Lost Family by Libby Copeland
Sep. 3rd, 2023 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI 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.
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.