DNAAdoption Team Members
June is an adoptee born in Kansas City, Missouri. She took a class at DNAadoption.com in 2013. As a result of DNA testing and that class, she has located both of her birth families. She has a degree in education from Arizona State University, and a graduate degree in education from Boston University. She has taught all over the world from a University in Japan to a Prison in Leavenworth, Kansas while following her husband, Alan, who spent 30 years in the US Army. She has been involved with genealogy for 30 years working on her adopted families and creating and maintaining websites on those families. She volunteered for 20 years at various Family History Centers and Libraries. She has also been a speaker and presenter at many of the northern Florida genealogical societies. At DNAAdoption.com she is the original author of the “Just for Absolute Beginners” class and works to improve our education program.
Website & Class Support
Barbara’s passions are genealogy and website developement. She especially enjoys helping others with their research, using both traditionald and DNA. Barbara has been doing genealogy research for over 35 years throughout New England, New York, the Carolinas and Quebec, tracing families back to the mid 1600s. The use of DNA has helped Barbara to break through many genealogy brick walls.
Barbara helps to maintain the DNAAdoption website. She also maintains her family genealogy website, blog, and FaceBook page where she shares her research and articles. She designed and maintains the genealogical websites for the VT Genealogy Libray Society in VT, the Henderson Cty Genealogical & Historical Society and the Pleasant Hill Cemetery Association in North Carolina.
Marian began genelaogy work while transcribing the Civil War letters of her 2nd great grandmother Margaret Jane Watts Hays Overstree. She began using DNA test in 2008. Her brother’s Y-DNA test led to the discovery that their father had been informally adopted by their grandmother’s husband. Connecting with maternal cousins she discovered that her maternal great grandmother had an unknown father. Becoming frustrated at not finding their birth fathers she joined DNAAdoption in 2014 and, using our Methodology, has identified a family in New York descended from her father’s grandparents. Her great grandmother’s father remains a myster. She has a B.S. from U.C. Berkely School of Public Health and MA in Biology from San Francisco State University. She worked as a consultant to laboratories in Bolivia for almost a year. She is a retirement biointensive farmer and sculptor living in Lake County, California.
Chris is a retired civil/environmental engineer and helps support the DNA classes and the DNAAdoption Google Group. Using the techniques she originally learned here, she assisted an adopted family member in the search for his birth father. She is now involved in a second search for the birth parents of an adopted family friend. Chris is relatively new to both genealogy (2013) and DNA (2016). Both have quickly grown from “hobby” to “passion” in her retirement.
After moving around the country during her working career, Chris now lives in Oregon. She is an active member of the Genealogical Forum of Oregon and participates in regular DNA workshops offer there.
Sharon is retired and lives in a suburb near Kansas City, Missouri, where her passions are quiltmaking and genealogy. She has two adult children and five grandchildren. She holds a business degree and previously worked with a major telecomunications company teaching statistics. This lends itself to the DNAAdoption methodology in a logical and objective manner.
She has always been interested in genealogy, and she worked many years with several generations of paternal family members tracing their roots back to the 1600s.
Her mother was adopted, so the family tree was very incomplete. She was able to identify her mother’s maternal family using DNAAdoption methodology, and helped a distant relative find his five siblings all of whom had been adopted into different families when he was removed from the home at at age 2. She is still working on proving her maternal grandfather’s connection.
Peter J. Roberts
Peter J. Roberts is a retired Georgia State University archivist and associate professor with a passion for family history. He holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Emory University and a graduate degree in museum education from The George Washington University. Roberts has been actively pursuing genealogy since 1975 and has been involved in genetic genealogy since 2003. Born and raised in the Bahamas, he now resides near Atlanta, Georgia. He is the administrator of the Bahamas DNA Project and three surname DNA projects (Roberts, Sasser, and Rustin), and has taught genetic genealogy courses at Georgia State University and conducted workshops at institutions such as the Senior University of Greater Atlanta, John C. Campbell Folk School, Chautauqua Institution, and Emory University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. In 2013, Roberts was recognized as a “Genetic Genealogy Pioneer” by Family Tree DNA and is a co-founder and team member of mitoYDNA.org, a non-profit Y-DNA and mtDNA database. Since 2013, Peter has been instrumental in developing methods to integrate DNA results with relatives on WikiTree.
Steve was born, adopted and raised in California. With the help of DNA testing, Steve was able to identify and reunite with both of his biological parents and a brother, all of whom, by pure concidence, live just a few miles from where he now makes his home in Georgia. After completing his own search, he realized he had found a new hobby and started seeking out others who needed help solving cases of unknown parentage and other DNA mysteries.
Steve works by day as a commerical finance paralegal in the Atlanta area. When he’s not at work in the office or researching DNA cases, he might be found spending time with his wife and two teenage boys, playing music in one of his bluegrass bands or mountain biking.
Pam Tabor, Ph.D
Pamela Dalton Tabor (Pam) acts as a moderator for our DNAadoption Google Group, supports the members of the group in the forum, and collaborates with other team members to develop our classes. She has recently moved back to her Southwest Virginia roots after living for nearly three decades in Maryland. Pam has a background in educational research specializing in early childhood mathematics education from Southern Cross Univerity in New South Wales, Australia and currently works as the Research and Evaluation Specialist for a nonprofit organization missioned with improving the quality of numeracy education for all students.
Pam is a relative newcomer to genetic genealogy having been recently reunited with both her birth parents via a combination of traditional and DNA methodologies. She brings to the team a background in research, teaching and publishing.
Kitty Vickers, J.D.
Kitty is an adoptee born and raised in Texas. She located her birth mother many years ago through traditional search means and located her birth father more recently using DNA. Kitty is a retired litigation attorney, who graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. She has a B.A. in political science from the University of Texas at Arlington and has a master’s degree in social work from the University of Houston. After completing her search for her birth family, Kitty was hooked on genetic genealogy and has continued to work to help others with their searches. Kitty has a long history of working with web forums and mailing lists. Back in the dark ages (i.e. the early 1990s) she was a Sysop on Compuserve. In the past, Kitty has administered and moderated several mailing lists and web forums on a variety of topics including adoption, weight loss, sewing and online gaming. When not working on genetic genealogy, Kitty enjoys playing with cats, and reading. In her spare time, she also enjoys playing bridge, World of Warcraft and Hearthstone.
Donna comes from Portland, Oregon and now lives in the country near Vancouver, Washington. She was originally a bookkeeper but has retired and is doing genealogy.
Donna joined Oregon Adoption Rights Association (OARA) about 1992 and with the help of OARA was reunited with her son in 1994. Later Donna became OARA’s Search Assistant. This is where her journey of helping others started – first with those already interested in genealogy and building family trees on Ancestry and now with genetic genealogy and DNA.
She currently serves as the State of Oregon’s Confidential Intermediary and the CI for three other private adoption agencies in Portland. Donna is one of the few that has access to the California birth index and works closely with those in that state still in their search for their families.
In the last 16 years Donna has been involved locally with search and rescue. She and her husband started their own search and rescue team mainly serving in Washington and Oregon.