I also was, I was scared for my mother because she, you know,
told me if your father finds this out, he will disown you and
divorce me. This is the reason they got
married 50 years ago was because she told him I was his child.
So he married her because he was, quote, doing the right
thing. Probably not the thing you want
to find out after 50 years of marriage almost at that point
that you didn't need to do that. You spent your life in a
marriage that you did not need to be in.
And, you know, of course, like any marriage, it had its ups and
downs, more downs than UPS. They were young and didn't
really know each other and got married for the wrong reasons
and somehow are able to sustain it for public consumption for a
long time. And so her expectation of me was
that I would continue to, you know, play the game, be the good
girl and not say anything. Welcome to DNA Surprises, a
podcast that delves into the world of unexpected DNA
discoveries. I'm your host, Alexis ourselves.
In July 2021, my life took a surprising turn when I found out
that I'm an NPE, a person who has experienced a non paternal
event. In other words, my biological
father isn't who I thought he was.
Join me as we explore the stories of NP, ES, adoptees, and
donor conceived people and their families.
Get ready to unravel the astonishing journeys that begin
with a simple DNA test. This is DNA surprises.
Welcome to Season 9 of DNA Surprises.
This season we're going to cross 100 episodes and in celebration,
I am so excited to share new stories as well as updates from
past guests that you won't want to miss.
Before we begin this episode, I also want to give a big thank
you to everyone who has joined the Patreon community as an
independent podcast. Your support helps me continue
producing the show. If you aren't on Patreon yet,
join me over there for AD free episodes, early access, bonus
content, and weekly DNA discussion posts.
Joining is free, and you can listen to episodes one week
early and AD free for as little as $5 per month.
Learn more at patreon.com/DNA. Surprises.
All right, let's begin Season 9. What never fails to surprise me
is how innocently DNA surprises begin.
In this episode we hear from Doe, and yes, that's a pseudonym
who uncovered her DNA surprise IN2021A skillful genealogist Doe
bought ADNA test for her husband who was curious about his family
history. As it just so happened she
purchased the test during a buy one get one free sale.
So she decided to take a test herself.
When she received her results, she learned that not only was
her birth certificate father, not her biological father, but
that the story she'd always believed about her mother was
false. She shares how the discovery and
the continued secrecy have affected her and how she uses
her experience to help others. Thank you for sharing your
story, Doe. My name is Doe.
I use the pseudonym to protect my identity.
I'm 53 years old and I live in Tucson, AZ.
I was born and raised in upstate New York.
Well my surprise story goes back to 2021 when I discovered my DNA
surprise, which was in August of that year but prior to that
starting back in childhood. I am the daughter of a 17 year
old high school senior. She she herself was raised by a
single mother and found herself pregnant with me.
She was sure she knew who my biological mother was and she
notified him that she was pregnant with his child.
He proceeded to leave town and he was gone for about 2 1/2
years with no one hearing from him.
And during that time I lived with my teenage mother and her
mother who was about my age at the time when I was born, and
they both helped together to raise me for the first three
years of my life. The man that my mother notified
was my father. He returned when I was about 2
1/2 years old and for pressure from his family.
They were a very Catholic family and there was pressure to do the
right thing. And so he more or less said,
hey, maybe we should do the right thing and get married.
Very romantic. So.
So at 20 and 22, they were married in the spring of 1973.
A year later, they bought their first home in a small town in
upstate where I grew up and live my childhood.
My teenagers graduated from high school.
My father and I really never had a relationship with one another.
He comes from an abusive background and really had no
idea how to relate to a child since no one had ever really
related to him. So it was a very contentious,
stressful, abusive upbringing in a lot of ways, and with a mother
who was young and and had no real sense of her own self or
power to try to defend me against it.
So I got out of that town and the house as soon as I could.
I went to school in New York. I went on to get married, had
two children. The marriage did not work out
and my children and I moved from upstate New York to southern
Arizona in the year 2000. I went to nursing school and
reeducated myself and became an RN, working here in town since
2007. And that's sort of where my ball
starts rolling is I have been at my job for many, many years.
One of my colleagues who work on the same floor as I do, came to
me one day and was talking to me about the fact that she had just
celebrated her 65th birthday and that she had been adopted as a
30 day old infant from a home for unwed mothers in Richmond,
VA in 1956, and that she had done ADNA test to see if she
could find family members. She had heard a rumor that I was
a genealogist. That was something I had done as
a hobby shortly after having my first child.
I was interested in where I came from and what I was contributing
to my child genetically and ethnically and culturally.
