Family Blindsided by Their Adopted Child's Dna Results
When a DNA Test Shatters Your Identity
"Each person comes into our group thinking they are a freak."
It was AncestryDNA's customer-service rep who had to suspension the news to Catherine St Clair.
For her part, St Clair idea she was inquiring about a technical glitch. Her brother—the brother who along with 3 other siblings had gifted her the DNA test for her birthday—wasn't showing up correct in her family unit tree. It was non a glitch, the adult female on the line had to explicate gently, if this news can ever country gently: The homo St Clair thought of equally her brother but shared enough DNA with her to be a half-sibling. In fact, she didn't friction match any family members on her father's side. Her biological begetter must be someone else.
"I looked into a mirror and started crying," says St Clair, now 56. "I've taken for granted my whole life that what I was looking at in the mirror was office my mother and part my dad. And now that half of that person I was looking at in the mirror, I didn't know who that was."
St Clair thought she was alone with her loss, and what an odd sort of loss it was. She had grown up in a tight-knit, religious family in Arkansas, never suspecting a thing. Her four older siblings loved her no less as a one-half-sister. One brother didn't think it was a large bargain at all. "He says he wouldn't take been this upset if it happened to him," she told me. "I don't discuss this topic with him much anymore." St Clair eventually found her biological father by tracing other matches on Ancestry's website. He was a stranger her mother knew more than one-half a century agone. The DNA test didn't erase her happy babyhood memories, but it recast her unabridged life up to now.
The kickoff time St Clair met someone who understood this—in the aforementioned bone-deep way she did—was online. She saw that Delilah, the popular radio host, had asked on her Facebook page if anyone had learned anything interesting from DNA tests. Well, certain, St Clair thought. She replied that she had only found out her dad was not her biological father. An hr later, a adult female who saw the annotate messaged her saying, "Oh my god I thought I was the simply one." For the next iii hours, they feverishly sent letters back and forth. They cried. They shared their fears and anxieties. They realized they weren't crazy for feeling those fears and anxieties. "By the time we finished talking, we were both emotionally drained," St Clair said. "Nothing's really changed for either of us merely we experience better just considering nosotros had somebody to talk to."
St Clair went looking for more than people to talk to. She looked for back up groups. She plant none. And so, being the type to take things in her own hands, St Clair started a group on Facebook called Dna NPE Friends, where NPE refers to "non parent expected." (NPE comes from the genetic genealogy term "nonpaternity effect," which St Clair and others accept refashioned to include both parents; some other increasingly common term is "misattributed parentage.")
"Each person comes into our grouping thinking they are a freak," says St Clair. And and so they observe each other. A year later, DNA NPE Friends—just 1 of several secret Facebook groups for misattributed parentage—has amassed more than 1,000 members.
These are boom times for consumer DNA tests. The number of people who have mailed in their saliva for genetic insights doubled during 2017, reaching a total of more than than 12 million. Most people are curious where their ancestors came from. A few are interested in health. Some are adoptees or children conceived from sperm donation who are explicitly looking for their biological parents. DNA testing companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA regularly tout happy reunions on their websites.
But not all biological parents want to be found. In conversations and correspondence with more ii dozen people for this story, I heard of DNA tests that unearthed diplomacy, secret pregnancies, quietly buried incidents of rape and incest, and fertility doctors using their ain sperm to inseminate patients. These secrets otherwise would have—or even did—get the grave. "It's getting harder and harder to keep secrets in our society," says CeCe Moore, a prominent genetic genealogist who consults for the television show Finding Your Roots. "If people haven't come to that realization, they probably should."
St Clair told me she sees it equally a generational shift. The generation whose 50-yr-old secrets are now beingness unearthed could not have imagined a world of $99 mail-in Dna kits. Just times are irresolute, and the civilization with it. "This generation right now and maybe the next xv years or and so, there'southward going to exist a lot of shocking results coming out. I'd say in twenty years' time it'due south going to misemploy," she predicted. Past so, our expectations of privacy will take caught up with the new reality created by the ascension of consumer DNA tests.
Simply until and then, hundreds, peradventure thousands, of people like St Clair are left to piece together their family histories, containing the fallout of a DNA test nevertheless they can. The best assist, many have found, is each other.
"Information technology was amend than therapy," Dawn, 54, says of joining the Deoxyribonucleic acid NPE Friends grouping. "I tried therapy. Information technology didn't piece of work." (The Atlantic agreed to identify by outset name only the people who have not revealed their misattributed parentage to friends and family.) Therapists, friends—they all had trouble understanding why the revelation mattered so much. When Dawn told her close friends that her biological father had Italian heritage, they joked about making cannoli. "They don't understand the gravity," she says. She herself didn't quite empathize until it happened to her either. Dawn had spent her whole life suspecting her father was not her biological father, yet the revelation nevertheless left her unmoored. "The very foundation of who I thought I was was ripped out from under me," she says. "Until that moment, I had no idea how much stock I had put in my family to identify and to find who I was."
