Fiom : Adoption and DNA testing: an ongoing journey
You were adopted, but your adoption papers were tampered with in the past. Still, you want to know where you come from. And maybe also find biological relatives. “Searching using DNA also has a lot of potential for adoptees,” says Jeroen (38). We asked him about his experiences.
Jeroen was adopted from Indonesia. Together with his adoptive sister and brother, he used to live with his parents in the east of the Netherlands. I have fond childhood memories. When I lived abroad for a while for work in 2008, people sometimes thought it was strange that I looked Asian, but I came from the Netherlands. At that moment, Jeroen becomes curious about his roots. That was very broad back then. For example, I started listening to Indonesian music, was interested in the culture.
In that year Jeroen writes a letter to Spoorloos. It could take a while, they immediately said. So I didn't have high expectations. The papers showed that I had an Indonesian mother and a Chinese father. Furthermore, there were too many gaps in the file, so Spoorloos indicated that they could do nothing for me. Although I expected it, that message was not nice. In the meantime I had already made a roots trip to Indonesia in 2010. There people asked if I was from Japan, Korea or Vietnam. Anything but Indonesia or China. This was all painfully confusing. I thought I found my roots, but instead I felt like a foreigner there too.
In 2011 he reads an article in National Geographic about DNA research. You can not only demonstrate kinship with this, but also map out your ethnic background. I thought the chance of a match with a distant relative was quite small, but maybe that way I could get confirmation for my Chinese roots. I immersed myself in the matter and registered with FTDNA. I sent the swab with my saliva. An online account will then be created and you will be kept well informed. In the beginning I checked the website every day. I opted for an extensive test. It costs €700, but then you can also find your 'deep ancestry'. Then you see where your ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago come from. I find it very interesting and cool that this is possible. It's an ongoing journey
And those results are coming. I have ancestors in Southeast Asia, but that is still very wide. FTDNA mainly focuses on customers from Europe and the United States. That is why Jeroen contacts a professor who is mapping 70 subpopulations in Asia. She did this in response to the attack in Jakarta in 2004. This is how they hoped to find the perpetrators. At the same time, she had collected a lot of information about ethnic groups in Indonesia. I then sent her my raw data from FTDNA. Then Jeroen receives a special message: he is almost 100% Javanese. It was clear that my adoption papers had been tampered with. So my father was not Chinese. This gave peace. Indonesia is big, but I didn't have to go all over Southeast Asia.
Jeroen: With DNA testing you can not only demonstrate kinship, but also map out your ethnic background.
In 2013 Jeroen will travel to Java. The nice thing was that people there said 'you look like us'. That was a nice confirmation. The DNA search continues. He enrolls in MyHeritage and GEDMatch. DNA certainly has a future for the adoption world. For me, finding a match with biological relatives is a bonus. Reliability is still very low, so I have no expectations. Maybe that's self-defense, I don't know. For example, I have matches with distant relatives. In a few years I may find a distant great-uncle and I will get more and more leads. But if it doesn't work, then it won't work.
Privacy is a tricky issue for me. I am now registered with US DNA databases. If they want to use my hereditary data for research, they can. I really thought about it and made the decision. As a result: I take this risk. In addition, it is a new field and interpretation is still difficult. So if you get a match, but they are very distant relatives, you always have to ask yourself if it is useful. It's not easy. So I am very careful.
In the beginning I was working on it a lot, almost daily. Not anymore. I have now become a father. We are raising my son in Dutch with Indonesian elements. I want to give this to him. We visit pasars in the Netherlands and go on holiday to Indonesia. This is how the journey of discovery to my roots continues. Together with my family.
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