conference, Spurlock said that calling Johnson with the news of the arrest this week "was kind of one of those bittersweet moments because this was a long time, almost 40 years."

Spurlock, looking at a family photo of Helene, Janet, and their brother and grandmother who have since died, recognized that most of Helene's relatives did not live to see her case solved.

"Because it had taken so long, so many people have gone and don't have the opportunity to hear this, that we made an arrest," Spurlock said.

"It's sad that they aren't around to hear this news," Johnson said.

During the news conference, Spurlock talked about Pruszynski's life and recalled the future she was working toward when it was cut short.

"This is a young girl who was just starting her life," Spurlock said. Helene "came to Colorado to have an opportunity to make a difference. She wanted to be in journalism, she wanted to be a part of a bigger story."

Johnson, too, reminisced on her sister's potential.

"I want people to know what a special person Helene was. My sister was my best friend," she said in a statement. "Helene was on track to do great things, she had a bright future ahead of her. Not a day has passed that we haven't missed her."

Johnson said that the detectives who helped make this break in her sister's case are her heroes and that she hopes other families will experience the same sense of closure she got this week.

Brauchler said he thinks they will.

"Cases like this give me hope for the future. As we continue to make these technological advances, there are crimes still unsolved today that I have great optimism for because of cases like this, that we're going to end up solving," he said.

"I think the public ought to feel good about that," he said,"and I think murderers ought to be scared to death of it."

t.hartz@theday.com

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DNA from beer mug leads to suspect in 40-year-old cold case death of Stonington woman's sister - theday.com

The son of a man charged in a 1998 cold-case killing was arrested after DNA testing also tied him to the crime that another person had wrongfully served 20 years behind bars for, the Riverside County District Attorneys Office said Tuesday in a news release.

Googie Rene Harris Jr., 40, was arrested in Palm Desert last Friday and charged with one count of murder in connection with the killing of his fathers ex-wife, Terry Cheek, authorities said.

Cheeks body was found in April 1998 near some rocks along Temescal Canyon Road in the Corona Lake area.

The discovery led to the arrest of her boyfriend and co-worker, Horace Roberts, who served 20 years behind bars before he was exonerated last year when the California Innocence Project used new technology to obtain additional DNA testing that tied two other suspects to the killing, according to the DAs office.

The investigation into Cheeks killing was reopened, which led to the arrest of Googie Rene Harris Sr., 63, of Jurupa Valley, and Joaquin Lateee Leal, 53, of Compton, in October 2018.

Harris Sr. was married to Cheek and Leal was the victims nephew by marriage, authorities said.

The latest arrest, of Harris Jr., comes after DNA testing of a watch found near the victims body connected him to her killing, according to the DAs office.

Investigators believe the watch was knocked off of Harris Jr.s arm when the victims body was left along Temescal Canyon Road, the DA said.

The father-son duo and Leal are all believed to have been involved in a plan to kill the woman, authorities said. A motive for the killing is unknown.

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DNA Testing Leads to Mans Arrest in 1998 Riverside County Killing That His Father Is Also Charged In - KTLA Los Angeles

A HARD DRIVE is a miracle of modern technology. For $50 anyone can buy a machine that can comfortably store the contents of, say, the Bodleian Library in Oxford as a series of tiny magnetic ripples on a spinning disk of cobalt alloy. But, as is often the case, natural selection knocks humanitys best efforts into a cocked hat. DNA, the information-storage technology preferred by biology, can cram up to 215 petabytes of data into a single gram. That is 10m times what the best modern hard drives can manage.

And DNA storage is robust. While hard-drive warranties rarely exceed five years, DNA is routinely recovered from bones that are thousands of years old (the record stands at 700,000 years, for a genome belonging to an ancestor of the modern horse). For those reasons, technologists have long wondered whether DNA could be harnessed to store data commercially. Archival storage is one idea, for it minimises DNAs disadvantageswhich are that, compared with hard drives, reading and writing it is fiddly and slow.

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Now, though, a team led by Yaniv Erlich of Erlich Lab, an Israeli company, and Robert Grass, a chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have had another idea. As they describe in a paper in Nature Biotechnology, they want to use DNA data storage to give all manner of ordinary objects a memory of their own.

The researchers describe a test run in which they encoded the Stanford bunnya standard test image in computer graphicsinto chunks of DNA. Those chunks were then given a protective sheath of silica nanoparticles. That served to protect them for the next stage, in which they were mixed with plastic and used as feedstock in a 3D printer, which printed a model of the bunny. The result was an object that contained, encoded throughout its structure, the blueprints necessary to produce more copies of itself. By clipping a tiny fragment of plastic from the finished bunnys ear and running the DNA within through a sequencer, the researchers were able to recover those blueprints and use them to make further generations of DNA-infused bunnies.