And so I had started not knowing a thing and self-taught.
So it had been quite a while. I was pretty skilled at the
genealogy aspect of what she was looking for.
The DNA aspect, not so much. The DNA portion like in nursing
school was rather limited. So it was going to take a bit
more of a deep dive for me, so. You were just interested in in
family history. Your interest in genealogy had
nothing to do with suspicions that you might have had.
Correct. My father-in-law at the time, he
was a avid amateur genealogist and he was sort of sharing his
spines with me regarding his side of the family.
And so when my children had such a complete picture of where who
they were genetically and genealogically on one side of
their family, I was hoping to provide for mine as well.
So that's where my interest in genealogy came up was to sort of
fill in that gap for my children and and I just really loved it.
OK, so going. Back over to your colleague.
She's wanting to do some digging into her adoptive or not her
adoptive, her birth parents, correct?
OK. She'd been raised in a wonderful
family with an older brother and two parents who she had this
amazing life. Her parents had passed and she
was interested in finding out where she came from, sort of
that primal need to know where you come from.
So I offered to help her and I said I would do the best I could
to try to help her figure it out.
She had some paperwork from her adoption, which she graciously
let me look through and read over.
It took me about two weeks to figure out how DNA and genealogy
go together and use the ancestry.com.
I was able to identify her parents by the end of the two
weeks, and her father had passed away, but her mother was still
living and was in Baltimore, MD. And I was able to provide her
with her mother's address and telephone number.
When I gave her the information, I said, you know, the thing I
want you to think about is that there's a lot of ethical issues
that come with finding out this information.
You know, your mother wished to be anonymous.
She did not provide her name. She did not provide any bread
crumbs, which might have allowed you to figure out who she was
without needing to go to sort of these, you know, great lengths
to figure it out. So just know when you're
thinking about reaching out, know that you could get rejected
because she's been hiding the secret for 65 years and you're
just not sure where this might lead.
So she chewed on it for a little while.
But she did ultimately call her mother.
They spoke on the phone and she told her who she thought she was
and her mother did verify that I was correct, that she was my
colleague's biological mother and there was a rejection there.
She had gone on to marry and have four other children and no
one knew that she had given birth to this child in 1956 in
Virginia and she asked that it stay that way.
She had did not have a desire to bring her daughter into her life
and use her. So then, of course, now my
colleague and friend is dealing with the fallout from that.
But she did have a very good experience with her paternal
side. They welcomed her with open
arms. She's been to Virginia several
times to see them and has just been, was eternally grateful to
me. And it was a really wonderful
feeling to be able to help someone figure out who they were
and to see a more or less a really good experience for her.
So after that, my husband, he wasn't my husband at the time,
but he is now. At the time he had said to me,
why don't you do a tree for me? Just out of curiosity.
I'd like to see what you can come up with.
OK, sure. So I took what I knew and
started putting a tree together for him.
And I pretty quickly discovered that his father's father was an
illegitimate child, so he had taken on his mother's last name
and there was no birth certificate for him.
No, like christening records, nothing.
He was born in 1897 in Arkansas, and in the mid 40s he had filled
out a delayed birth certificate to allow him to be eligible for
Social Security. And on the delayed birth
certificate, when asked if his birth was legitimate or not, it
said no. So.
Wow. OK, so I wanna, I wanna stop you
there because I didn't realize that this was something that was
documented, the illegitimate versus legitimate that's
actually on paperwork. It it is on his actual delayed
birth certificate form, yes. Wow.
OK. And so this is your husband's
grandfather. Correct.
OK, OK. And of course, he passed on in
1976 and my husband's father passed in 2011.
So anyone that would have had any possible information to give
us was gone at that point, with me being able to ask the
questions to get to the bottom of it.
And so when I presented my husband with my findings and he
said, how do I figure out who my great grandfather was?
And I said, well, you're going to have to do DNAI.
I have no way of figuring this out without having that tool to
help us narrow it down. Yes, your grand grandfather
could be anyone. He wasn't sure he wanted to do
it. So he chewed on it for a while.
And in May of 2021, I said I had seen on Ancestry that they were
running a buy one, get one for the upcoming Father's Day
holiday for their DNA test kits. And so I bought one, got one
free, got it in the mail, and I gave it to him for Father's Day.
And I said I will do it with you for moral support if you would
like to. And he said, OK, let's do it.
