Prior Lake woman finds biological family through DNA service

Prior Lake American

Prior Lake resident Victoria Ackland Sinz went from having one older brother to having seven or eight siblings in the span of a few months.

Ackland Sinz said she always knew she was adopted. She was taken in by her adoptive parents when she was 6 weeks old.

“It was never a secret,” she said. “I don’t remember a time where my parents said, ‘Sit down, we have to tell you something.’ I knew I didn’t look like anybody in my family.”

When she was younger, people would tell Ackland Sinz she looked like a friend they had or someone they knew. Ackland Sinz said she would always wonder if she was actually related to them.

She even emailed a woman from a television station that people said she looked like and asked her if there was any chance she had a relative who was adopted. There wasn’t.

She didn’t begin to start seriously searching until after she had her son.

“Once I became a mother myself, I really felt called to find my biological mom just because I couldn’t imagine how hard that must have been and I wanted to do it just to let her know I was OK and I’d had a good life,” she said.

Then, she went through some medical issues and needed family health history. She contacted the service that facilitated the adoption and was able to send and receive letters from her biological mother, with the agency as a go-between.

“We wrote back-and-forth for a while, but everything was very confidential still,” she said. “Then, I was going through my divorce and I had to put all that on the back burner.”

Until DNA services became more readily available, Ackland Sinz wondered if she would have to hire a private investigator to find her biological family. Her adoptive parents bought her an AncestryDNA kit for Christmas in 2017.

“I still feel my adopted parents are my parents,” she said. “I did ask them before I started all of this just to make sure they were OK with it — I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or seem unappreciative or seem I wasn’t happy with the family I had. They were very excited and supported me through it.”

DNA services, like AncestryDNA or 23andme, allow people to spit in a tube and send it to the company. The company then analyzes the DNA to determine ancestry, but many also offer a tool to find other people you’re related to.

Once Ackland Sinz got her results, the service showed her two women using the service that had enough of a DNA match to be considered a first cousin or closer.

“Those ended up being my two half-sisters,” Ackland Sinz said. “So, we all have the same mom, we all have different dads and I’m the middle sister.”

Not only that, but her mother and sisters all lived in Minnesota. Her older sister, Theresa Dietz McDaniels, lived in Belle Plaine and her younger sister in Robbinsdale, along with her biological mother.

It was a surprise on both ends — the biological mother told the youngest sister, whom she raised, that she had given Dietz McDaniels up for adoption, but never told her about Ackland Sinz.

“The three of them have been getting to know each other for 25 years now and now, all of a sudden, here comes me out of the woodwork,” she said. “I looked them both up on Facebook and just by looking at them I was like ‘Oh my gosh, those have to be my sisters.’”

Ackland Sinz and Dietz McDaniels even had two Facebook friends in common and frequented the same bars. Her biological mother and adoptive father once worked for the same company, Northwestern National Life Insurance.

The sisters started out with a three-way phone call and moved on to a brunch with all of them and the biological mother.

“Now, we’ve just been getting to know each other,” she said.

The sisters hope to plan a road trip and vacation at some point in the future. For now, Ackland Sinz said it’s been strange seeing the quirks and similarities they share.

“I feel like I’ve known these people my whole life,” she said. “It’s really strange.”

Ackland Sinz said she harbors no ill will about the way all of it played out.

“I don’t feel resentful,” she said. “I’m just happy and excited and grateful to have a chance to get to know them, even if it’s at a later point in my life. I feel it’s a blessing. I feel like it was a miracle. What a cool Christmas present.”

Ackland Sinz said she believes more people will have stories similar to her as the popularity of DNA services continues to grow.

“I always thought like, ‘I might have someone out there,’” she said. “I think now it’s such a reasonable cost and it’s so accessible that more people are making an effort to find family. With all this new testing and stuff it’s opened up this whole world that people wouldn’t have had an opportunity to have before.”