Ancestry tests tend to reveal some rather surprising information, which is arguably one of the main reasons quite a few people take—or show interest in—them. According to YouGov, roughly two-in-ten Americans have taken a mail-in DNA test; out of those who haven’t, nearly half say they’d like to if it was free of charge.
Data suggests that the main reasons for taking such a test are wanting to learn about where their family comes from, seeking information about their health or family medical history, and making connections with previously unknown relatives.
It’s arguably safe to assume that every test can provide surprising information; however, for some people, the results reveal more than they could have seen coming. A redditor recently turned to the ‘Ask Reddit’ community seeking to hear horror stories regarding things people found out with the help of ancestry tests, and quite a few netizens were willing to share. Scroll down to find their answers on the list below and see just how unexpected the results can be.
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My grandfather did not die when my dad was 4 like we always thought. Instead, he faked his death, walked 1500km to the other end of the country, married a sixteen old girl and had 7 more children.
All the while leaving my grandmother to bring up the 6 children he had with her and his 2 children from an earlier marriage. Worst part was that he used the same names for the second batch of kids as his first lot.
That is absolutely appalling. It's bad enough he walked away leaving his children. But to start again,have more children and then name them after the ones he left behind..just rakes the p**s
Well, it's not *my* horror story. But ... police arrested the guy who murdered my mother--decades ago--because someone in the killer's family used one of those tests.
The submitted DNA allowed them to get a match on a grandparent... and a couple of years later, when they subpoena'd his DNA to corroborate their other police-work, he confessed.
It took 40 years, but I imagine this is a hell of a horror story for him. He wasn't ever a suspect before the DNA match.
My parents and I all did dna tests and I manage their profiles- theirs were done before mine was available. They each got a panicked message from a woman on the other side of the world who had matched as their daughter. She was distraught, thinking her parents had lied to her for her entire life.
When I logged in to my account, it showed that I had no dna matches with my parents which I knew to be wrong, plus the fact my mum was a young child when this woman was born made it clear the company had swapped our results. Customer service just said ‘oh well’ and offered a new test. My family found it funny but that poor woman who had spent several days freaking out thinking her life was a lie before I got her messages and responded.
So wonder how many of the "married cousins" or any other was wrong also?
About three years ago, I took a 23andMe test because I always had suspected (or maybe hoped) that my sister’s dad was also my dad—he was in my life from the beginning because my “bio” dad was a piece of work.
Well he isn’t my father, and neither is the man who I grew up believing was my dad. My sister in law did some digging and found my real biological father. He’s the one who reached out; did a dna test, wanted to meet me and my children and introduce me to my siblings.
For a while I held off because it was such a shock and I felt like it was moving really quickly. 4 months after we had first started talking, we met and I was welcome with open arms by EVERYONE. And even though it was still a little weird and I was super nervous, I am glad I took the chance to meet him.
He died from covid complications just 8 months after we found out he was my real dad.
Aw sh*t. I was just getting emotional from the happy story and than that ending emoted me for other reasons.
My cousin trying to scam the government claiming minuscule percentage Native American submitted a sample. What did happen was four children he fathered with four women other than current wives found him.
My father is from a country that is literally split in half. Half the country is ethnically Greek and the other half is ethnically Turkish. There is a long history of bad blood and our capital is split down the middle. We are culturally Greek but thanks to my brother's impulse-decision DNA test, we learned that we are ethnically more Turkish. Not really a horror story, but goes to show how stupid war is.
Let me help you, “My father is from Cyprus….where” what’s with the ambiguity?!
The wife and I both got tested. She had an incredible background. North American First Nations. South American. Portugal and all over Europe. It was so cool!
When I got mine back it said.
You’re Scottish mate.
EDIT: in no way did I mean to imply I was unhappy with my results. I just found it hilarious if you compared the findings.
I did ancestry dna a few years ago. Found out my father sexually assaulted over 50 women.
My sweetie's mother had an affair after kid #2 and ended up pregnant with #3. His dad (mother's husband) didn't bond with him the way he did with the older siblings (or the three from his previous relationship) for that reason. It was quite obvious as he got older, too, being blonde, blue eyed, skinny, and a high academic achiever vs. being overweight with dark hair, brown eyes, and not-so-academic like his five older siblings.
"Dad" died fifteen years ago and never had a good relationship with my hubby because he didn't care to invest much in a kid that wasn't his. Last December during my pregnancy, we decided it was time for him to do 23andMe so he could have some proof in hand before connecting with his mother's AP, alleged bio-dad.
And it's a damn good thing he did. Turns out that his siblings' dad was actually his real dad this whole time. Genetics are just kind of a crapshoot sometime, and the affair was total a red herring.
