"My dad was 14 when I was born and my mum was 20, years later he got *unlived* by his best friend"

our slash ass credit redditors whose life was changed by a DNA test what happened I ordered one of the earlier versions of 23andme back in 2013 looked through some fun generic trays and ancestral history then forgot about it for a few years until one day in 2017 when I received an email at a close relative was discovered the connection listed them as a first cousin which was weird because I thought that I had no immediate cousins and no one in my family recognized a name a few months later another one was added and finally a third a couple of months after that turns out my uncle has multiple illegitimate children and they all took DNA tests around the same time all three of them found out that he was their dad thanks to my initial result connecting them and working together to compare family history their older thirties to forties so it's more of a peace of mind at this point in their lives but I'm glad that they were able to find their real dad through the experience my life wasn't changed but I was contacted by someone on 23andme wondering how we were connected since he thought he knew all his second cousins in the area I recognized the surname as that of my biological grandfather I answered this man's question by detailing how my grandfather had gotten my grandmother pregnant out of wedlock then it turned out he was already married with the family forcing my father to be put up for adoption I guess the guy didn't like that story had blocked me my family has been just my mom and I and our dogs for a while now I took one and pretty much got exactly what I expected my mom took Claire's and it came back that she wasn't Jewish at all this was extremely confusing because her father and his family escaped the Nazis her father was definitely Jewish she immediately knew he wasn't her father it was horrible at first my mom was devastated as I'm sure you can imagine she lost part of her identity she looked at the part that connects you to people in your family and found someone listed under close relative whom she had never heard of this person was listed as first cousin for me to my mom's parents and spoken to her in decades so there was no asking them she reached out to the close relative and found out that his parents lived next door to my mom's parents before my mom turned one my mom remembered a rumor that one of her cousins told her when she was little her mom had an affair with the next-door neighbor turns out the next door neighbor was my mom's real father he has three kids around my mom's age one is three months younger than her and three kids about thirty years younger as you can see he got around long he passed away a few years back but the family welcomed us with open arms when we met them it was an instant connection like we had been a part of their lives forever they brought out pictures and boy does my mom look like her father they told me that my grandpa would be so proud of me and my accomplishments some of our interests and talents aligned they told us we look like the rest of the family and we did we never had that before my mom and I went from only having each other to her having six siblings having nieces and nephews and me having aunts and uncles and tons of cousins and a family reunion to go to each summer I have family in five different states little cousins to teach and big cousins to look up to my mom has a huge family and so many people to call and talk to and to ask Larr how she's doing it's amazing to watch weddings birthday parties and lots of love funerals - one of my uncle's passed away but I got a chance to meet him before he did I think he was waiting to meet my mom and me he was an amazing person and even though I didn't know him for long I loved him my family has turned this into the best experience of my life and my mom's to edit spacing I was adopted at birth back in the 1960s I had a happy childhood but both of my adoptive parents died of cancer in the early 1990s I sent my DNA into ancestry in the hope that I'd make contact with one or both of my birth parents literally all I had was my mother's name on the birth certificate and my father's name on a photocopied set of adoption paperwork when I first checked the result I was disappointed to find only a few third and fourth cousins I mailed the ones who looked as if they visited the site regularly it turned out they were all related to my birth father he had also died sometime in the early 1990s then one day I logged back onto the site and found that I'd matched with the first cousin I sent a tentative email saying that I had been given up as a baby and appreciated that it was a sensitive family matter and that if he didn't want to get involved I was fine with that but could he give me some more information about my family he replied the next day and told me he was my uncle and that my mother was still alive she had given birth to me as a teenager but had reluctantly had to give me up as her family was religious and birth dad was a dead mate he sent her a card saying sorry and a 20 pound note when he heard she'd had me then married someone else I made contact with her by email earlier this year it turns out I have a half-brother and sister as well a nieces and nephews we are taking things slowly at the moment but after so many years it's amazing to have a mother again we have the same likes dislikes and politics I'm hoping to meet up with her next year my brother and I did 23andme tests and when we went to compare our results it said he was only my half-brother we thought we were full blood-related our whole lives turns out our biological mum who has since abandoned us and passed away cheated on my dad and made him believe the baby was his my dad was 20 at the time and it's changed the whole course of his life he loves my brother as his own but damn my dad and his two siblings found out they all have different fathers one other brother has already passed so we'll never know if there was the fourth baby daddy or not my dad is a junior and named his son the third after a man who it turns out is no relation our last name is an Irish name and we're 0% Irish as his plyo father was likely 100% German my grandmother was a quiet devout Catholic woman as far as I always knew so it's been wild finding out she had some major secrets my friend did a test to see what her ancestry is recently she ended up discovering who her dad actually isn't learning there her dad is still alive not dead like her mother said so that's something I had a very rare cancer as a child I was always worried that any children I might have would suffer the same fate when my wife and I got serious about Parenthood I learned that there was a genetic test for the type of cancer I had I submitted a sample and it came back completely negative for any cancer markers meaning my kids would have essentially no chance of developing the same disease this was a huge relief but at the same time it meant that my cancer was completely spontaneous which changed an incredibly rare cancer into an almost impossible cancer this profoundly Illustrated just how little control we humans have over our fate my mom took a DNA test and she chose the option that allowed her to be connected with family members she has a half-brother who was put up for adoption as he was the result of a fling her father had with an old girlfriend but the two were forced to break up because she was heavily religious and teen pregnancy was frowned upon so she also had to give up the baby my mother's side of the family never knew about him before last year my grandfather also managed to keep the secret for 60 plus years which is kind of impressive he's a pretty cool dude and he looks and acts almost exactly like my grandfather did I'm so glad that my mother and him found each other I couldn't imagine