So in June of 2021, we both spit in tubes and we packaged them up
and sent them off. About four weeks later, I get a
text message that my DNA results are in and mine actually came in
ahead of his. And so I excitedly sat down to
my computer. I, I had a couple of brick walls
in my genealogy research, especially on my father's side,
that I was having trouble breaking through.
And other people in the family had also had trouble breaking
through some of these brick walls.
And so my thought here was, I'm going to get these answers.
This is going to be great. I'm going to be able to the bus
through those walls and get some answers.
So I logged into my results and I have this extensive list of
people that I've matched to. The very first person, my
closest match is a person. I recognize the name right away.
She's a cousin of mine through my mother.
And so ancestry.com has this option where you can choose one
of your DNA matches. You can select A button called
Shared Matches and it will show you all of the matches you have
in common with this person. So knowing this was a maternal
match, I knew everyone I shared with this match would be my
mother's family. So I noted that on all of those
people. And then I went back into the
program and I asked to click on my paternal side, let me show
see my paternal DNA. And my question was, who the
hell are all these people? I don't recognize any of these
names. My closest match was a person
that I had never heard of before and so I was sort of confused.
I guess I wasn't really a surprise yet.
I was more confused than anything.
That must be something went wrong.
That'd be weird though, because my maternal DNA is matching
correctly and I didn't really know much about the process of
how the DNA is extracted and how it's tested.
And so I started doing my homework about the process of
how the DNA is extracted and tested and how the matching
works and all of those things, just to be able to see, is there
something here that I might have fallen through a crack?
This mind is incorrect. Oh.
Yes, the the the infamous mental gymnastics.
Yes I also I concluded that 50% of my DNA was incorrect.
Somehow the lab messed up. That was my trick.
And isn't it interesting that that is with our go to because
how could this be this this cannot be right.
So, you know, why in the world would my, you know, mother tell
me something that wasn't true? Yeah.
So you did not recognize any of the people, You didn't recognize
the name or anything like that? No, none of it.
There was no one on my paternal DNA matches that I recognize.
So the story that my mother had always told me was that the when
she got pregnant with me, she lost her virginity.
So I grew up believing that, you know, Gee, mom, that's awful.
Like, I felt really bad for her. You lost your virginity and got
pregnant. Like, that is so rough.
Gosh, mom, that's awful. And so I was coming into it with
that being my knowledge base. So it literally was impossible
for anyone other than this man to be my father.
And why would my mother tell me something that wasn't true?
So what I did then was I I started to look at my top
matches and I'm trying to figure out a way using my genealogy, my
new information for genetics and DNA and how am I going to figure
this out? So I took my top 20 paternal
matches and I figured out how they were all related to each
other using my genealogy skills and using databases
onlineancestry.com, Facebook, you name it, I was using it.
And so I was identifying these people and identifying their
relationship to one another. There was one person on my match
list that I had reached out to and said, hey, Ancestry says
we're related. Do you have any clue how?
And she said, no, I did my DNA because my father is adopted and
I was hoping to find his family for him by doing my DNA.
And I said, well, your father and I are related through my
eternal line apparently. So I was trying to grasp at any
straw who can give me any information about who you are so
that, you know, maybe I can figure this out.
My next thought process was that maybe my grandfather isn't who I
think he is. Maybe my father is the person
whose DNA is not correct. So I sort of went down that
rabbit hole briefly and then sort of backtracked.
No, that's that probably isn't likely.
And so there was one day in the beginning of September, I would
say of 2021, I'm sitting at my computer and I'm looking at
this, at the Excel spreadsheet and the family tree and all of
the work I had done to figure out all of this.
And my husband says to me, so anything new?
And I said, no, I, I'm so confused.
I just don't even know. I'm not sure what I'm looking at
anymore. I don't know where I fit in all
of this. It just doesn't make any sense.
And he said, if this were someone else's DNA, what would
you tell them? And I paused for a very long
time and said with a very shaking voice, I would tell them
that the man they think is their father is not their father.
And he just put his hand on my shoulder and let me cry.
Up until that point, had it even crossed your mind or had you
fully pushed it out until he asked you that question?
I think I fully pushed it out. I was not willing to even
entertain the idea, but he has a way of bringing things into
focus for me when I'm having trouble figuring out which
direction I'm going in. And he broke it down to the very
simplest, simplest common denominator.
Take yourself out of the equation.
Now, what do you think? Yeah, that was.
A good question to to ask and kind of bring things into focus.
So I'm so sorry. That is devastating to realize,
especially you've been doing all this research trying to make it
make sense in a different way. What do you do once you realize
that this is the case? It took a few days for me to
sort of get my feet back under me.
