"She's not really your daughter": how giving away a DNA test can end up destroying your family

Three years ago, Jenny decided to take a DNA test “just for fun”.

The youngest of five children, she had always been intrigued by the history of her ancestors. When she was a teenager, she loved looking at old photographs with her grandfather and over the years she had carefully pieced together her family tree.

As her children grew older, and with more time at her disposal, Jenny, a freelance writer in Connecticut, began attending genealogy conferences and workshops to improve her methodology. "Everyone was talking about these DNA tests, but I wasn't interested, it sounded very scientific and I don't have the head for it."

However, he was curious to see what the test could reveal about his ethnicity, so he sent in a sample and tested it.

She wasn't surprised when the results revealed that her heritage was largely British, also Scottish, with some Scandinavian genes. “Very unexotic,” she says with a smile.

But a year later he got tested with another genetic testing company and convinced his brother to get one too. This time there was a surprise. The email with the results included a chart that she had a hard time understanding, but there was something written underneath that immediately caught her eye: “Estimated relationship: half-siblings”.

Jenny assumed that her brother had done something wrong by sending the sample. She thought that she had left the kit out in the sun or that she had forgotten not to eat or drink for an hour before providing the saliva sample.

“I was mad at him,” says Jenny. “I thought: how typical! I ask him to do a simple thing and he doesn't do it well. I tried to rationalize it, but at the same time my stomach was in knots.”

Jenny searched the internet for answers and found out what a centimorgan, a unit of genetic linkage, is. Siblings usually have at least 2,500 centimorgans in common, but Jenny only shared 1,700 with her brother.

Plagued by doubts, she asked a cousin of her father's, a woman in her 90s, to take the test as well. “She had helped me a lot with the genealogy, we had exchanged pictures and she was very sweet,” says Jenny. “I feel really bad for not telling him the real reason I asked him. I told him it would be fun and promised to send him the report."

Six weeks later, Jenny was sitting up in bed with her iPad when she received an email with the results. Unlike her brother, she did not share DNA with her father's first cousin.

“I felt my heart break,” Jenny says, her eyes brimming with tears. “I thought, 'Oh my God, it's true!' My poor husband, who was sleeping next to me, had no idea what was going on. I had never felt so alone."

For the next several months Jenny told no one about her findings. But she did send DNA kits to her other brother and her two sisters and convinced them to give them saliva samples. She had always thought that she was different from them, less tall and less dark, and the results confirmed that she was different.

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Jenny also convinced her 86-year-old mother to get tested. “She was my mother, of course, but she needed irrefutable proof, because finding out that the man who raised me wasn't my father broke my heart,” she explains. "I felt that everything I had lived through for 50 years was not true."

A year later, she plucked up the courage to talk about it with her mother, who was frail and suffering from cancer. Over tea, Jenny explained that the DNA test results were a bit strange.

“My mom had a cup of tea in her hand. She took it to her mouth but when she was about to drink she stopped. She looked at me and her hands started to shake,” Jenny recalls.

“She was a very strong woman. I don't think he'd ever seen her cry before, so seeing her shake like that was really hard,” Jenny adds. “It really distressed me a lot to ask him questions. I didn't want to upset her, but at the same time I thought that I couldn't let her die without answering a few questions, because I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life.

In the town where they lived there was a man who had a business. Jenny remembers that she had always gotten along very well with her mother. He asked if this man was his father. “I said her name,” Jenny says. "She widened her eyes and asked me how could I know."

Jenny's mother admitted that she hoped to take the secret with her to the grave.She had never told her husband, who raised her without knowing he was not her biological father, something Jenny now He finds it "incredibly reassuring." Jenny describes her father, an engineer who died almost ten years ago, as “an introverted and naive man”, and thinks he would have been devastated if he had known the truth.

“It was like a new duel. I went through all the stages of pain, ”she says. "It was something that was beyond my control, there was no going back and there was no way to fix it."

Jenny found some solace in a book, 'The Stranger in My Genes,' by Bill Griffeth, a financial journalist who had a similar experience.

“He hates it when I say it, but he really saved me,” says Jenny.

“Without your book, I think I would have gone crazy or ended up doing something destructive. I contacted him and he encouraged me to journal about my feelings. He even read the things I sent him, he was very kind."

The book's author, Bill, co-host of CNBC's 'Nightly Business Report,' says his life changed in 2012 after taking a DNA test. He discovered that his Y chromosome did not match his brother's and that his biological father had died 13 years earlier.

