One evening in July 2021, 22-yearold Jennifer Burns - “Jenna” to her friends and family - was sitting in a Walmart parking lot in Clemson, South Carolina, when a flurry of email notifications appeared on her phone. Jenna, a mechanical engineering undergraduate who had been shopping for a simple dinner with her flatmate, remembers thinking the timing was “weird” - it was after work hours after all. Then she noticed the source: a DNA site she’d subscribed to several years earlier. “A new DNA relative has sent you a message,” one notification read. “At that point I’m kind of freaking out,” she remembers. It could only mean one thing.
Jenna was born Maria Mashinka in the grim Russian industrial city of Nizhniy Novgorod and given up for adoption as an infant. When Jenna’s American adoptive mother Marybeth was young, she had always prayed for the children behind the Iron Curtain, and the impact of those prayers resonated. In 2000, she and her husband, Chris, were approved to adopt two Russian babies, and though they planned on bringing only one home, a boy they called Ethan, at the last moment they added Jenna. Jenna and Ethan were raised practically as twins in rural North Carolina, a childhood that, by Jenna’s account, was