In the Facebook grouping that St Clair now runs with several admins, she does stress that the grouping is not a substitute for therapy. She advocates getting professional help, even describing to me at length over the phone how to find employee help programs for gratuitous counseling. But as the group's creator, she has become a de facto tribe-mother-counselor-guru. Members of the group would repeat her mantras (We're not a dirty little cloak-and-dagger) dorsum to me. And they often started sentences with "Catherine says... " before reciting some bit of her advice.
I asked St Clair if she had any professional training for this, and she laughed, saying no. But she grew up in a family that fostered a lot of kids, and taking care of an adopted younger sister with cerebral palsy has taught her to permit go of anger. And she reinforces this in the Facebook group, speedily deleting unsupportive comments. "Anger only hurts y'all," she says. "That's why I push so hard with my group."
Lisa, 44, admits she is withal trying to let get of that acrimony. She had always felt out of place in her family. Her hair—which she always straightened—was naturally fine and curly, her skin dark. "People would think I'm Hispanic, and would speak Spanish to me on the street," she says. Then when a DNA test in 2015 revealed her biological father was likely African American, information technology clicked into place. But her mom denied it. "She wouldn't answer me. She would change the subject area," Lisa recalls. When she kept pressing, her mother broke down, maxim information technology would destroy the family and that her dad—the man she grew up with—would kill her. She refused to say anything else almost Lisa'due south biological father.
Lisa doesn't desire to strain her relationship with the father who raised her either. "I just could never break his centre," she says, but her mother'due south refusal to talk frustrates her. Reading the same stories from other people about against their parent, Lisa says, has made information technology easier to cope. She'd like to to host a meetup with members of the Dna NPE Friends group who live well-nigh her in Pennsylvania.
Lisa has likewise set out on her own to discover her biological begetter. "I just want to know who he is," she says of her male parent. "I merely desire to run into a moving picture." The Dna exam matched her with a cousin in California on her begetter'south side. By constructing "mirror trees"—a technique genetic genealogists use to find common ancestors—she thinks she found 1 of her grandparents, but she has not yet been able to pinpoint one man as her father.
Kathy, 55, also told me about her yearning to know more about her biological father. By the time she constitute out nearly her misattributed paternity from a DNA test, he had already passed away. She found Newspapers.com clippings nearly his former ring from the 1940s. She visited the town where he grew up not too far from her. And when she learned an player played him in a 1990s movie, she watched it intently, studying the role player for clues to the real human being. "It's the closest thing I had," she says.
The revelation has not been easy for her female parent, who Kathy suspects had an affair with her biological father when she was a secretary at his firm. Information technology also caused a rift with her sisters, who are close to her mother. "My sisters were freaking out. They didn't want me to say anything," Kathy says. "They said keep information technology a clandestine. Why practice yous need know? Why open the door? Why open the can of worms?"
St Clair has a mantra for these situations, too. "I'm pitiful," she says, "I'm not a cause of the problem. I'one thousand the result of it." Still, she is sympathetic to the upheaval these revelations can crusade. "You take to effort to put yourself in the shoes of this person who's near to be blindsided. In that location's an adult out in that location that is their child that they never knew well-nigh. Perhaps they had an affair at the beginning of their marriage and they changed their ways ... this is going to crusade a major tear in their family unit. It could. We always try to prepare for the worst."
That'due south why the DNA NPE Friends grouping offers detailed advice on how to make first contact. The grouping suggests going with a letter that asks for family medical information and makes clear that the writer is non afterward money. And transport photos, ideally three of them: the person as a toddler, as a teen, and as an adult with their own family if they accept 1. "It strokes the ego to exist able to say ... oh my gosh she's got my nose and my eyes. So it tugs at his heartstrings," says St Clair.
Of course, the attempts to attain out are sometimes met with anger or radio silence. After Todd, 53, took an AncestryDNA exam, he found some new cousins that he messaged on Facebook. The cousins ended upwards blocking him. "They think I'm after something," he says. It was the group that talked him downwardly, advising him to requite it time and write a letter. When he contacted a newfound aunt, he also posted the letter to the grouping for editing advice.
Todd's discovery was actually not well-nigh his ain father but his mother's father, and he's still torn nigh whether to tell his mother. He remembers the devastation when he start realized his female parent'southward sisters were not his full aunts. "The second I plant out I'm ashamed to say it felt different. I didn't feel as close to them," says Todd. "Information technology was tears every mean solar day for nine months." He's made some peace with it at present, but he worries that his elderly mother would take it harder. Todd wishes that AncestryDNA had given more of a warning. "They have that commercial where the guy's like, 'Now I don't vesture lederhosen' [after finding out his ancestors were Irish rather than German]. That was your surprise. Let me tell you my surprise," says Todd. "You can find something you really don't desire to know. I think they should issue that warning."