“I never knew my father,” she tells me over lunch at her New Jersey home. “I never shook his hand, never hugged him, never heard the sound of his voice. I never saw him walk, never heard him laugh."

Like Jenny, Bill was fascinated by his family tree and discovered that one of his ancestors was executed during the Salem witch trials in 1692. He was “obsessed” with researching his roots. For years he had visited cemeteries, cathedrals, libraries and courthouses across the country to gather more information.

When Bill learned that he was not biologically related to the man he had known as his father, who was not actually a Griffeth, he felt an overwhelming sense of loss.

“It was all a big lie, I was very angry. And at the same time I was very sad,” says Bill. “It is ironic that I am the unofficial historian of our family. I spent years looking for information on all these people. And they took it from me that way.”

Bill, like Jenny, also had to work up the courage to open up to his elderly mother about his infidelity decades earlier. "The last thing we would think of my holy mother is that she had an affair," she says. “She was a devout Christian. I was teetotal. She was your typical church woman."

Bill's mother was 95 when they had the awkward conversation. She reluctantly admitted that she "made a mistake" by having a brief fling with a former boss.

“I didn't want this to define our relationship in their later years, but unfortunately I think it did,” says Bill. “After that, a kind of coolness settled in between us. I think my mother was hoping to get to the end of her life without it coming out."

Stories like Bill's and Jenny's are many: “Do-it-yourself” genetic test kits are bringing hundreds - if not thousands - of skeletons out of the closet.

The older siblings of Conroe County, Texas, clerk Catherine St Clair gave her a DNA test for her 55th birthday. She also found out that her biological father was a man she had never met but, unlike Bill and Jenny, her mother was no longer alive, so she couldn't get answers to her questions. .

She was distraught and had a hard time accepting the test results, until she talked to another woman in the same situation and decided to start a self-help group. A year and a half later, Catherine's group has nearly 4,100 members.

It's called DNA NPE Friends (something like Friends with an Unexpected Father). Some members were born to secret lovers, in some cases their mothers were raped, others were never told they had been adopted as babies or young children.

I was invited to one of the group meetings at a Mexican restaurant in Waco, Texas. There were about a dozen people sitting around a table in the back of the room eating tacos and talking intensely. Most had driven for hours to get here in the pouring rain. Catherine encouraged the more timid members to speak up, handed out tissues and told crying women not to consider themselves anyone's “dirty secret”.

I met Betty Jo Minardi, an online sales manager with long, dark hair who was accompanied by her husband, Angelo. Two and a half years ago he had a DNA test which revealed that her brother was only her half brother of hers. Like Jenny, she asked her father's cousin to take the test and found that she did not share DNA with him.

So she called her mother, who lived in Minnesota, and carefully told her the results. Betty Jo's mother immediately said that the company, Family Tree DNA, had to have made a mistake.

The next time the subject came up, Betty Jo's mother, flanked by her stepbrother and stepsister, angrily accused her of lying. Her stepbrother said Betty Jo “needed to spend some time on a couch” because she was mentally unbalanced, while her stepsister wrote a Facebook post saying DNA tests were unreliable and only the FBI could provide data. precise genetics.

Betty Jo wanted to be absolutely sure her father wasn't the man who raised her, so she went a step further. Although he had been dead for three years, Betty Jo had some of his hair and she sent it to a laboratory for a paternity test. The analysis revealed that they shared 0% DNA .

At this point, her half-sister told her what she was doing was "evil" and in a text message in a family group they told her, "You don't exist to us anymore." Since then, Betty Jo has not spoken to her half-siblings nor her mother.

“It's sad, because my mother and I were very close,” says Betty Jo. “She called me every week, and now nothing. For months I cried every day, I was depressed, I had some kind of crisis. Christmas is a particularly difficult time, but my children and husband were very supportive. Now I'm so much better".

Betty Jo believes that her mother's pride, her Christian faith and her self-image as the “perfect wife and mother” prevent her from admitting that she had a child out of wedlock. “I told her that if she didn't want to talk about it, she could give her lawyer a statement to give me after she died,” Betty Jo says. "But he didn't even bother to reply."

Some of the DNA results link Betty Jo to cousins ​​of Mexican descent. With her dark hair and eyes and olive skin, she believes her biological father might be from south of the Texas border. Her mother and the father who raised her are of Northern European ancestry.