What I really felt initially was I was angry at my mother.
It was the very first thing I felt.
I felt cheated and I felt manipulated and I I was going
through all sorts of scenarios in my head.
How could this be, given what I knew, what I thought I knew to
be true about my conception, how can this even be possible?
Then I started to to really sort of get scared because I'm still
trying to protect my mother. Subconsciously, I think I
started to think maybe I was the result of an assault and that
she had tried to keep it quiet. You know, this is, you know,
obviously culturally. This is a problem in our society
that women are the victims of sexual violence and are not
believed. And at the time I was born,
absolutely not, which she had been able to tell anyone
anything like that and which she had been believed.
So my thoughts then sort of turned to really devastation for
her because what if this is what has happened?
And boy, you know, this woman raised me, the child of
violence, and I was going down all of these, this rabbit hole
with this as well. So I knew that I was not ready
to talk to my mother about this and to ask the big question,
which was who is my biological father?
After a few days, that's right, immediately where I went to, the
thing that I felt most grateful for through this whole process
was I had the skill set to figure out who my father was.
And so by when I removed myself from the picture and just sort
of looked at myself as a client that I was going to help figure
out where they come from, things started to fall into place
pretty quickly. Then once I put on my genealogy
hat and took off my NPE hat and I was able to figure out who my
biological father is pretty quickly.
I found a picture of him online, his high school yearbook photo,
which I look exactly like. He has a daughter that's five
years younger than me who could be my twin.
When people see the photograph of her, they think it's me.
I also have 1/2 brother who's 11 months younger than me.
And what I discovered was that my biological father was engaged
to be married at the time of my conception.
He is also seven years older than my mother.
She was underage at the time of my conception, and So what I
knew was that I was on his side. At least I was the product of
going outside of our relationship.
But then the last part of the puzzle was how I knew who I
knew, where I knew when I didn't know how.
And I really needed to know. And it was a real struggle to
try to find the words to talk to my mother about it.
I was terrified she was going to disown me, that she was going
to, you know, be terrified that I had figured it out.
I found out her long held secret which could just blow everything
up. So I took about 3 months to
really sort of put it all together in my head.
And I eventually ended up sending my mother a text message
because I just could not find the words to to tell her what I
had discovered. And what does all this mean?
I'm I'm trying to figure out what's how this happened.
How did you have the patience to wait for three months?
I hear on this podcast all the time, kind of varying timelines,
right? There's the people who as soon
as they open their tests, they're calling their moms
wanting to know, myself included.
And then and then there's people who have waited like a year
before asking their parents anything and kind of just
sitting with it. How did you find the patients to
wait, especially with this detective, you know, genetic
genealogist side of you? How did you hold off and have
patients? I think it had a lot to do with
my fear of what it would do to my relationship with my mother.
And I knew I wanted to, I wanted, I needed to be in a
place where I was going to be, I guess OK with her severing our
relationship if that was going to happen as a result of me
confronting her with this, as I've mentioned before, it was a
very dysfunctional childhood that I came up through.
So I what I realized through this journey is I never really
had a good grasp on who either one of my parents were.
They were very good at hiding who they were from me, as you
know, personal in on the inside people.
And so I really, truly thought she would disown me over this
because whatever it had happened, she clearly was trying
to keep this a secret. And I was about to out her and I
needed to do it in a way, hopefully that would try to
preserve something of my relationship with her because I
really felt at that point, well, I know who my biological father
is, but he I don't know if he knows I exist and or and now I
know about him, but no relationship with him at all.
The man that raised me is not my biological father and I've never
had a relationship with him. And now the relationship with my
mother is on the table over this.
So I needed to put myself in this place where I was OK, I
like to say I was OK being orphaned because I felt like
that's where this might be heading.
And so I really needed to have a lot of internal conversation
with myself about how much did I need to know the truth?
Was it worth potentially losing my mother from my life over
this? And after that, three months or
so of really struggling with it, I decided I needed to know.
And so I composed a rather long text message and it essentially,
you know, said I have something I need to tell you I and I don't
know how. So I'm doing it here.
I prefer to do it to your face, but we don't live near one
another. And it just didn't seem like
anything to do over the phone either because I wasn't sure who
she might be with when I called. Would she be in a place to talk
about it? So I decided this was my best
option and I sort of spelled it out for her.
What happened and I randomly took ADNA test for no
significant reason other than to support my husband.