what it would be like to miss out on growing up with one of your siblings I'm also happy for him for being able to find his biological family turns out he lived 20 minutes away from us for his whole life and we had no idea we even went to the same family doctor we also ended up helping him find and contact his mother who gave him up and everything turned out pretty good the only downside is after finding out about the whole thing his wife got jealous of him spending time with a lot of his long-lost siblings Beach and they ended up getting divorced but he seems happier without her and he just recently started dating another woman I had been searching for my biological father for 10 years when I took my DNA test and got the results back I found out a my bio father was 14 when I was born B my mom was 20 when I was born C my father died when he was 24 d he was murdered by his best friend e that there was a lifetime original TV series with an episode dedicated to his murderess that I had a half-brother G my half-brother didn't know the person he called dad his whole life wasn't his dad Q existential crisis my entire life I was told I was heavily Native American so much so in fact my granddad was a Cherokee chief and he gave all of his grandkids Native American names I have 0% Native American and I'm mostly Irish and Scandinavian I dunno man my 23andme also showed up no native that's my grandmother on dad's side is literally half blood tested and reservation registered it's pretty wild we are all related by blood too I also showed up Portuguese and no one else in my family did but still enough DNA to say yet he's your dad he's your brother she's your mom etc my life wasn't changed but it was made a little more complete found out along with my dad when I was a teenager that my grandpa wasn't my real grandpa my grandma who survived her husband back in early 90s tailed us late in her life in the mid 2000s that her husband was sterile so she slept with this other guy let's call him Tom Thompson my dad had no idea and was in his late 40s when this news came to us for five years off and on I searched all public records to find any trace of this Tom Thompson and found nothing my grandma was going senile so although I believe she had an affair I didn't believe all the info she spewed out about Tom being a war pilot and having done amazing adventures did my DNA test just for the hell of it last year and found out that Tom Thompson does exist and he was a war pilot and everything else she said about him checked out I'm now connected to my cousins on my dad's side and it's been really warming to get closer to a family never knew I was adopted and received a connection to my birth mother's brother through ancestry.com I was hesitant to reach out because of all the reunion horror stories I've heard throughout my life but I ended up doing it anyway my uncle asked me to call him right away and now I have three siblings who want me in their life aunts uncles and gazillion cousins who threw a big welcome home party for me this summer my birth mom's cousin told me she had been looking for me but didn't know how to go about it because of her age and lack of ability to use the Internet however she never told her children I existed I guess something that generation just didn't do but anyway happy story I bought my ex-husband and I 23mm kids for Christmas one year I am part black that was a shocker I don't claim it or anything though I'm Snow White he was adopted all he knew from the adoption agency was that his mother was married and at the time he was conceived but her husband was not his father my husband was the product of an affair it was really neat when his results came back and he saw profiles of third and fourth cousins first time in his life he ever saw a picture of his blood relatives one day he got a new match from someone it said he was likely her uncle as it turns out it was his half-sister as it turns out his mother had four kids with four different baby daddies he had two older siblings and one that is 10 years younger than him his mother kept his other siblings but for whatever reason put him up for adoption also as it turns out his mother is crazy as a bedbug he eventually had to block her from calling because she was nuts his adoptive family wasn't very good there was some abuse but his bio siblings have all told him they think he was the lucky one for having been adopted apparently I have no Native American like I was told growing up I'm 98% British Irish and there's 0.1% of Ashkenazi Jew the biggest life change came from the realization that I had extra Neanderthal DNA which gives me the superhuman ability to sneeze less after eating dark chocolate I can't believe this sparked so much discussion I revisited my 23andme to see how my Neanderthal DNA ranks compared to some others I have 280 variants which is more than 58% of other folks so does anyone out there with more variants really have less backward edit to pack it up people this guy has more Neanderthal DNA than 99% of the population growing up I had two half brothers and three half sisters from my parents previous marriages I was told that my father's wife had cheated on him with another woman and he caught her and that was the end of that and my mom told me that he had caught her husband with another woman and so they divorced they got married and had me hence I was the only child they had together the sister closest to me in age she is six years older than me got a DNA test done and lo and behold she is my full sister we had asked my father numerous times after my mother died if she was my full sister and he denied it till his dying day she didn't get a test done until after he passed away sir my parents were having an affair for at least six years it really hasn't changed my life though I only have a relationship with my one brother and that's just fine with me this is not exactly the type of DNA test people would expect that I've suffered from pretty awful mental health issues since I was a child eating disorders general social anxiety OCD depression and as of a few years ago psychosis by the time I was 16 I had been on well over a dozen different mental health medications with little to no help and a lot of side effects my mom schizophrenia kicked in when I was two years old she had it under control for a while but as I grew up I basically watched her take over her started with little things like putting the TV remote inside the fridge next I was having to put out fires and clean up her burn wounds because she'd try to cook directly on the stovetop no pot pan and eventually led to me having to lock myself in a room because the voices had told her she had to kill me so when I turned 18 and started showing very mild signs of psychosis symptoms myself my doctor was very diligent in it under control as fast as possible treatment was extensive but part off getting better involved going through a clinical trial for my condition that involved having my DNA tested I don't know exactly how it works but they used my DNA to find out what medication would be the perfect fit for me to help with my mental health without having to deal with negative side effects I still suffer from mental health but more so anxiety symptoms than anything else and have graduated from the psychosis intervention program I was in since my symptoms are almost entirely gone in that department for a long time one of my biggest fears was that my son would grow up like I did watching my mom's sickness take control but now I truly feel as if I am the one that is in control and it's a great feeling ro you made it to the end you're ducking mad lad I'll cut you a deal smash like and subscribe for more curated content might it's free and that's a great price

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Id: 7WxLYirwvbU

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019