But the reasons for Betty Jo's insistence go beyond curiosity. She says that it would be useful for him to know her ancestry from her for medical reasons. She has a thyroid problem, and she and her daughter share another condition that doesn't run in her family on her mother's side.

People like Jenny, Bill, Catherine and Betty Jo, most of them in their 40s and 50s, are in the same situation. Their mothers got pregnant by someone other than her husband, willingly or not. It's hard to accept, but the practical consequences tend to be limited by the fact that most of the parties involved are very old or dead. But what happens when a DNA test reveals the secrets of someone younger?

Lawrence (not his real name) also contacted Catherine St Clair, who put him in a special category: not as children, like most members of his group, but as parents.

His daughter, who had long been interested in family history, had begged him to take a DNA test, and he had resisted, in part because of the $99 it cost. Until one day he agreed to do it.

When Lawrence's wife found out, “it looked like she was hit by a truck,” Lawrence says.

She turned pale, he recalls, and “had a horrible look on her face, like when someone gets caught stealing something.”

That night she closed her bedroom door and confessed that she had had a long relationship with a man she had met at work. A paternity test two months after the birth of her daughter confirmed her hunch: the child was not her husband's daughter. He had kept it a secret for 15 years.

Paralyzed with shock, Lawrence called his mother and told her he was leaving his wife and daughter. But his mother stopped him.

“My mother told me: ‘Your daughter is innocent. She had nothing to do with it. you want her And that biology does not change it. So, luckily, it brought me to my senses," says Lawrence. He left his wife, who according to him had no regrets, but continued to father his daughter.

Lawrence says that for a long time he felt completely alone because men, in his experience, are reluctant to talk about their marital problems. Only a friend acknowledged that his wife had had lovers, but a paternity test had revealed that he was the biological father of his children.

“Nobody understood that finding out your daughter isn't yours is worse than finding out your wife had an affair. A hundred times worse,” she says. "I was in a cheating support group on Facebook when one of the women in Catherine's group contacted me about joining her group, and they created a section for parents."

Lawrence told his daughter that he would not stop her from contacting her biological father; after all, he knew the man's name, address, and phone number. But to her relief, her daughter had no intention of doing so. In fact, he refers to him as “the sperm donor”.

But Lawrence's son, younger than his daughter and biologically his, blamed his sister for their parents' separation. Lawrence felt that he was unfair and said so.

“I told her it was her mother and what she did that caused the divorce, not that her sister was born,” she explains.

Despite it all, Lawrence says he's glad he got tested.

“I don't regret taking the DNA tests. I'm glad I found out the truth. But to everyone who wants to take the DNA test, I say prepare for an unexpected result: you could have skeletons in the closet.”

Some, unlike Lawrence, wish they would never discover the skeletons. One of the women I met at Catherine's group meeting told me that she would be happier if she could go back in time and not know what she discovered.

I asked him why, and he paused for a long time.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I just didn't know I would cry today. I did not expect. I feel like I lost a lot and I can't replace it with something good.”

But there can also be positive results in DNA tests.

Bill Griffeth visited his biological father's grave, found photos of him and made contact with a niece who knew his father when she was a college student. She was happy to hear from Bill and is helping him fill in some of the gaps in her family tree.

In Texas, Catherine St. Clair is also in touch with relatives she never knew she had. Last summer, she and her half-sisters, Rayetta and Mona, spent a long weekend in California and hit it off like a charm.

Betty Jo will cross her fingers this Christmas when a lot of people get a test kit as a gift. She hopes that some close relative on her father's side will get a DNA test and that in time she she will be able to find out who her real father is.

It took Jenny a long time to tell her husband and children about her DNA test. This year, before Thanksgiving, she informed all of her siblings about her and admitted that she was "totally freaked out." The news was taken better than she expected, though one sister is still "in denial" and questions the results.

Jenny's daughter, Katie, in her 20s, understands her mother's grief. “I think she could say that she was a daddy's girl,” she explains. "I remember that for my grandfather's birthday she would change the Facebook profile picture to one in which they were together."

She adds: “Her father is dead, the person she thought was her father is dead. Her mother is dead, she died last Christmas, so now she has to deal with this enormous burden alone”.

Jenny knows she has bio-siblings. She has no intention of contacting them now, but she is aware that one day the phone may ring. "If they find out, go ahead, we'll have to deal with it!"

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