And this is what I discovered. And I did mention, you know, if
I'm the product of the salt, I want you to know I I would never
blame you. I completely understand sort of
touched on all of those aspects of what sort of I had thought
maybe was my back story. And I waited and I waited and I
waited and it was several minutes before response and the
response came across when can we talk?
And that was it. And so it was a couple of days
later when I was able to have some time, which I knew I would
need a fair amount of to have this conversation that we agreed
to talk. And in that conversation, I told
her story. I laid it all out for her.
Everything. I told her who my biological
father was, that I had figured out who he was.
And she said, I'm sure you have because you are able to do those
kinds of things, So I'm sure you have.
And I told her I needed to know my story.
How did I come into this world? My mother was so absolutely
devastated by this information. She had a nervous breakdown.
She was hospitalized because my mother didn't know either.
Oh my gosh. She.
She was not hiding anything from you.
Correct. My mother was not hiding.
Well, she was, but she wasn't hiding the fact that she knew
my. Paternity.
That's true. OK, yes.
So she was not being truthful about not having had sex when
she got pregnant with you. Correct.
But she fully believed that your birth certificate father was
your father. She.
Absolutely believed it. And so I knew in that moment
that she was telling me the truth, that she did truly
believe that he that my birth certificate father was my
biological father. And so here we are both in the
same sort of crazy situation, but we have totally different
trajectories with it. She's now discovering the truth
about a child that she carried and raised that she believed was
the child of one person. So she was going through all of
that sort of feeling of betrayal and feeling of of almost
violation, which I could understand completely thinking
you, you had one man's child and it turned out to be someone
else's. And also she was struggling with
the idea that this true of the truth would come out and what it
would do to her life if it did. And so she told me the story of
my conception. Obviously her past was not as as
innocent as she had hoped that she could portray it to be.
And essentially what she, without going into too many
details about it, she essentially told me that she
couldn't believe she didn't get pregnant before she did with a
child, that she had been going into bars and being served since
she was 14 years old, and that I was the product of a drunken one
night stand that she really can't recall.
How did you feel when you learned that information?
I felt like a dirty little secret that that I knew
immediately I was not going to be able to reach out to my
biological father. I, I knew right away, given her
response that this was not, you know, this was going to be
something I knew she was going to ask me not to do because it,
you know, tell as little people as possible.
She was upset with me that I told my husband and I said,
well, he's my husband and we live together.
I cannot keep this from him. I was, it was totally
devastating. I cried every day.
I, you know, I was upset finding out about that.
You know, this man wasn't my father, despite the fact that we
had no relationship with one another.
Still, his family has a very long history, German and Irish
descent. And so he and his family were
very proud of their Irish descent.
Saint Patrick's Day was a holiday in our family and you
know, just all of the, that cultural impact, I wore a clad
out ring because I identified as an Irish American because our
family was very proud of their Irish heritage.
I am, I've been a professional singer for most of my life and
my paternal grandmother was a singer was a so clearly this is
where you get your musical ability from all of the things
I've been told my whole life. This is where this comes from.
This you, you're proud to be who you are.
Where did this all come from then?
Because clearly I did not get my voice from her.
And am I Irish? I don't know.
I have no idea. And so it was a real turning
upside down of my whole life, looking at my children and
thinking, you know, he's not their grandfather.
Some stranger is their grandfather.
And when I put the photo of my biological father at 18 against
with a picture of my oldest child who was in his mid 20s at
the time, they are each other's doppelganger like looks exactly
like him. I have a nephew through my half
sister who looks just like my second son.
So this the genes are very strong.
And so looking those kids in the face and, and telling them, you
know, here's the thing, who you think your grandfather is is not
your grandfather and he's not my father.
And this is what I'm sort of struggling with right now.
And, you know, there, it's interesting how people can be a
step removed from a from a crisis or a trauma and can sort
of help you bring it into perspective a little bit there.
I thought was really, mom, are you OK?
How are you? This really doesn't affect us
necessarily, but wow, if we were you, this is we feel devastated.
Did they have a relationship with your birth certificate
father or did this change much for them in terms of, you know,
their relationship? It didn't.
Change it so I've been in Arizona since they were two and
four years old. OK.
So they've grown up away from that, that, that part of their
family, you know, occasional phone calls, video chats, the a
visit here or there. But it there definitely wasn't a
close relationship there with any of my family on that side
because of the distance. OK, wow.
So you are just dealing with so much turmoil and feeling
completely uprooted and your mom does not want you to tell
anyone. But it sounds like you,
obviously you told your husband he's your, he's your rock there.
