Gigi Merk was awash with nerves when a Volkswagen Golf pulled up outside a family friend’s home in Toronto.It was July and Merk, a 17-year-old from Ohio, was about to meet Alyssa Raggio, a 25-year-old Toronto woman she had spent the last three months talking to online and playing video games with.“I was so nervous when she arrived I didn’t really want to answer the door,” Merk remembers. “I had my mom do it.”Merk’s jitters weren’t just because it was her first time meeting Raggio. The pair also suspected they were sisters. It was a hunch Merk uncovered in May after submitting DNA to 23andMe – a company that provides more than 125 reports on ancestry, health predispositions and carriers of medical conditions to customers who pay a fee and mail a tube of their saliva to the California-based business. When Merk’s results came back, they showed she was a “full sibling” match with Raggio.“I didn’t think I was going to find anything, so I was pretty shocked and confused,” Merk said. She didn’t hesitate to fire off a note to Raggio, who answered the next day, but was caught off guard. Raggio had done a 23andMe test almost five years ago in hopes of learning a bit about her medical history, but rarely checked its site anymore and certainly never expected to find a sibling through it. She had reservations when she first heard from Merk. “I immediately started running through article after article about 23andMe to see how accurate the match was and what are the odds of it being a mistake,” she said. “Pretty much everyone said that matching on that level wasn’t a mistake… I was shocked.”And the similarities between Raggio and Merk were hard to ignore, too.Raggio, who has worked in the human resources sector, had been adopted as a seven-month-old from Jiangxi, China by a Chicago couple and had never been able to learn much about her parents bec ...
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