I fantasized this one scenario where my mom tells me, like
maybe when I'm a teenager, you know, that my father's somebody
else. And the whole time we're living
within just like 10 miles of each other.
They, they started out in Los Angeles, the city of Los
Angeles, and then Long Beach. And Long Beach is so close to
Gardena, but it's also really close to Westminster, where I
went to high school. And so I imagine that I find out
and then I introduce myself and, you know, it's a shock, of
course. And then I meet his wife and
another stepmother. So of course they're going to
argue and whatever, but they get over it, you know, because they
find me so charming or whatever. And the the next thing I know, I
now have six siblings instead of just two, and with very similar
interests. Welcome to DNA Surprises, a
podcast that explores the life altering world of unexpected DNA
discoveries. I'm your host, Alexis Ourselt.
This show centers the stories of people who've experienced NP, ES
or non paternal events. In other words, people who've
learned that their biological father isn't who they thought he
was. We'll also hear from adoptees,
donor conceived people, and the families navigating these
discoveries. Get ready to follow the
incredible journeys that begin with a simple DNA.
Test this is DNA surprises. One of the things I've learned
from hosting DNA Surprises is that these discoveries don't
lose their impact with age. Whether someone is 2545 or 70,
learning that the man who raised you is not your biological
father can shift your understanding of your identity
in an instant. In this week's episode, Randy
shares how Adna Test, organized by his half sister, uncovered
that truth. With both of his parents already
gone, he began the long process of piercing together the
identity of his biological father.
Following DNA matches, working with relatives, and navigating a
trail of clues that stretched across years.
Randy reflects on the twists and turns of his search and how the
age we are when we make these discoveries can impact what
happens after the truth is revealed.
Thank you for sharing your story, Randy.
My name is Randy, I just turned to 70 a few months ago.
I'm from Gardena, CA. I was born and raised there and
my mother Maxlin grew up in the hollers in the mountains of
Eastern Kentucky and I now only live a few hours from there near
Louisville. Soon after high school, she
moved up to Detroit, MI to help out her younger sister who was
in a an abusive relationship. So that was my Aunt Margie.
She had four children by then, and then my mom met Charles, my
dad, who lived just outside of Detroit, by the following year.
My mom gave birth to my older sister Cynthia in 1947 and then
my brother Rodger in 1949. And then about a year after
that, they decided to move to California, which is how I ended
up being born in Gardena, which is one of those many communities
within Los Angeles County. There's a large gap between my
birth and that of Rogers. Seven years, to be precise.
Three years after my birth, they got divorced.
So anyway, that was the basic story, which we always knew of.
But then in the 1990s, at some point, my sister was talking to
my dad and he mentioned that actually mom and he didn't
actually, they never actually got around to getting married
until after I was born. And so they were together for
almost 9 years, maybe 10 years before they decide to get
married, which makes the divorce even harder to understand.
But it kind of helped me a little bit.
I mean, that kind of made me feel a little better because I'd
always, I thought growing up, I wonder if I was the cause of the
divorce. But now I see that maybe I was
the cause of them getting married.
I don't know but. Yeah.
And that seemed like, you know, fairly uncommon for them too.
So that's really interesting. When Cynthia heard this from
dad, then she asked dad about it and she just said, well, they
were living in a common law marriage and, you know, that was
legal in California. So, you know, that's the end of
that story. And the mom was always kind of
kind of like that. They were very cut and dried
explanations without going into much detail.
So then dad a couple of years later he meets Janie.
They got married in 1960. They had two children, 2 girls,
Nancy and Sandy. And Nancy is very much part of
this story because she was the one who dove deep into a
genealogy and asked all the siblings for DNA test and a
cousin John. So we did that.
And I was, you know, excited about that.
And like I've noticed many others who you've talked with,
one reason they want to get ADNA test is just to find out what
their ethnicity is and to see if there are Native American
ancestors, which I always find interesting that people are, are
always wondering about that. But I was, I was one of those.