And then you tell your children. Who else do you tell when you
have this kind of push from your mom not to disclose?
Well, it was tough to decide who to tell and who not to tell
because clearly this was affecting my day-to-day
existence and so friends were aware something was very wrong
and so it was difficult to know how much to reveal, how much to
say and and whether to say anything at all.
So what do you do? So I found a therapist, and I
started seeing a counselor. In my past, I'd always sort of,
you know, dealt with things emotionally on my own.
I never really thought that I needed professional help.
But boy, this was huge. And I knew I couldn't burn my
husband and my children with trying to help me because they
had no idea where to even begin, where to begin.
So I got a recommendation for a counselor who I started seeing
weekly. This was a very interesting case
for her. She'd never really heard about
non parent expected events and DNA surprises.
And so it was new for her, sort of new groundbreaking for her
and her colleagues. And so they were all sort of
taking an interest in my case and really the and where was I
coming from emotionally and mentally.
And they were sort of creating a template for how to help the
other people like me who may present for their services.
And if it was not for my therapist, I'm not sure where I
would be right now. So she gave me a safe place to
really talk about all of my feelings about everything about
my father and about my mother and my dysfunctional
relationship with them and my childhood and my adulthood and
how all of this has affected who I am as a person.
And how is this now going to also impact me and my future.
What I have discovered, it was a long road of self exploration
and self discovery and of learning to forgive and and to
learn to accept what you cannot change.
My therapist called it radical acceptance.
Oh yes, we. Talk about that all the time on
this podcast and at the retreats.
And yes, radical acceptance is how we get through right?
That's. The only way does your.
Father know? Does your dad know or have you
held the secret? No, he does not know.
I have a sister that I grew up with who is 6 years younger than
me. She does not know my mother has
sworn me to secrecy and so why I have to be anonymous when I when
I interview Because I am protecting.
She's asked me to protect her and I, her now have decided that
I will do that, so I know that. Therapy is is helping you.
How are you coping with holding on to the secret and how is that
affecting you? Well, it's made me.
Feel freer. Oddly enough, I'd always felt
growing up that I was not where I was supposed to be, and I'm
sure you hear that 100 times over.
You always feel like you don't fit, like you're the oddball.
And, you know, even when your parents are pointing it out to
you, you know, we just don't understand where you come from.
I was the first person in my family to go to college.
I actually have two degrees. I was the first person to become
a professional musician in my family.
Even though there were people with musical ability, I just
always sort of had this go get em sort of attitude about life.
And everyone else is very much I'm going to stay in this town
in upstate New York and not leave.
This is all I want to know about.
I don't want to know about anything else.
So I. Really felt.
A lot of freedom after a while because boy, this explains a
lot, doesn't it? It really helped me to see,
you're right, you don't belong in this situation and there's a
reason why you don't belong here.
And this is the best reason of all.
Like it's actually in your DNA that you don't belong, and
you're just channeling who you are.
Nature versus nurture and all of the things.
Clearly there's something there for nature.
Because once I was able to delve a little bit further into my
biological family, I started to get answers to my questions.
Yeah, that is. So fascinating how you've been
able to use your expertise to find out so much information and
you still have not contacted your biological father, is that
correct? That's correct.
Do you want to? I do.
However, I'm not at a point where I feel like I would be
willing to accept the fallout from it, the potential fallout.
You know, you get into these situations where you know,
you're trying to keep something secret and the more people that
even have an inkling about it, it causes anxiety about
potentially something getting out.
And so my situation is a bit unique because I'm from a rather
small area. The sister that I grew up with
and the sister that I didn't grow up with went to school
together and were in the same grade.
Oh. Wow.
OK, so my half. Sisters know each other.
They're actually friends on social media.
Oh my gosh. OK.
So you're really kind of just sitting back and watching that.
Yes, it, it, there's other connections as well, which are a
bit complicated to explain without like a diagram, but
there's a couple of different ways that it, it's sort of hits
really close. If I were to reach out to my
biological father and let him know of my existence and my
son's existence, and if he were to say to me, I want to
introduce you to the family, I want to have you be a part of
things. I would be unable to do that
because my half brother and sister know who I am.
We, we live in a very small area.
My sister that I did not grow up with, her husband has known me
since childhood. Oh my gosh.
So if I came. Out to my bio father and he
introduced me to the family. This man is going to say there's
no what? This isn't your father.
He's your father. He's been your.
Father my whole life, well, he actually hasn't been so I I feel
like I'm feeling. Anxious just right.