Satisfied with their proof of concept, they then repeated the trick by encoding a short video in DNA and fusing it in plexiglass, a transparent plastic. They used the plexiglass to make a lens for a pair of spectacles. Once again, clipping a tiny sliver from the lens and dissolving the plastic away was able to liberate the DNA, which could be used to recover the video.

The cost of both producing and reading DNA is falling precipitously. The price of reading a million letters of the genetic alphabet has fallen roughly a million-fold since the start of the millennium. For that reason, Drs Erlich and Grass hope their idea might one day have all sorts of uses. One, they think, could be to embed relevant information into manufactured goods. They give the example of custom-fitted medical implants that contain a patients medical records and the precise measurements needed to make another implant.

A second use, for the privacy-minded, could be steganographythe art of concealing information within something apparently innocuous (this was the idea behind the DNA-infused spectacles). Their most futuristic idea is an entire world full of objects which, like biological life, contain all the information needed to make copies of themselves in every part of their structure. Drs Erlich and Grass have dubbed their technology the DNA of things, and it is certainly a clever idea. But the next job might be to come up with a snappier name.

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DNA could be used to embed useful information into everyday objects - The Economist

Fort Worth police say they've solved the decades-old cold case murder of an 11-year-old girl using DNA phenotyping.

On June 27, 1983, Julie Fuller was reported missing after she'd gone to take out the trash at the Kensington Motel in Arlington.

Fuller and her family had only recently arrived in North Texas, having moved to the United States from England.

The latest news from around North Texas.

The next day, the girl's naked body was found in Fort Worth along the 200 block of Handley-Edervill Road.

"You have an 11-year-old girl who's left in the woods, nude, clearly she had been raped," said homicide Det. Tom O'Brien. "That is going to get your attention."

The investigation turned cold and, until now, the identity of the girl's killer had never been confirmed.

However, using new DNA technology, O'Brien now says he's cracked the case and identified the person they believe took the child's life.

The break began in February 2018 when detectives reached out to Parabon Nanolabs to obtain a Snapshot DNA phenotyping report -- DNA phenotyping, police said, is "the process of predicting physical appearance and ancestry from unidentified DNA evidence."

Using DNA evidence obtained in the Fuller investigation, Snapshot produced trait predictions for the unidentified DNA. By combining those predictions with individual guesses about face shape and eye and skin color, composites were created to show what the girl's killer may have looked like at ages 25, 45 and 65 years of age. Various ages were created since investigators didn't know anything about the girl's killer.

Detectives then sent the DNA to a private genealogy company which matched the evidence with DNA it had on file from a relative of the suspect.

Police contacted the suspect's family, got more samples of their DNA, and positively linked him to the crime.

"No doubt," O'Brien said.

Police said the killer was James Francis McNichols, who died in 2004 in Iowa at the age of 52.

"I would have loved to have had him held responsible for what he did to this little girl," the detective said.

O'Brien now hopes this new technology can solve other old murders.

"The Fort Worth police department has over 1,000 unsolved cold cases," he said. "This technology is going to be utilized for any case we have we're able to use it."

Link:
DNA Used to Solve Decades-Old Cold Case Murder of 11-Year-Old Julie Fuller - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

NORTH RICHLAND HILLS, Texas A breakthrough in a 2007 North Richland Hills cold case could mean peace and long-awaited justice for the family of 68-year-old Marianne Wilkinson.

For the very first time, police have developed a DNA profile for the crime which means they can test and run it through various databases for a possible match.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Marianne and her husband Don were watching the Dallas Cowboys rout the Detroit Lions in their North Richland Hills home.

But around 8 p.m., Marianne answered her door and was killed. Police say she was shot at least three times.

Her husband, who was still in the home, frantically called the police.

"My wife has just been shot," Don said over the phone to 911. "Somebody rang the doorbell and then shot her. I need some help quick."

Detectives have always believed that the gunfire at Marianne's door was not meant for her. The 68-year-old was beloved and had no enemies.

Her son Mike Wilkinson and his wife Terri don't forget that night, especially over the holidays.

"You always live with it, and it changes you forever," Mike said. "You know there's no rationality for going to someone's door and shooting them no matter who they are."

The hardest part to come to grips with is that no arrests have been made for 12 years.

Police have looked at three persons of interest, however. Their names are Dennis Taylor, Vincent Lane, and Willie Boley.

Per our partners at theFort Worth Star-Telegram in 2013, "Taylors wife lived in a home with the same address number on a parallel cul-de-sac a block away from the Wilkinson home. She and Taylor were going through a divorce at the time of Wilkinsons death."

Marianne Wilkinson was murdered on December 9, 2007 as she answered her front door.

Boley was believed to be an employee of Taylor's.

However, Boley was killed in Oklahoma City in 2013 following a domestic dispute with his girlfriend.

The girlfriend told police that Boley had been beating her and then she shot him.