And so we get the DNA test. So it's like, you know, six
weeks. And by this time, this is in
2014, in 93, I moved with my wife and her two boys from
Southern California to Perry County, Kentucky, which was the
exact place, the same county where my mom had grown up.
So I had lots of kinfolk, have lots of kinfolk all over the
place to take a job teaching English at the Community
College. So then I take the DNA test in
2014 and I'm waiting for the results.
And Nancy writes me a letter, an e-mail to let me know that the
results are in. And I was excited.
You know, I see that. Oh, there's this e-mail.
So I open it up. She says, hi, Randy, your DNA
results posted this morning. And I'm not sure if you've taken
a look or not, but there was something unexpected.
I can't really find a good way to say it.
Your results didn't matter, Sandy, John and me on any level
of genetic relation. Again, Sandy is her older sister
and John is a cousin and the conclusion is that Dad wasn't
your biological father. I'm like really confused now and
the adrenaline is running and I decide I need to calm my nerves.
So I go downstairs and I empty out the dishwasher to give me a
break, you know, to try to calm down.
So I do that. I come back up and there's only
one paragraph of the e-mail left and Nancy continues.
It hurts to me that you had to find out this way because in my
heart, this changes nothing. You are my brother, period.
You were Dad's son until the day he died.
Dad and your mom had an unconventional relationship in
many ways, but they both love you.
Roger and Cindy, I don't have a clue as to who knows or knew
anything, but if or when the time is right for you, I'll
certainly help piece it together.
Love you, Nancy. So this is just as so many other
people as I've heard on your podcast said, it's just doesn't
make sense. It's I'm baffled.
Dad is not my dad that my name shouldn't be the last name.
Did you accept the information or did you have any denial?
Like, that's a lot of information to take in, no?
No, I didn't have any. I was just, you know, well, she
opens, you know, in that first paragraph with with this
unexpected news. So I that's why I was starting
to get nervous. I had no idea.
I mean, it was just totally flabbergasting.
So I call my wife in Jackie and have her read the e-mail.
First thing she says is you think it's a mistake.
Oh, and then it hadn't even occurred to me.
It's like, oh, of course, yeah, that's probably what it is.
Yeah, right. That's kind of the first thing a
lot of people go to. Obviously it was a mix up, some
sort of mistake. Yeah.
Right, right. But then I think, well, what if
the tests were correct, however, you know, 'cause And then I
immediately think of all the ramifications.
If that's the case, then it means Roger and Cynthia are my
half siblings saying to Nancy are not related to me at all.
So they were they're like what? close family friends, I guess.
But that's no doubt why Nancy tried to reassure me, you know,
that I would always be her brother, which, you know, I
found very, very moving. But now this is 2014.
My my dad had passed away in 1999.
Mom had passed away in 2011. So I can't consult them, you
know, And that's one of the disadvantages of being as old as
I was at the time, like close to 60.
And now I'm 70 and I realize, OK, a whole entire half of my
family tree has just been lopped off.
So I've only got half a tree now.
So we begin the search for for a father.
And this is thanks to Nancy and her familiarity with using
Ancestry, dancestry.com and the family tree.
She got really familiar with the science and the mathematics of
it. So I asked her how, how do you
know that this information? How did you figure this out?
She included a little matrix of just the six people who were
tested, you know, with the six names going across the top six
names going down, you know, in a column and showing how much DNA
we all share. And she also introduced me to
relationship charts, right, DNA relationship charts and how they
they overlap somewhat as you move from one amount, a range of
numbers to another. So it's, you know, Randy,
Rodger, Cynthia, Sandy, Nancy and John and where Rodger and
Cynthia are. And then you you follow their
row across to my name intersecting.
It shows the amount of DNA that you would expect from 1/2
sibling. And then if you do the same with
Sandy and Nancy, Nancy and Sandy share, of course, and they share
with Rodger and Cynthia the amount of DNA you would expect
from half siblings. But when you compare me to Sandy
and Nancy, it's just zero. There's nothing there.