And all of the. The close connections and you
know, it's like you're, you're like on a razor's edge, right
of, of proximity to these people.
For sure there's No 6. Degrees of separation here it's
maybe one or two and that's it. So in your.
Ancestry results. Did you toggle it so that people
can't match with you? Is there a concern about the
siblings you grew up with taking the test and seeing that you're
half siblings or somebody else finding you?
So there was but. I was able to disguise my
identity on ancestry so you can use like an alias.
As far as and when people are looking at any information you
have on ancestry, instead of my name being attached to it, it
will be my alias attached to it, which is like, it's sort of like
a code name that you can use. Some people just use their
initials for their ancestry account so that nobody can
figure out who they are that way to keep their things private.
So I just switched everything over to an alias and I, you
know, named my tree DNA family tree, keep it all very sort of
benign. And of course, anybody that's
living in the tree is not visible to other people looking
at your tree. Even if you make it public, your
living people are not shown. And so if say one of my half
siblings through my biological father were to test, they're
going to match to me, but they're not going to be able to
get too much from my tree except to see past like, like to the
grandparents level. That's about as far as they'd be
able to actually see. So my biological father has two
brothers as well. And so I felt pretty confident
that given how much time it took me to to do the whole genetic
genealogy thing and figure out how to work all of that, someone
without that background just logging in and looking at their
DNA might not go that far to say, I'm going to try to figure
out who this is. And I have had matches come
along since then through my biological father.
And what I'm discovering is that there are a lot of what I call
disenfranchised children from this family.
So there's people out there. That are testing because they
don't have a connection to their family and they are part of my
paternal family. So there is a group of five men,
one of them being I matched to his daughter on Ancestry.
She's the one who told me my dad is adopted and we did this test
to see if we could figure out who his parents are.
What I discovered was is that he had four half brothers, all of
them shared the same mother who is a cousin of my biological
father. OK.
All five of them were raised either in foster care or were
given up for adoption and didn't know about one another.
So I was able to bring. Five brothers together.
OK, I was gonna ask. Did you make a connection there?
Yes, I was able to. Identify all of their biological
fathers. For them, that's incredible.
And do they? Now have like a relationship so
they. Are all now, you know, in
contact with each other and going over memories and seeing
some of them are seeing photographs of family members
for the first time. This is your biological mother.
This is your biological father, you know, So it's been a really
great experience for all of them.
And I find myself being surrounded by people who are all
having really good experiences with their DNA.
And I find myself at the center of that storm in a position of
not not having the same, same experience as them.
Yeah. So.
You, you kind of are at this point.
You've told the people that you've told, and you are now
anonymously kind of moving through this space.
Where would you say you are now with everything and what do you
hope for next? I.
Feel like I'm in a reasonably good spot now.
I I can talk about this without crying.
So that's, I always thought that was really great the first time
I was able to have a discussion about this with someone and I
didn't spend the whole time in tears.
That I thought was a good sign that I had reached a good point
where I can talk about it and it still hurts, but I have a handle
on it. But I find a lot of healing and
helping others because I know how I felt when I had that
realization that this man is not my father, then who is?
And I, when I put myself into someone else's shoes who maybe
like me, who didn't feel like they could reach out to their
mother immediately and find out what was going on or just wants
to sort of figure it out on their own without pulling the
other people in, how can I help them?
Because I know if I wasn't able to help myself, I would have
went crazy because I needed that information.
It gave me something to focus on and something to channel that
pain and anxiety through to find my truth.
And I know how reassuring that can feel to find it.
It starts a whole other cascade of emotions and feelings.
Once you figure it out, that's not the end.
It's, and I think that anyone who's been through this, I don't
know maybe if you would agree with me, but there's always
another question. There's always another piece of
information you want to know. And no matter how much
information you find out, will it ever be enough?
Yes. Yes, that's something that we've
definitely talked about. And the fact that you kind of
sometimes have to make peace with the fact that you will have
that radical acceptance that you will never have all of the
answers to the puzzle. And that's kind of just how it
is, right? Like you can, you can get a ton
of answers, especially if people are alive and they're willing to
talk. But there's always, like you
said, there's always something that pops up and you have to
weigh the relationships in your life and if you're willing to
put those at risk and just all of the things that you touched
on. So you've really turned your
experience into helping other people.
Are you now seeing more of these DNA surprises and NP ES and your
work? It's very.
Interesting that my working with my colleague, it got a lot of
the other people at my job interested in their heritage and
their genealogy and their background.
