Not a review — The Lost Family by Libby Copeland and a familiar surname

The Lost Family by Libby Copeland roams over the vast landscape of genetic genealogy circa 2019. It came out in March of 2020. I was at the Silver Unicorn very shortly before the lockdowns and bought a book or two at a school-connected event (some sort of reading) that was very hot and crowded.

https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/1778498.html

Anyway.

I picked it up again to continue reading today, some years later (I think I have picked it up at least once, maybe twice and then put it down again). I’m most of the way through, and have reached a picture of Phillip Benson (switched at birth with Collins) and his first wife, Esther Abolafia Benson, sitting with their son Kenny.

I cannot stop laughing. I absolutely did not expect to meet a relative-by-marriage in these pages, but it was probably inevitable. When my dad’s first cousin asked me to track down Mrs. Abolafia after my first visit to her, I had no recollection of ever having heard that last name. It’s especially funny showing up here, because Abolafia isn’t even an Ashkenazi Jewish surname (and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage in an Irish family is what started the whole search for the babies swapped at birth), so Philip Benson, supposedly Ashkenazi but actually Irish, first married a Sephardic Jew.

That last name has been the source of so much unexpected for me. The mother-in-law and father-in-law and assorted other relatives of Mrs. Abolafia are buried in the Seattle Sephardic Brotherhood cemetery which makes perfect sense given that last name, but I was trying to identify the plot in the cemetery using an online map when I realized I’d spent the first 24 years of my life across the street from that cemetery. When I reconnected with another cousin after a multi-decade gap, she told me stories of going to that cemetery for one of the burials. I told a good friend who was my next door neighbor for several of those years that story, and she said she worked with an Abolafia for quite a few years.

I’m going to resist the temptation to attempt to trace the connection between Esther Abolafia Benson and my extended family, at least tonight.

ETA:

Apparently — and I just learned this on sep 3 2023 — there are _two_ Sephardic cemeteries very close to where I grew up and I misunderstood which one the Abolofias are buried in. It isn’t the one across the street from where I grew up, but rather a few blocks over. Oh well!

Lost Family by Libby Copeland

I bought this book in e-form, altho I first saw it at a local bookstore (you can be mad about this, and I will also note that I bought several other books at the bookstore). I was really excited to read it — and other books I bought around the same time — but the lockdowns changed my focus and I am only recently returning to this book. I tried several times to read it, but it was incredibly difficult in 2020 and 2021 and even into 2022 to read about people traveling to meet extended family they learned about through genealogy.

The sections on using genetic genealogy to identify victims of crimes and the people who left DNA at a crime scene are really interesting, because Copeland captures some of who was talking about the ethics of this _before_ the GSK moved this into wider awareness, and what they were saying and the responses they got, and also how rapidly people’s reactions moved in the wake of GSK and related cold cases.

I remember working at a startup in the 90s, and the founder/CEO of the company sifting through the kinds of people to hire at an executive level as we grew rapidly. One of the possible positions was “Strategist”, or for one of the other executives to take on “Strategy” as part of their role. He concluded that it did not make sense to hire for this position or to assign this role to anyone but himself at that point in time, and subsequent events have absolutely confirmed that this decision was correct. While strategy and ethics are extremely different activities / topics / lenses, they _do_ overlap, and they share the important characteristic of imagining alternative worlds/futures and making value judgments about which one to steer towards (or away from). Since watching him go through this process and listening to how he described the tradeoffs and why he decided what he did, I have thought over the years many times about how groups of people make this decision. With genetic genealogy and crime, most of the people thinking about it before it became a broad topic were very concerned about privacy and individual control of their genetic information and the potential for large organizations (corporate or governmental) to abuse this information in pursuit of Bad Goals. Once genetic genealogy and crime became a broad topic, a few people continued to think about it in these terms. The attraction of identifying a violent criminal, or the victim of a violent crime, washed away concerns about whether or not one’s second cousin’s DNA could be used to identify oneself or vice versa. However, the solution to the pressures of these disparate positions was resolved in at least one important service to move all existing accounts to “opt out” of being included in searches and to otherwise allow these types of searches on everyone who “opted in”. At least the initial impact was to make it a bit more difficult to do that kind of search (altho not _that_ much more difficult, as warrants started to be produced to access that information).