John, the cousin, he shares amount that you would expect
from first cousins, and so he shares numbers with Rodger and
Cynthia and Sandy and Nancy and 0 for me.
So the only logical conclusion is that I'm not the son of my
father. Nancy then comes up with a plan
and she gives me a job to do. And this job is to contact
anybody, anyone I can think of who might have been around at
the time of my birth to see what they know.
Of course, they're going to be older than me.
And then she's got the job of looking really closely, going
deep with all the cousin matches, right, Because she was
the manager of my my test and had access to all that
information. So she starts looking for the
paternal cousins and seeing if we can find the family, the
clan, the tree that I belong to. So I replied to Nancy in an
e-mail by asking her, well, why don't you ask your mom, see if
she knows anything? Well, she, she did it
immediately. I think before the day was over,
she got back to me and asked her mom if her mom knew anything.
And her mom, Janie, said, I'm sorry he had to find out this
way. That was a shock there.
So. OK, so, so people were
suspicious. And there are all these emotions
all at all at once. You know, I'm, I'm getting
angry. There's a kind of a sense of
betrayal, like people are hiding this from you.
Such an important, important thing.
The next person I ask, even though my sister and brother are
7-8 years older than me, you might have thought I would ask
them next, but instead, for some reason I still can't figure it
out. I decided to ask my first cousin
Linda, who is my maternal cousin.
She is the the daughter of Margie who I mentioned earlier.
I called her up and I said well oh hi Linda, how you doing?
So I took Adna test and before I could say anything more she goes
Oh my God. When Margie, my aunt Margie
moved with her girls and their oldest was a boy John, they
needed a place to stay. So they actually moved in for a
little while, less than a year, but they moved in with my and
again, this is before I was born with my mom and dad and Roger
and Cynthia in a modest 2 bedroom house.
My Aunt Margie told years later, you know, would tell Linda some
things about what life was like in our household.
And they both my mom and dad both had kind of fiery tempers.
So Linda recalls her mother telling her that Marge was in
the other room and she heard my dad and and mom arguing when my
mom was pregnant. And my mom blurts out, he's not
even yours. So it's really, you know,
turning into a soap opera. My dad was kind of, he had a
short temper, but, you know, he was out of the house by the time
I was 3. And then they did the every
other weekend, you know, visitation with the father, that
kind of a settlement. She didn't she didn't get any
alimony. She didn't want any.
She just got child support. Linda told me that as they
watched me growing up, they were suspicious just from because I
looked so different and acted so different from my dad.
Cynthia and Roger were clearly the children of dad, but but I
just seemed like I was from another family.
It was actually John, the oldest, who asked Linda, have
you ever noticed that Randy just doesn't seem to to be anything
like, you know, Charlie? And she goes, Oh yeah, that's
right. And then as I got older, it just
that just became more and more apparent.
Besides the negative feelings, I had the sense of betrayal, There
was also kind of an excitement because it was like, hopefully
maybe my father is a really good guy.
Not that my dad wasn't a good guy, but but, but maybe, you
know, I, I was now all of a sudden my life had become
interesting, more interesting than I could have ever imagined.
I was on a quest to learn about, you know, myself and, and to
find a father. And so Linda, she came up with,
she came up with three candidates right off the bat,
after a lot of searching, she gave me the name of the guy.
There was this married couple that lived around the corner
from us I didn't know anything about.
But Jack and Juanita, they were the ones who first moved to
California around the 19. Yeah, it would have been just
before dad and mom, and they were good friends of theirs back
in Detroit, and they encouraged them to move out to California.
So we're living right around the corner from them.
So Linda thought maybe, you know, Jack was, he's kind of
tall, WAVY hair and that I looked more like him anyway than
I did my dad. So she thought that might be a
candidate. And then there was Linda's own
father, Frank, who again, not so tall, but he had the WAVY hair
and he also had bad acne and he had those, you know, acne scars,
which I had. And I had adolescence.
