“We had no idea that my mom had a sister,” Camp Verde resident Gail Metz said.
Growing up in Long Island, she had heard stories about her mother Audrey’s family, but since she had been separated from her half-sister Carolyn at age 5, even Audrey had forgotten she had existed.
She also knew of her mother’s step- father, Frank Wasick, who had raised her, but knew little about who her actual ancestors were.
“My mother had grown up being told her father was a totally different man,” Metz said. “But she remembered living with a man with her mother when she was very young. His name was Biscotti — that’s what she told me.”
For Christmas this year, Metz’s husband gave her a DNA kit from 23andMe.
She hoped at the time to find out more about her father’s family — he had been adopted, and she did not know his ethnic heritage. But when she took the test, she found something even more interesting: A woman named Carolyn Bascari had a 13% DNA match.
“Then I knew, because my mother had said ‘Biscotti,’ and Bascari is obviously very close,” Getz said. She immediately contacted Carolyn Bascari and discovered that she was in fact her mother’s long-lost sister.
“They were raised together for the first five years and then my grandmother and he split up and she never saw my mother again,” Metz said. “She searched her entire life to try to find her and reconnect with her. And now she’s 97 and my mother is 85.
“For all those years, she raised her family and she did all that, but she always had a picture of my mom with her, and always wanted to reconnect. Had she not done the 23andMe that probably never would have happened.”
“It’s so crazy whenever that happens,” Lindsay Grove, a spokesperson for 23andMe, said about the Bascari story.
According to Grove, the company does not always know about these cases, and many of them come as a complete surprise for everyone involved.
“For the cases where it’s a complete surprise for customers, it can be emotional and it’s not always a happy response,” Grove said. She said that for some customers, finding out about a long-lost relative can be upsetting or jarring, and that the company has counselors ready to help people process potentially life-changing information. But for Metz, her mother and her newly-found aunt, the experience has so far been positive. Metz has also discovered through the program that she has Sicilian heritage, which has made her think with added fondness of a trip she enjoyed to Italy several years ago.
Audrey, who lives in Long Island, and Carolyn, who lives in Pennsylvania, have not yet reunited in person. But knowing that the other is out there and has been found has brought a new excitement to the whole family.
“Carolyn had wrote down everything she can remember,” Metz said. “She sent me the whole thing and she sent me pictures and stuff like that. She’s been the family gate- keeper for all these years, just waiting for the opportunity to pass it along.”