I actually found out I have the cancer gene from one of these tests (BRCA1) and my whole family was tested as well - my sister, brother and dad all have it too. We now get preventative cancer testing but who knows it could have very well saved one of our lives down the road - not really horror story overall, but when I first found out it was extremely scary as I was just expecting to get some entertaining report back and instead found out I had a serious health condition
No it's not a health condition yet! Having the gene in itself is not a healfh condition. OP needs to monitor this, but should NOT develop a sense of being sick, being ill, having a condition. The mental health aspects of physical health conditions, or risks, are also very important. This is something one should discuss with their therapist, to figure out how they feel about it, and how they can find a sense of strength and optimism.
My kid took the test, and 8 years later, introduced me to a half-sister I never knew I had. My father had remarried and had a son I knew about, but this younger sister took us both by surprise. And the father in all this has passed on, so... I got a sister now!
I worked in healthcare. I have heard so many NPE stories (non-parental events; basically discovering unexpected parents and/or relatives in your family tree).
A protip for parents and/or family who are still hiding genetic secrets: the era of being able to hide these things has been over for a very, very long time. I strongly suggest you come clean on your own terms before your child or relatives inevitably find out through a DNA test -- and nowadays it's not a matter of if, it's when. 🤷
It's absolutely a matter of "if" because most people aren't obsessing over their DNA at all. The majority of people haven't ever taken such a test.
Found out my Dad isn’t my biological father. My Dad’s sister gave me a DNA test for the holidays. I ended up taking it and discovered I wasn’t related to my aunt, aka not related to my Dad. But I have 10+ half-siblings with whoever my sperm donor dad is. They gaslit me for months saying the results were inaccurate, called me a liar to my sister, all this garbage. Then finally admitted it was true after 6+ months of lying. We now have a terrible relationship.
I'm adopted and was hoping to find out family info and hopefully who my birth parents were.
Found out my birth father sexually abused the kids of one of his girlfriends and is currently serving 45 years. Also he committed multiple armed robberies in the past. On top of that he's into a bunch of weird Africans are the real native americans beliefs that's he's using to try and get out of prison. Not sure he actually believes all of it but he did a DNA test in the first place to try and claim to be native.
That whole side of my gene pool is into weird religious stuff. Plus the guy he thought was his father isn't. His mom had an affair and his real dad/my grandfather had recently also just got out of prison for attempted murder then died from covid. Pretty sure he was in the drug trade in Miami in the 80s as well.
Safe to say I want zero contact from anyone on that side.
My other half is native and the horror stories are just all the teams they went through in residential schools and literally being moved to Indian territory and being given the last name orphan because all their family died.
Also my birth mother was basically stolen from her family and given to a white family and none of her siblings even know she exists.
I am beyond lucky I didn't have to grow up in any of that environment.
This sounds awful but I'd be interested in mum's side in this person's case.
My birth mom banged out six more kids after she abandoned me and LEFT ONE OF THEM to DIE in the desert alone at 10. ( She made it and got fostered where we learned about each other) Stop having and abandoning kids. F**k you lady.
one of my best friends called me one day in a panic. she did one with her father for fun. he is not her father. turns out mummy has many skeletons in the closet. bio dad never knew she existed and was SO happy to find her. we now doubt her sister’s father is her father. just a gigantic domino effect of not good.
Not a horror story, but certainly unexpected…
My sister did 23andme and matched with a niece. Apparently my brother 40m, unbeknownst to him, has a daughter. From her age we can tell she must’ve been born when my brother was in was in high school. The bio mom must’ve given her up for adoption without telling my brother. No bad feelings, they would’ve been so young (like 15 years old), so it was for the best.
I'd have bad feelings if I were that brother. I would have wanted to know!
not me but my coworker found out his bio dad was not who he thought he was. turns out he is one of the many many children of fertility doctor Donald Cline (there’s a Netflix doc about him if you’ve never heard about him)
Short rundown of who that is: Absolutely screwed situation with a doctor who worked at a fertility clinic and instead of using donor sperm/doing artificial insemination with the egg and sperm that was presented for that, he used his own. It was a big scandal back when it came out.
Summary: Got their parents arrested for murder.
It's not my story but one known around Ireland. In the 1980s, a dead baby was found on a beach in South Kerry. It had been stabbed many, many times. A massive investigation occurred, and there were appeals for the mother to come forward. In Ireland's dark past, we have treated women and especially unmarried mothers terribly. A woman on the opposite side of the county was wrongly accused of killing the baby and dumping it 3 hours away. She had given birth to a baby who was stillborn, which they buried on their farmland. Her family was coerced into signing false confessions by our police force that she had killed the baby in South Kerry, even though she did not.
Fast forward to 2022, there was suddenly a middle-aged married couple from South Kerry who were arrested on suspicion of killing the baby. Their child, who was in their 20s, submitted their DNA to an ancestory site. They got hits, and one of them was for murdered baby found on the beach. They haven't been convicted the trial hasn't happened yet.
One of my great-uncles got contacted by a woman who said he was her father, after she took a test through one of those sites. He denied it vehemently, and it caused some strife in the family until it was revealed that it was actually his older brother who was the father. Turns out he was kind of a cad in his youth, and never found out until now.