Of course we didn't think of it immediately, but of course he
couldn't have been my father because Linda had taken the DNA
test and she, you know, she had, She had.
She was on the 1st, yeah. You're just trying to find any
any connection though, so you're thinking of all possibilities.
Right, right. And she was only, she was
definitely a first cousin, which meant that Frank, you know, her
father couldn't be my father. And then she suggested her
stepfather, Margie, married again, had four more children.
So eventually they had eight children, and they're all girls.
But he had a brother, Linda's uncle Bob, and both Bob and Jim
were tall with the WAVY hair. Again, she showed me a picture
of him. I didn't remember much about
Bob. I knew Jim really well.
So I did all this research on ancestry, looking at documents
and records and trying to see what I could find.
She even suggested I asked Jim if he would take ADNA test.
And so I did. And begrudgingly he agreed and
he took the test and he and I remember the reply in the
e-mail. He said yeah, just like I
thought, yeah, we're not, no, we're not related.
So then the other job I had to do was start messaging my
paternal cousins and seeing what I could find.
This took over 2 years of this kind of research and because
partly I really didn't know what I was doing and when I would get
messages, when I would contact my paternal cousins and ask them
questions and they reply to me, I just assumed that everybody
else out there in ancestry land knows more about it than I do.
But I realized, no, that's that's not true.
Many are as confused as I was. You know, about how this all
works. So there were two cousins that
that came to play key in unlocking the mystery, and that
was Stephanie and Leslie. And at first this is an example
of how Leslie wasn't quite sure how to understand the
information because, you know, I told her who I was and where I
was born and, you know, gave her my last name and all that.
I listed the these other men, their surnames in my profile
just in case. But Leslie responded by saying
that she doesn't know she she doesn't have anybody in her
family tree with my last name. And of course he doesn't,
because. Right, because that's, yeah,
it's, it's not about the last name.
It's the DNA. Right, right, right.
I'm not because I'm, I, I shouldn't have that last name
either. And she was slow to respond and
I would contact her occasionally and, and then there was another
cousin, Stephanie. Stephanie was, was obviously
much more experienced with analyzing, you know, the matches
and looking at the DNA shares. And she had emailed me early on
with some questions, but I didn't really understand the
significance of it at the time. But she had asked me about, she
knows that I had a name in my tree, but that turned out to be
the wrong name to ask me about because she was looking at my
maternal information. That was another complication
because later I would find out from Nancy that who understood
it better that I had a lot of regional endogamy, right?
I had a lot of cousins from Kentucky who are my cousins on
both sides of my tree. So Stephanie is asking me about
somebody on her tree, but that was that was the wrong name to
be. That was the wrong last name to
be looking at. But I didn't understand that.
So finally, close to two years, Stephanie emails me again and
she's figured some things out and she has this new last name
and she tells me that she's a part of this family and she sees
that they. So we're on the like we're on
the second cousin level, maybe second cousin once removed.
And so I'm giving Nancy, of course, I'm forwarding her all
these emails. And finally Nancy, through her
digging and doing the math, she comes up with this proto family
tree. There were seven children at the
grandfather level. And she was able to narrow that
down as we found out more about this family, what we needed to
find at second cousins, right? Second cousins are people who
share great grandparents. So if we could find great
grandparents then we can narrow it down to the grandparent
family. Then they have to have a male
child and that male child or its brothers, whatever would, would
most likely be my father. There's another person that
Nancy pulled into this conversation, which is a good
friend of hers from Wisconsin named Carla, who is who has a
statistics like expert, but she studied DNA genealogy herself as
an amateur. And so she's providing her
insight. And eventually we found a family
that looked like it was my family.
And so I had a name, I had a father.
And also with Leslie's help was providing this information about
the family. She mentioned that the this
couple, John and his wife, had four boys and that the couple
were still alive in their 90s. Which means that I got
immediately excited about that because it meant that it was a
possibility that my my own biological father was still
alive and maybe I'd have a chance to meet him.
