Proving a Grandchild Across a Missing Generation — Epoche B1
Every year or so, the news here in Argentina carries the same photograph: a middle-aged man or woman blinking in a room full of microphones, newly told their own name. The captions call them "recovered grandchildren". For years I read past the phrase; now it stops me every time. Behind it sit one piece of history and one piece of science, and the science is the part I keep thinking about. The history first. During the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, around five hundred babies and small children of imprisoned parents were taken and given to other families, and grew up under other names. Their grandmothers — women the age of my own grandmother — began searching almost immediately, and the group they formed, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, is searching still. Inside their search sat a problem I had never thought about. The blood tests of that time compared parents with children — and the parents were gone. How do you prove a child is your grandchild, across a missing generation? In 1984, geneticists working with the grandmothers showed it could be done: certain markers, including DNA that passes down the mother's line almost unchanged, reach a grandchild directly, so a grandmother's blood can answer for her disappeared daughter's. In 1987 Argentina went further: a National Genetic Data Bank, created by law, stores the searching families' samples. The bank means a grandmother's question keeps being asked after her death. More than 130 people have recovered their identity this way; I check the number whenever the photograph returns. Any Argentine with a doubt about their origins can give one sample and be compared against every waiting family at once — including families whose grandmothers died decades ago, and whose blood is still, patiently, asking. References Paz, O. (1990). The Labyrinth of Solitude. Grove Press. Wölfflin, H. (1964). Renaissance and Baroque. Cornell University Press.