If a DNA test reshaped what you thought you knew about your family, we'd like to hear your story.
Stories do more than document experience.
They teach others how life is lived.
By sharing your story, you can help people better understand the hopes, losses, questions, relationships, and forms of belonging that emerge after an unexpected DNA discovery.
What happens to belonging when DNA changes what you knew about your family?
You took a DNA test, or someone in your family did, and it revealed an unexpected parent, sibling, child or other close family connection. Or perhaps you are a woman who anonymously placed a child for adoption. While we welcome stories from anyone with this experience, regardless of religion, we are especially interested in those who identify as a Latter-day Saint or have been shaped by the Latter-day Saint tradition, whose theology places family at the center of eternal purpose, as these discoveries can raise profound questions not just about identity and belonging, but also about covenant relationships.
What you share becomes the foundation for three things this community is building together:
Understanding — serious scholarship that puts faith, identity, and DNA discovery into a conversation that has barely begun.
Awareness — helping people grasp what an unexpected parentage discovery actually does to a person, a family, and their relationship to faith.
Real help — practical resources for people facing this, and for the family, friends, and Church leaders trying to walk beside them.
This project is led by Joseph Stuart, a historian of religion and kinship at Brigham Young University, who studies family, identity, and meaning in times of change. He is collaborating with Diahan Southard who is the founder of Your DNA Guide, and has helped thousands of individuals find their family using their DNA. But it can't be built by researchers. It has to be built by the people who've actually lived this — which is where you come in.
Whatever your experience has been, we would like to hear it. Some stories are marked by joy, some by grief, many by both. Some questions find answers. Others remain open. This project makes room for complexity, uncertainty, and experiences that resist easy conclusions.