What did you think when you narrowed it down?
Well, it was getting more and more exciting because of what we
were discovering about John the father.
The first thing that happened was I was on on Ancestry,
looking at the documentation, and there's a picture and it
looks like a yearbook picture. I enlarged it and so there's
this person looking at me and it's in the USC Trojan yearbook
of 1949. That's when John had graduated.
Then I clicked on another picture and another section of
the yearbook which showed him as a member of the journalism club.
And when I started college myself in 1973, I began as a
journalism major. So that sent, you know, tingles
up my spine. And then and there were a couple
of other pictures of him with that club pictures.
And then I found another picture of him in another yearbook, only
he was on the faculty that in the faculty section and turns
out that he was teaching English, which is what I do and
or did I retired a couple of years ago.
So that was amazing. Yeah, to see these connections.
And did you feel like you had anything in common with the
person you believed was your biological father all those
years before? Right.
So dad was, he was kind of a difficult man to love, at least
with, with as far as his children go, because he had kind
of an ego and he didn't really know how to have a conversation.
He liked to tell stories and maybe what do you call it?
You know, go on and on. I I remember one time we were
over at his house this after I was married, you know, for
dinner, he was saying something and, and all I said was I think
you might be exaggerating, you know, kind of jokingly, but with
a straight face. He just says and his eyes kind
of go kind of go cold, you know, kind of dead.
He says, you're calling me a liar.
You know, that's the kind of Congress said you would have.
So I just said no, he wasn't really abusive or, but he
thought, for example, college professors were eggheads.
You know how much respect for, for that kind of education.
He was a very conservative Republican.
My grandfather, his father was a member of the KKK back in
Detroit back in the day. I think I had a pretty good
education and, and, and what it was and what it meant to be a
racist. So there wasn't much.
I felt kind of alienated from him a lot of the time.
That would change just before he he passed away, fortunately.
So no. So to find this kind of
information that what appears to be my father is an educated man
teaching English in high school and he had these four sons.
So we searched for them. We had their names.
And so Nancy once again told me to, you know, go, go on Facebook
and wherever else on the Internet to see what you can
find out, which I did. One thing we learned right away
that the these four brothers were all born in the 50s just
like me. And so I came across the one
brother, his name is Robert. I discovered that he taught
chemistry at Community College. Just unbelievable.
And then John, they had a brother, John.
John was a very popular name in this family as as there were in
many families back in the day, was a Carpenter in the school
district. And then there was Paul.
It was a little harder to find. I couldn't find him on Facebook.
I found him through just a Google search.
He taught history at a Community College just outside of
Sacramento. So now I have two brothers who
are Community College professors like me and a father who's a
high school teacher, an English high school teacher.
And I mean, it's just incredible.
And and, you know, I've heard stories like this before, but,
you know, to have it happen to you.
Well, and it and there were times I, I would cry a little
bit. I know this probably didn't do
me much good, but I would, I imagine what could have been.
Yeah, that's. Common.
Yeah, but what if so, what what were you thinking about?
I mean, I imagine being raised by someone who is who is more
like you, similar career. But what were the the thoughts
that you were having? Well, I, I fantasized this one
scenario where my mom tells me, like maybe when I'm a teenager,
you know, that my father's somebody else.
And the whole time we're living within just like 10 miles of
each other. They, they started out in Los
Angeles, the city of Los Angeles, and then Long Beach.
And Long Beach is so close to Gardena, but it's also really
close to Westminster, where I went to high school.
And so I imagine that I find out and then I introduce myself and,
you know, it's a shock, of course.
And then I meet his, his wife, and another stepmother.
So of course they're going to argue and whatever, but they get
over it, you know, because they find me so charming or whatever.
And the the next thing I know, I now have six siblings instead of
just two and with very similar interests.
I think about how what if John had been around to offer me
advice because I wanted to go to USC myself, but to save money, I
ended up going to BYU because at the time I was a Mormon.
