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An unlabeled pie chart with blue, green, purple, and orange sections.

Lynn Schwiebert was 67-years-old when she decided to figure out who she really was.

She had spent years tracing her lineage back multiple generations. Then she took an Ancestry DNA test.

“My research showed I was 100 percent British,” said Schwiebert, now 70, who stood and shared her story in February at this year’s RootsTech conference, an annual gathering for genealogy buffs held in Salt Lake City. “I wanted to prove that I was right.”

While searching for her father, Lynn Schwiebert became connected with her biological cousin, Jane Stephens, through an Ancestry DNA relative match. Schwiebert helped Stephens solve the mystery of why her DNA did not match with the rest of her known family. It turns out Stephens had been switched at birth.

What Schwiebert, who lives in Osceola, Wisconsin, expected was the story of Ancestry DNA testing most of us are familiar with. A customer spits in a tube, puts it in the mail, and a few weeks later they get a friendly pie chart and colorful map that highlights the regions of the world their ancestors...