Both 23andMe and AncestryDNA accept warnings about uncovering unanticipated information about family in their terms of service. They likewise permit users to opt in or out of finding genetic matches, and 23andMe has some other alert in the opt-in screen.
Lynn, 55, of all people, understood that Dna tests tin can reveal family secrets. Her husband had been adopted, and Lynn prepare out to use her son'due south AncestryDNA tests to find his paternal grandparents. In the procedure, she compared her son'southward results to her brother's and apace realized something wrong. Information technology didn't look similar a typical uncle-nephew relationship. The reason, Lynn eventually found out, was that her biological begetter was not the father she grew up with. "I but didn't meet it coming," she says. "If you go looking into other people'southward secrets, you lot only might notice ane of your own." Her mother still refuses to reveal what happened.
An AncestryDNA spokesperson said in a statement, "Nigh everyone who takes our AncestryDNA exam finds something surprising, and for most customers it's something heady and enriching; just there are certainly cases where a discovery might be quite unexpected ... We besides have a modest, dedicated group of representatives who are peculiarly trained to speak to customers with more sensitive queries."
A 23andMe spokesperson added, "We typically counsel customers that while we're confident in our ability to predict close genetic relationships, nosotros're non a paternity examination."
To bring together DNA NPE Friends, you start have to apply through a closed just public "gateway" grouping on Facebook. It's a jury-rigged system, designed to become effectually the fact the group needs to be findable plenty to reach new members just also secret plenty so as to not circulate my male parent is not my biological father to ane's entire social network. St Clair and her admins also privately invite people who post about misattributed parentage in 2 popular public groups on Facebook chosen Dna Detectives and DD Social, both run by Moore, the genetic genealogist. Moore also runs secret splinter groups defended to diverse specific scenarios like unknown paternity and incest.
Like any rapidly growing group with i,000-plus members, DNA NPE Friends has had some growing pains. Ane particular post kicked up a firestorm, according to St Clair, when some sperm donor-conceived members of the group took it to suggest bearding sperm donors don't want to know their biological children. Some threatened to leave. St Clair says donor-conceived people are absolutely welcome in the group, and her admins aggressively weed out negative comments.
Brianne Kirkpatrick, a genetic counselor, likewise runs a couple of Facebook groups for people dealing with DNA surprises, and she deliberately keeps them minor. Kirkpatrick'due south groups are less active day to day, only they are also less impersonal because of their size. (Lynn, the woman whose endeavor to find her married man's parents revealed her own misattributed paternity, is a member of one of these groups.) Kirkpatrick also wants to maintain the privacy and confidentiality she promised her members, the offset of whom she met through her genetic-counseling practice a few years ago.
Having watched the stories in the group unfold, Kirkpatrick emphasizes they aren't all negative experiences—even if they start that mode. "How people react in the short term will not necessarily predict the long term," she says. St Clair put information technology to me in even more vivid terms. She compared finding out almost the existence of a underground child to finding out your teenage girl is pregnant. "Anybody'due south tearful, upset. Excuse my phrase, the shit just hit the fan," she says. "Merely nine months afterward they're standing at the hospital goo-gooing and celebrating and passing out cigars and balloons." It takes time.
When St Clair took her AncestryDNA examination, the parents who raised her and her biological father had all passed abroad. She didn't have to—or perhaps never got to—face them. But she did realize that i of her genetic matches on AncestryDNA'south website was a half-sis, Raetta, who shared the same father. When they got in touch, St Clair learned about another half-sister, Mona, who still lives in Arkansas, where St Clair was born. Earlier this calendar month, she and Mona flew to Los Angeles to celebrate Raetta's 80th altogether. After losing half of her identity, St Clair gained another family. And the Facebook group has given her purpose.
Recently, St Clair decided to establish a nonprofit chosen NPE Fellowship. Members of her Facebook group had started donating Dna kits and fundraising to assist each other find biological families. The community was outgrowing Facebook, St Clair realized, so again, she took action. She hopes the nonprofit can also reach people too scared to tie their real Facebook accounts to such sensitive revelations.
Back in 2016, when she first learned about her biological father, she remembers crying in bed, asking God why it had to happen to her. She heard a voice: "My darling child, information technology had to happen because at that place are a lot of lost souls, and they demand somebody who's strong enough to assistance them and atomic number 82 them. The only mode you lot could practice that is if yous're i of them."
Have y'all taken a DNA examination with unexpected results? We desire to hear your story. Submit a letter of the alphabet to the editor or write to messages@theatlantic.com.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/dna-test-misattributed-paternity/562928/
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