So I was really had that, that fervent, you know, Mormon, the
passion. I thought that he would have
been this, this father would have been a good person maybe to
receive some counseling, some advice about how to proceed with
your college career. So Nancy and Carla talked to me
about how to I need to make contact with these four
brothers. They decided it would be better
to contact the brothers instead of the father.
They coached me on writing a letter, an e-mail, this first
e-mail where I just kind of put some feelers out and I emailed
Robert mentioned that, you know, I took a test DNA looks like you
were related just as a way to to see how receptive he would be.
Maybe I was being a little deceptive, but I didn't want to
scare him too much. I wanted to verify some
information, like, so you have you have these brothers and a
father and a mother and these names and whatever.
He wrote back within an hour. So yeah.
Hey, Wow. That's crazy, you know?
Yeah. I don't know where where you fit
in, but, you know, if you need any more information, go ahead
and contact me. So then my next e-mail, Nancy
suggests I just come out and to tell him that I thank your
father is my father. And then silence for a while.
A week passes without any response and I asked Nancy if I
should contact him again and she said no, no, you're going to
have to play it cool here, just wait.
And another week passes and she explains how Robert may have
shown this e-mail to his brothers, or maybe not, but he's
he may be in shock and doesn't know what to do.
But eventually she says OK, go ahead and write another letter.
And so I do more silence. And then finally her and Carla
persuaded me to write a longer, more detailed letter and to
include providing information about where I was born and grew
up and the to include three photos in the letter, one of me
and my two boys around the age of 10 or 11.
So that's what I do now. Before I was just writing to
Robert individually. By this time we had found Mark's
e-mail address, so we wrote to all four.
And then we waited. At this point, you've been
waiting two years, right? Just to really like.
Yeah, we're now getting to test was in 2014.
We're getting close to like December of 2016.
That was after a lot of red herrings and false leads and
bump steers and just taking a lot of time just to get a
response from people in the early stages.
I thought, well, there's no way we're going to.
This is like looking for a pen, you know, in the proverbial
haystack. But you know, we did find it
thanks to and I was just again, like I said, really lucky to
have Nancy there to help guide me.
So we get this letter back and it's from the four brothers, a
very well written letter and they say the information that
you've provided that leaves little doubt that you are a
sibling. And then they laid out next
steps is the way they phrased it.
So they had no problem believing that I was their brother, but
given their parents old age, they did not want to cause them
any unnecessary distress. So their father and mother
cannot know about me. They apologize for that.
But that's just the way it it's, you know, it has to be at this
point. So that was sad to hear.
But I understood it completely and said, yeah, I no problem.
I, you know, I understand. And then they said maybe in in
the future, you know, we'll be able to, you know, maybe meet
or, or whatever to get that long detailed letter.
I appreciated it, but that's, you know, then I realized for
sure, yeah, there's no way I'm going to.
I'm going to be able to meet my biological father.
It seems so close. Yeah.
Sure. And then in it would have been
the two 2017. Oh no, it was actually 2018 when
I learned that that John, my biological father, I passed away
and one of the brothers wrote this really touching, beautiful
eulogy commemorating their father.
And that's when I learned that he was he was at Pearl Harbor in
World War 2 on a minesweeper in 2018, might have been 2019.
I was trying to since they were opened to a, to a meeting
sometime. I wanted to make it really easy
for him to meet me. Two of the brothers are in
Northern California. The other two are in Southern
California. And I thought, boy, wouldn't it
be nice if I could find a conference to go to, an academic
conference in the Bay Area, which I knew there were plenty
of those during spring break, would be perfect.
And then I could let him know that, well, I happen to be going
to a conference in San Francisco or wherever, and if you'd like
to get together, you know, I'd love to.
Well, that's exactly what happened.
So I was able to write that letter and I got to meet Paul
and Mark. I was very nervous.
Of course, it's kind of awkward at 1st.
And we brought pictures to exchange.