And I've had several people at work approach me and say my
results are in, can you take a look at them?
Because something's weird. And so I have helped several
people figure out. A friend of mine at work is
currently looking for 1/2 sister that is 18 years older than her.
She was unaware that she had a sister that was 18 years older
than her. And so with my help, she did the
DNA test and we are now actively searching for perhaps sister who
was placed for adoption. Well, I think it's.
So beautiful that you are helping other people in these
situations. And I can't imagine the level of
empathy. Well, I guess I can cause I've
been through it too, but you know, the, the level of empathy
that you're able to provide because you've gone through
these experiences and these emotions and had these questions
come up. And I think, you know, there are
wonderful people doing wonderful work in this space, helping
people find their families. I think the fact that you are
also an NPE is really impactful though, for people that are
going through this experience. So thank you for the work that
you're doing. I appreciate that.
Yeah, now. I do want to touch on your
podcast. So Doe is going to launch a
podcast soon that's gonna dive more into the DNA surprise world
and also the genealogical aspects of it.
Is that right? Yes, that's correct.
Can you tell us more about it? Yeah, so the.
Podcast is going to be called Decoded Secrets of the family.
The beginning of it is going to be I'm going to be having some
of the people that I've helped. I'm going to be interviewing
them and having them tell their story much like I'm doing today.
And then sort of put in there the mix of then I found out who
I really was and this is how I did it.
This is who helped me, whether it was me or a search Angel or
any number of people out there who have the ability and the
skill to to help people find their truth.
And it's seems like maybe all the stories might sound the same
at some point. But once I started talking about
my story and listening to other people's stories, I found
there's commonality, but there's also some really huge
differences in people's stories. There's always a unique part to
it, always the gotcha moment that maybe no one was expecting.
And so my hope is, is that people will who have had these
DNA surprises and who are wanting help to look for their
truth, that my podcast will help them do that and, and maybe
they'll pay it forward as well. Yeah, that's amazing.
I think the more people with the skill set that you have the
better. I feel like that is on my bucket
list is to learn more about this and Doe and I live in the same
town so I might just be knocking on her door and asking for for
some tutorials on how to walk through and do it.
Well, it sounds like we could learn from each.
Other because I had never done a podcast before.
So perfect. Perfect what?
Advice do you have for a parent who might be keeping adna
surprise from their child? Well, my advice?
Is probably hard advice, but you need to be honest with your
child. The devastation that comes from
finding it out any other way is really destabilizing.
It really causes people to question their whole identity,
their whole life. Woulda coulda shoulda you know
me with my not so great relationship with my birth
certificate father. Of course those questions have
come up. What would my life have been
like if this other man had raised me?
What things would have been better?
What things might have been worse?
You know, so be honest and give them the information that
they're asking for that they need.
Because finding it out from ancestry.com or finding it out
from a a relative who might know who, you know, gets loose lipped
or this is not the way that somebody should find out that
maybe they don't have the whole truth about who they are.
Thank you for sharing. That and what advice do you have
for someone who just uncovered ADNA?
Surprise. Like being an NPE first thing.
Is find somebody you can talk to internalizing how you're feeling
is going to chew you up and spit you out needing to find somebody
you can talk with not even necessarily or has any type of
counseling expertise or even with DNA surprises.
Does someone who's you trust, who can listen to what you're
saying, who can help give you sort of like that same advice my
husband gave me help sort of simplify it, help you see the
forest through the trees. What is it exactly I'm upset
about, and what is it that I want to know?
And sometimes friends, people can help you tease out what it
is you're feeling and what it is you need to know.
And from there, maybe find a good counselor and find somebody
that knows how to do genetic genealogy who can help you
figure it out. Doe, thank you so much.
For coming on the podcast and sharing your story, I love
talking to people who have taken this very difficult experience
and then used their own experience to help others.
It's so inspiring to hear the work that you're doing.
And for anyone who's listening, I will be sure to put Doe's new
podcast in the show notes when it launches.
Thanks again for joining me. I appreciate.
It thank you. Thanks again to Doe for.
Sharing her story and be on the lookout for her podcast, Decoded
Secrets of the Family, coming out soon.
If you have adna surprise that you'd like to share, submit your
story at dnasurprises.com and remember to join me over on
Patreon for AD free listening, early access to episodes and so
much more. Until next time.
This episode of. DNA Surprises was hosted,
produced and edited by me Alexis Ourselt.
It was mixed and mastered by Josh Ourselt of Siren Recording
Studios.