Greeks investigating their roots through DNA testing

It all started quite accidentally during a house move in 1994. As she was opening various boxes, Yiota Tourli, then a teenager, came across an envelope that aroused her curiosity. Inside she found evidence that she had been adopted. The papers showed that she had been born in Las Vegas and was given to a Greek migrant couple in the United States as an infant. She made no attempt to locate her biological parents then, but the questions kept mounting as the years went by, and she started wanting to know more about where she came from.

Becoming a mother herself was the trigger. "I needed to know what my son could face in the future. I had no medical history," she says.

Her adoptive parents told her they found her in a basket on their doorstep with a note saying that her biological parents had been killed in a car crash. She tried to corroborate this story with the help of...