So it was a very nice conversation.
And after a couple of more years passed, Paul sent me an e-mail
out of the blue asking me he had a couple of books from his their
father's library that he'd like to send me if I was interested.
And I said, yeah, you bet. A few weeks later, I received
their dad's copy of Gulliver's Travels, an edition which had
come out in the early 40s that his that, well, our dad had
purchased in Honolulu in a bookshop, a used bookshop.
And so it's, it's inscribed on the inside.
You know, their dad has his name there and the year.
So I was very, very attached by that.
And the other book was this thick and thought English
literature anthology that John used in his grad school days.
And then a similar thing happened with by let's see, 2023
was my high school 50th reunion. So that allowed me that gave me
an excuse to go see the other brothers at a restaurant in
Huntington Beach. So I've been able to meet with
all four brothers once so far. I don't know if I get a chance
to see him again. The final complication is that
while John, the father, passed away in 2018, their mother is
still alive, age 104. So they still can't reveal my
identity. So they can't let everybody know
you know, who I am. So that's kind of ironic, I
guess I'm, I make a joke about it to, you know, friends and
family that she's just doing that out of spite to frustrate
my plans. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, what are what would you like to see happen, you know, in
the future? Well, I don't have to be honest,
I don't really have high hopes. I mean, the distance is a
problem. 2000 miles if we don't get to ever see each other in
person again, you know, I'm fine with that.
After their mother passes away, there might be more of an excuse
to They might want me to come out, introduce me to the
extended family, but maybe not I I don't really know what, given
my age and the distance to California and all that, who
knows? We'll just just see how it
unfolds. What advice do you have for a
parent who might be keeping adna surprised from their child?
Like others, I feel that a child has the right to know who is
mother and father are, and that children want to know where they
come from. It seems to me I want to know
who I am, and a big part of that has to do with who your parents
are and why you are the way you are, to not reveal that
information. And I understand my mother
committed adultery. Well, the more I read, the more
I've realized over the years that adultery is a very popular
thing all down through history. And it happens and then there's
some very interesting stories out there.
And so I understand the shame. And fortunately in the modern
world now, this does have quite the same stigma as it used to.
So I've I've accepted the idea that I'm a bastard.
There's a lot of us, but it just doesn't mean anything.
That word like it used to where you could lose out and on an
inheritance simply from that. But parents need to because so I
have this kind of resentment now towards my mother that she
couldn't tell me. This may be the most important
thing she could have told me. She decided not to.
And both my parents went to the grave with that secret.
That's just really, really unfair to the child.
That's not right. No, And what advice do you have
for someone who just uncovered Adna surprise?
Having a support group to help you get through it.
And of course I had Nancy in my experience, but I also came
across DNA detectives on Facebook.
There were a lot of very supportive, friendly people out
there who who answered questions for me and provided that support
through this ordeal and that. And I saw a lot of stories,
very, the happy stories, very tragic stories.
That's a, a good resource. I, I found DNA detectives and of
course there's tons of books out there and there's the resources
of how to read and analyze your DNA results.
In my experience, I was baffled, confused.
But we're older. But it takes time.
Yeah. Well, Randy, thank you so much
for joining me today and sharing your story.
I'm always fascinated by these stories that take a while to
kind of come into focus. I hope that, well, I, I guess I
should say I, it's not like I'm hoping for anyone to pass, but I
do hope that soon, you know, you'll be able to maybe be a
little bit more public or, or see what the next phase of a
relationship could be with the newfound family that you
discovered. So I I just wish you the best
and thank you for your time today.
Oh, thank you very much. Thanks again to Randy for
sharing his story. If you have Adna surprise that
you'd like to share, submit your story at dnasurprises.com and
for early add free access to episodes, join me over on
patreon@patreon.com/DNA Surprises.
Until next time, DNA Surprises is hosted, produced and edited
by me, Alexis Oursalt. It is mixed and mastered by Josh
Oursalt of Siren Recording Studios.