Since the killing, the gun that was used to commit the crime has been found and a partial fingerprint was lifted from one of the casings at the scene.

DNA was also collected, but for years Mike and his wife Terri have watched the case receive very little traction.

"There's still this loss that's there," Mike said. "Mom was a lot of fun, mom was one who knew how to love and appreciate."

"That's the difficult part is waiting."

Mike's wife Terri echoed a similar feeling.

"I just think about all the things she has missed," Terri said. "Everything joyful has the stab of sorrow because she's missing it."

North Richland Hills recently revisited the Wilkinson case after the family encouraged them to.

DNA collected from the scene that was once little to no help was re-examined and with technological advancements, a new DNA profile was created for a possible suspect.

The good news is that law enforcement can use that profile to search through multiple law enforcement databases for a match.

So far, however, no positive hits just yet.

For Mike and his family, it's a huge piece to a puzzle they've been trying to put together for years.

"We're very grateful and very hopeful that it will turn into something," he said.

"I just want to see justice," Terri followed up.

Photo of Wilkinson (center) with her family.

WILKINSON FAMILY

Inside the Wilkinson's home is a number of things that belonged to Marianne.

Handmade ornaments are on the tree, Christmas figurines are in the kitchen, and paintings that were once Marianne's are on the walls.

Terri said they bring her family comfort and remind them of the memories they had with the 68-year-old.

As they surrounded the living room, the Wilkinsons said all they can do now is wait.

Something they've gotten good at over the years.

"I would feel rested and it doesn't seem right to not have justice on this side of the grave," Terri said.

If you know anything about the person who is responsible for the death of Marianne Wilkinson, call the North Richland Hills Police Department.

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For the first time, a DNA profile has been created for 2007 cold case murder involving 68-year-old woman - WFAA.com

VANCOUVER, Wash. (KING) On Saturday, John Hart prepared to fly back home to Wichita, Kansas after spending Thanksgiving with his family in Vancouver, Washington.

I hadn't had that kind of Thanksgiving in I don't know how many years. It was the best Thanksgiving that I've had in forever, Hart said.

Harts praise is not for the stuffing. It was the best Thanksgiving because it was a celebration nearly 60 years in the making. Or as Hart likes to think of it, divine intervention.

Growing up, Hart always knew he was adopted and loved his parents dearly, but when both his mom and dad passed away within the same year, he had a longing for family.

The year was 1987. That is when he started his search for his biological family.

However, making his way to Vancouver, Washington to find them was not an easy road.

Hart paid a company to find his biological mother. He spent thousands of dollars and years without any real leads.

It's just one wall after the other, Hart said.

Hearing stories of other families finding each other through genealogy websites and kits, Hart eventually turned to ancestry.com. He found a match for a close relative, but it turned into another dead end.

It just seemed that every time I tried to do something there was always a stop, he said.

Little did Hart know, his biological mother, Rosie Ashmore, was looking for him all along.

In 1963, Ashmore was a teenager and living with her mother in Los Angeles. When she was just 17 years old, she was raped and became pregnant.

At that time, if a girl got pregnant, it was her fault no matter what the circumstances were, Ashmore said. So, she said we can't have this, we have to hide this.

Ashmores mother took her away to have the baby in secret.

When I gave him up I thought, 'How do you explain to a child, who doesn't understand language at this point, that it's out of your hands? Ashmore said. It's out of your control and so, I gave him up.

Life continued to move forward for Ashmore. She went on to get married and raised two children: Steve and Julie. But the son she gave up never left her mind or her heart.

I wanted to find him, I needed to find him to tell him that I know in my heart I always did love him and that it was out of my control that I could not find him, she said.

Ashmore too turned to ancestry.com, where she also found a match her son, John Hart. She immediately tried to contact him, but Hart never got the message.

Finally, about one month ago there was a break. That close relative Hart found on ancestry.com more than a year ago told the family about the connection, not knowing Ashmore was looking for her son.

Ashmore had told her children about the son she gave away, but her other family members did know what she was searching for.

Thats when Ashmores granddaughter got to work on social media. Harts two daughters back in Kansas did the same. Within days, the mystery was solved: mom and son had found each other.

To have all this come through my children was it was very overwhelming, John said.

Hart flew into PDX just ahead of Thanksgiving for a very emotional reunion with the mother he hadnt seen since birth.

It's like the puzzle. There's all these pieces of puzzle out there that have finally started to be put together, Ashmore said. And him coming through the airport and me seeing him, it's like the last piece of the puzzle in place. It was just meant to be.

The way that they welcomed me and have accepted me and loved me -- it's more than any one man deserves. A second chance at love and life, Hart said.

Hart not only found his mother, but his brother and sister as well. They say they plan to talk just about every day and are already looking ahead to the next visit.

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DNA site helps reunite Washington woman with her son after nearly 60 years - WTHR