An American man by the name of Tim Curran attempted to find his birth family through submitting his DNA sample to genetic testing services last year, which sent him on an adventure to Morocco, and across three continents.
In a story published on CNN, Curran recounted his adventure, saying that he was adopted in California in 1961.
He searched for his birth family, but was thwarted by sealed records. In the last decade, however, home DNA testing and easy online access to official genetic records broadened his possibilities.
After a lifetime of believing he was a White American, he learned that was only half true. His mother was born in Iowa, US, but it turned out his father was North African.
He reached out to anonymous DNA matches through popular US websites 23andMe and Ancestry’s messaging systems.
After weeks of research using various public record databases, he was able to identify both his parents and find contact information of their close relatives.
His birth father had been born in the mid-1930s in Casablanca.
Records showed he had emigrated to the US in 1959 and ended up in San Francisco. The mother had been raised in San Diego, and also moved to San Francisco right after high school.
After reaching out to his biological relatives on the website, his mother and father’s families both welcomed him with open arms. He quickly learned that both his biological parents had died.
“I was deeply disappointed I had forever missed my chance to meet them. Would things have been different if I’d searched harder earlier? But I was thrilled that all their siblings were still alive,” he tells CNN.
According to his new-found biological family, he pieced together a rough idea of his parents’ stories on opposite sides of the world, “they had both butted heads with difficult parents and left home at the first opportunity. They both wound up in one of the most free-thinking places on Earth: San Francisco,” he stated.
The father worked as a floor installer in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, while the mother was a cocktail waitress and dancer.
“I pictured them meeting while he installed floors in a nightclub where she was working.”
The father was living with a girlfriend, and the mother’s sister said “she never once heard her discuss his father in any way.”
Other than the sister and her mother, no one else in her family was told she was pregnant. The father’s family told him they are 100% certain he was never told either.
There were other big surprises waiting for Curran, as he was told his mother never had another child for the rest of her life.
On his father’s side, he said that he “was shocked to learn I had a half-brother and sister, and dozens of cousins in France and Morocco.”
“They invited me to visit. I booked a trip to meet my father’s huge, welcoming family,” Curran said.
“Morocco was another world entirely.” He had never traveled to a Muslim country, or anywhere outside Europe or the Americas.
The experience was a “strange and magical combination of foreign adventure and comfort travel,” he described, buffered by family looking out for him.
He spent the first six days in a seaside resort in Dar Bouazza, about 45 minutes from Casablanca, where his Moroccan family owns a set of neighboring summer homes.
The houses were built on property his grandfather bought nearly a century ago.
Despite the language gap, he got to know his family, “the stern uncle, the motherly aunts, the prankster cousin, and recognized many of their personality traits and quirks, how boisterous, curious and sly they are” in this strange yet oddly familiar blood-relation.
After spending nearly a week wolfing down delicious, authentic Moroccan meals like lamb tagine and pastilla, Tim left on a tour of Fez and Marrakech arranged by his cousin and her husband, who owned a luxury travel company.
He described his experience: “Those two cities were beautiful and awe-inspiring, alien yet weirdly familiar. I experienced them in a unique and very personal way thanks to my DNA journey: as a son just one generation removed from his father’s homeland.”
Whether or not DNA testing has unexpected results, it can inspire some fascinating travel across the country or, as Curran’s case, around the world.
“What I learned on my adventure, however, is that the best part, even more than the places you visit is the people you bond with, your new-found family who are like you, but also very different,” Curran described to CNN, reflecting on his journey.
What an amazing story deserving, even, to be encapsulated in a fully fledged movie 🙂