Last fall, I was part of a family reunion almost 80 years in the making.
In the aftermath of World War II, a Jewish toddler was rescued from an orphanage in Poland. Given the name Sarit, the little girl grew up on a kibbutz in Israel without any family. She lived her entire life without ever knowing who she was or where she came from. But before she died, Sarit was given the gift of a commercial DNA test. A distant cousin became invested in trying to use DNA to find Sarit’s birth parents; she reached out to ask if I could assist with the search, since I’m a genealogist with experience doing DNA research. Over the course of more than a year, we worked diligently to untangle the puzzle of Sarit’s identity and reconstruct her family tree. We ultimately learned that Sarit hadn’t been an orphan at all; rather, in the chaos of war she had been separated from her parents, who survived and searched desperately for her for the rest of their lives. They died in Israel in 1977 and 1995, respectively. And in October, we reunited Sarit’s daughter with her two elderly aunts and many first cousins.
