Testing one, two, three…

I was an early adopter of DNA testing. I took my first DNA test in December 2012 with Ancestry. I couldn’t wait to see my ethnicities! The testing pool was smaller in the early days when many folks hadn’t tested yet. Ethnicities were lumped together. My results came up with over 80% of British/Irish together. No surprise there. Mom and Dad were both primarily of British ancestry. The remainder was German and French. That made sense with our tree. No bells went off; nothing was unusual. I was amused with it and promptly forgot about it.

At age three, on Thanksgiving 1968, with my brothers and sisters
(other family members hidden for privacy)

From my journal, I recalled my motive for asking my brother to test:

I had done the Ancestry test. Then 23andMe. Fun, harmless stuff. Then I went to the SCGS (Southern California Genealogical Society) Jamboree in Burbank, California in 2014 and went to a DNA workshop. DNA really isn’t my thing. Too much science for my brain. But it got me thinking I should ask my siblings to take a test to see what kind of ethnicity we each inherited. I don’t look much like my siblings.

I asked my brother who lives closest to me to take the test. He is the oldest and since Dad passed away in 2009, my brother would probably have a lot of similarities that Dad would.

This would be fun to have the rest of my siblings tested and compare. And then ask Mom to test too.

Of course, I certainly wouldn’t call what happened next “fun.” In a way, I look at that naive woman I was, and I want to protect her and warn her that she will never be the same afterward. I would also like to lift her up and tell her she is stronger than she thinks. I’d promise her that she will get to the other side of this at some point.

There was a time after I discovered the truth that I wished with all my heart that I had never taken a DNA test. It was just too painful. I didn’t know how I could ever live with it. I thought I could have lived happily for the rest of my life without knowing. But, of course, that would mean somewhere down the line, my children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren would discover something that didn’t quite add up in our family tree. And anyone who could tell the story to clear it up would be long gone.

So, it was meant to be that I found out when I did, at the time of my life that I did. I don’t think I would have been able to handle it when I was in my 20s as a new mother, with my Dad and biological father both still living. There was a reason in the universe that I was 50 years old with grown daughters, my Dad and bio father both gone, and my mother still alive. At least now, I could learn the story and tell my daughters the truth about their ancestry.

From my journal, looking back as I went into a panic that first night (more on that in an upcoming post.):

 No one could know. Not until I could process it. Handle it. Get all my facts straight.

I contacted my Dad’s first cousin. She is the only living relative on Dad’s generation. Her mother and Dad’s mother were sisters. She was into genealogy too. I asked her if I sent her a kit would she send in a sample. I told her it was a fun thing. I would send her the results and she could see how much “whatever” she was. God forgive me for not being completely honest with an 84 year old woman. But I really wanted to compare her and I to see if we shared any DNA.

In the meantime, I also asked my other siblings to test but didn’t tell them why. They knew I, the family genealogist, was always interested in kooky family history things. So they didn’t even question me about it.

I waited for the results to come in one by one.

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This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you start at my first post of the series HERE.