The Jim Collins / Philip Benson babies-switched-at-birth story winds through the book, providing a frame for thinking about the changes over time in genetic testing and the size of the accessible databases. Because one of the families is Ashkenazi, the family that got the Ashkenazi baby had a very difficult time navigating cousin matches to track down the close family of their person because of endogamy. It’s amazing that Copeland used this story to show how the matching algorithms and databases evolved over time so that the basically impossible search of the beginning of the Collins/Benson search undertaken by Alice was solved shortly before that basically impossible search would become trivially easy. Technology!

Finally, as I noted in a post last night, Benson’s first wife was an Abolofia. I _said_ I wasn’t going to try to figure out how we were related, but I lied. It only took about five minutes to figure out the relationship. My dad’s first cousin married an Abolofia. His father’s niece — so, I guess her cousin by marriage — was Benson’s first wife. Every Single Time I work on this surname, the serendipity is _delightful_.

Fun book, really happy I finally read it. I can’t say I wish I’d read it sooner, because I tried and obviously, I just wasn’t ready. I bought some other books at the same time that I haven’t read so maybe one of those will be next.

Sunday: walk, swim, Ms Marvel

I walked with M. and A. M. and I had a porch visit.

A. and R. went to the Beede center. Apparently, A. has a decent butterfly stroke. Good for her! I sure never did.

We watched the first two episodes of Ms. Marvel. It is very enjoyable. A. really likes it.

I read, okay, skimmed, K. J. Jackson’s _Oath_. Amazon tells me I bought it January 29, 2017 and I honestly have no idea why. It is available via kindleunlimited if you want to read it that way without paying any more money than your subscription.

SPOILERS

This is the third in a series and I have not read nor do I intend to read the first two. It works sort of as a standalone. There is some odd stuff going on in this book. The heroine is wandering around cleaning out people’s fortunes at the gambling table and getting caught being pawed by another woman’s husband and having sex outdoors in the ruins of a Roman bath in winter time and generally behaving somewhat implausibly. She met the hero when she was 16, and they got to know each other better after that but he went off to participate in the Peninsular campaign and came back somewhat wrecked. Meanwhile, back home, she was apparently kidnapped and, once determined to be a virgin, sold in a brothel. But she was rescued, so her virginity remained intact, but she there was that missing half of a month so she was married off to an old guy whose heir was trying to off him. She kept the old guy alive; he preserved her reputation. But when the hero returned, she was married, so he got married, too. Then the wife died in childbirth. Meanwhile, our heroine has a list of people who participated in the kidnapping virgins and selling their virginity in the brothel thing and that’s why she is behaving implausibly.

Anyway. He wants her to knock it off. The friend who has the list of people involved in the brothel is getting crazier by the day. The hero and heroine have sex, and he learns that is her first time NOT by her using her words AND she backs it up with I never want to get married again. I mean, everything about this book is just odd. Inevitably, suspicion that he, too, was involved in the brothel thing happens and the chaos winds up to 11.

No, the hero is not a bad guy. He’s a rescuer. Duh.

Anyway.

Maybe I just don’t like historicals anymore? I had pretty extensive issues with word choices and awkward dialogue. I did actually want to know what happened in this nutty plot, so the book has that going for it. If this sounds like the kind of crazy sauce that does it for you, give it a whirl. I’ve read worse. I don’t think I’ll read more of this, unless I can figure out why I thought it would be worth trying in the first place.

ETA: I apparently bought that the same day that I bought a couple Marie Harte books, and I am _reasonably_ certain that I bought one of those based on a recommendation from K. It took a while to get around to reading those, but they were okay. Not great, but probably I enjoyed them more than this book. I am starting to wonder if maybe I just really don’t like historicals any more.