CeCe Moore

Paul Fronczak was a newborn who was kidnapped from his mother's arms by a woman posing as a nurse in a Chicago hospital in 1964 and believed to have been returned to his natural parents in 1966.

CeCe Moore (born January 15, 1969) is an American genetic genealogist who has been described as the country's foremost such entrepreneur.

She has appeared on many TV shows and worked as a genetic genealogy researcher for others such as Finding Your Roots.

She has reportedly helped law enforcement agencies in identifying suspects in over 300 cold cases using DNA and genetic genealogy.

Moore was born in 1969 to Anthony Michael Moore (1935–2008) and Janis Proctor.

She studied theatre, film, and vocal performance at the University of Southern California and appeared in commercials and professional musical theatre shows, and, later, directed and cast advertising campaigns.

Moore became interested in DNA genealogy in about 2003.

In 2004, Kyle had been found outside a Burger King in Georgia; doctors determined he suffered from dissociative amnesia.

For 11 years neither Kyle nor law enforcement assisting in his case knew his true identity, which he was able to later reclaim.

Moore works extensively with adults who were abandoned as babies to identify their biological identities.

In 2009 while she was developing an advertisement for the company Family Tree DNA, she met genealogist Katherine Borges who was Director of ISOGG.

Borges introduced her to rival consumer DNA company 23andMe and made Moore a leader of a forum for people who wanted to know more about DNA genealogy.

Moore became fascinated by the subject, taught herself about it, passed over her business projects to her husband Lennart Martinson and worked full-time on DNA genealogy.

In 2012 she approached 23andMe to ask if she could put crime-scene DNA into their DNA databases.

She has been the genetic genealogy expert for Finding Your Roots since 2012 and heads the Parabon NanoLabs genetic genealogical unit.

Moore has been a key player in a number of human identification cases.

In 2012 - 2014, she was the genetic genealogist who worked with the Branum family on the Thomas Ray Lippert University of Utah artificial insemination sperm swap case.

In 2015, Moore's team of genetic genealogists uncovered the true identity of the man raised as Paul Fronczak.

Using the methods Moore developed for birth parent search in adoption, it was discovered that his real name is Jack Rosenthal and he has a missing twin named Jill.

In 2015, Moore led a team of researchers that established the true identity of amnesiac Benjaman Kyle as William Burgess Powell.

As the genetic genealogist for the PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in 2015 Moore made the discovery that LL Cool J's mother was adopted.

Through analysis of his DNA, she was able to identify his biological grandparents and introduce him to his 90-year old biological maternal grandmother.

In February 2015, Moore founded the popular Facebook group called DNA Detectives that guides adoptees and others of unknown parentage to DNA to identify birth family.

In 2024, this Facebook page had 208,000 followers and is the largest online genetic genealogy group.

The birth parents of California foundling Kayla Tovo were identified through Moore's work, as were the birth parents of the Los Angeles area three half-sibling foundlings who were featured on 20/20 in May 2016, and the birth parents of the Tulsa Fairgrounds foundling "May Belle" aka Amy Cox, as featured on The Dr. Oz Show in October 2016.

23andMe refused, but later in 2018 she began to use the DNA databases of GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA.

She has appeared on many TV shows such as Finding Your Roots, 20/20,

Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, The Doctors, The Dr. Oz Show, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, and CBS 60 Minutes.

In 2018, Moore joined Parabon NanoLabs as head of their genetic genealogy unit and hired three female genetic genealogists to work with her.

Parabon investigates cold cases using genetic genealogy.

The real Paul Fronczak was found living in Michigan in 2019.

In February 2019, she was optimistic that most cold cases could be solved using public DNA data in a few years.

However, in May 2019, GEDmatch, the DNA database that she had mostly used to solve cold cases, changed its privacy rules so that it became much more difficult to solve cold cases.

Moore said "Whatever one thinks about this decision, it is inarguable that it is a setback for justice and victims and their families."

By January 2024, Moore's team reportedly had solved more than 300 cases.

In May 2020, she began appearing in a prime time ABC television series called The Genetic Detective in which each episode recounts a cold case she helped solve.

In addition to her television work, she is known for pioneering the genetic genealogy methodologies used by adoptees and others of unknown origin for identifying biological family.