Karla Archuleta, 54, of Soddy-Daisy, calls herself a DNA detective.
It’s a nod to her part-time job helping trace family trees and solve adoption mysteries.
To date, she said, she has helped several hundred adopted people find their biological parents. Her success rate is almost 100%, she said.
“I’ve never charged for adopted children finding their parents,” she said. “It’s my way of giving back.”
Archuleta, who works as an office manager for a cemetery company in Chattanooga (as well as a being an historian, speaker and writer), has been honing her genealogical skills since she was a teenager.
“I got involved with my own family history when I was about 16,” the mother of six said in a recent interview at her home near Hixson Pike.
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Even as a young child, she would sit on the floor and listen to her grandmother and great aunt tell biographical stories about family members as if they were characters in a book, she said.
In time, she helped untangle several family genealogy mysteries herself.
By the time she was in her 20s in the early 1990s, Archuleta was practicing “old school” genealogy. Before the internet, she would write and make phone calls to librarians around the country to help build genealogical charts involving her family. One of her more interesting finds was a great-great-great aunt known as Madam Nina, who operated a three-story brothel in Minnesota in the late 19th century, Archuleta said.
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Later, she said, she helped find other family members who had drifted apart and realized that she was honing investigative skills that could help other people.
In the mid-90s, the internet made searching for ancestors much more accessible for ordinary people, and Archuleta began to use early genealogical resources such as Roots Web.
“A new world for genealogists appeared instantly,” she said. “There were message boards. There were chats rooms on Yahoo and AOL. It just grew and grew and grew.”
By the year 2000, she had decided to become a genealogist for hire.
“I wanted to go professional,” she said. “I wanted to do research for other people as well, besides just myself.”
“I’m a genealogy nut. I found my passion. I thrive from it,” she added.
If the advent of the internet was a game changer, the introduction of DNA records through such services as 23andMe and AncestryDNA was a quantum leap in genealogical research.
It also made solving adoption mysteries much more manageable. Archuleta decided that that work was so important that she drops her normal $20 an hour fee for adoption searches. Typically, she said, customers spend $300 to $400 on family tree construction.
Most of her customers come from a couple of Facebook pages she maintains and from word-of-mouth, she said. (Her email is thegenealogists@gmail.com.) And most are people adopted as children who decide to search out their biological parents, not parents searching for children they gave up for adoption, she said.
“Prior to DNA coming around as tools, I had solved about six adoptions, just with good old-fashioned research,” she said, noting in the past dozen years she had done scores of adoption matches.
Interestingly, she says many of the biological fathers she identifies through DNA matching didn’t know about the child who was put up for adoption, asserting that they never knew about the pregnancy.
Often, she is the person in the middle who coordinates the meetings between adoptive children and their biological parents. It’s a duty she finds exhilarating.
“It makes me as happy as it does them,” she said.
Life Stories is published on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.