My best friends Father is my Father. We were 40 when we found out. We were born seven months apart meaning her Mother (my Mom’s best friend) was very very pregnant when I was conceived.
Uh oh, I need more details, like were either of their moms in a relationship with this guy and did either of the moms know that the other was sleeping with him?
I've got 2.
My friend knew that she was the result of a sperm donor. She signed up for 23andMe and ended up finding that she has a half-sister! Then another. And another. *And another.* I think she is up to over 2 dozen now, and almost all of them are half-sisters, and they all look so much alike. They have tracked down their biological father, and I guess he donated sperm in multiple states over the course of some years. He wasn't intentionally trying to have dozens of kids out there, but the rules of capping-out didn't really catch him because of moving states.
The other one is more direct - one of my family members got tested and found a cousin. But that cousin had a single mother, born out in California (we live in the midwest) and nobody has any idea who their father is. Probably one of my uncles that passed away, or something along those lines.
Based on my family history (everybody cheating on everybody, tons of babies in high school, kids not knowing that their fathers are not their real fathers, or kids being raised by their grandparents when their "sister" is really their mom) - I refuse to sign up. I just don't want to know, it would just stir up c**p. Ignorance is bliss.
I actually prefer the c**p stir. If everyone finds out, it HAS happened in their family, it takes the last of the stigma off of all of that, and when similar circumstances happen in this day and age, everyone can be honest about it, and we learn how to talk productively. Plus, rapists might be more dissuaded if they know there is no hiding.
My sister found out that half our mom's side of the family, are products of incest. Up and until, a few great aunts and uncles.
My mom's generation has been really big into tracing our family tree. Turns out grandpa had two families (that we know of) that lived down the street from each other. If that wasn't enough to discourage my family from uncovering skeletons, a few years later one of my cousins took a 23 & me test to find out that our maternal grandfather is also her dad :/
Edit: for those asking, the cousin in question is the daughter of my mother's sister... So we're thinking some downright unholy things went on. Unclear as my grandfather and aunt are both dead now
Found out that I’m married to my cousin.
First cousin sounds weird because names should've sound familiar to other family members - any other cousin, meh - doesn't matter.
Grew up pretty normal for the most part, divorced parents but happy life. Wanted to know how my ancestry since I don’t know past my paternal great grandmothers maiden name. Got the results this past Christmas Eve.
Found a half sister (along with 2 other half siblings) that is too old to be my dads (he’d have been a literal child) and put 2 and 2 together and it turns out my dad is not my father.
Can’t ask my mom, she’s dead. My bio father is dead and no one knows anything and the people I have told (no one on my dad’s side, too scared to break that news) are shocked.
I know nothing about this man but his name and his mom’s name, who is also gone, I believe.
I just find out this big ol bombshell so suddenly and then hit a dead end just as quickly. It was an interesting and juicy Christmas for sure.
I’m 55% Swiss though which is random as hell!
Not that much, Switzerland sent the poor people to America because it was cheaper than helping them ...
My mother was one of seven children of an abusive mother and beloved father. Twenty grandchildren (my cousins, my brother and me). Through testing some cousins have determined that at least three of the seven children were not the biological offspring of my grandmother’s husband. We aren’t telling all the other cousins until the last uncle dies (he’s 93).
So...it might be a while it might not,but hopefully you uncle lives a happy rest of his life till the time comes.
Found out (doing the Ancestry DNA) that my paternal grandmother cheated on her husband with her (also married) family doctor. My dad has brothers and a sister that he never knew about. Dad says that the doctor must have known. He looks EXACTLY like his brothers, and the Doc use to always call him "son" during his appointments. His dad (that raised him) also must have known, cause he treated him like c**p, and made backhanded comments that, knowing what we know now, tell us he knew. Or suspected at the very least.
Not a horror story, but the opposite; my mom always told me my father wasn’t my biological father. I hated her for telling me and didn’t want to believe it. A few years after I did 23andme, I checked my “shared DNA” list and saw a cousin I was close to, from my paternal side. I was so relieved and happy and thankful I never told anyone what my mom told me.
We alway knew my grandma had my dad before she got married but through ancestry we found out she actually had another baby, after my dad but before she got married (different dads)
Someone in my grandparent’s generation gave up a baby for adoption 60 years ago and our family still doesn’t know/won’t admit who it was. She only joined 23&Me because her daughters encouraged her to find out more about her birth family for health reasons. We now have family members who won’t take the test.
I would say that the family members refusing to ever take a test, is a great way to start a list of suspects. The process of elimination can help to get to the truth.
I thought I was all French...Turns out I'm very....ENGLISH!!!!
Here's a can of worms, (pass the malt vinegar)...The UK has many peoples, mostly Celts. Many who've conveniently forgotten their tribal names. The Normans and Angles were assimilated and most of the Germanic genes come from Scandinavia.
I thought I was Irish and Scottish but born in England. Turns out part of my Irish is French (Redmond = Roi Monde, Huguenots) and the Scottish is mostly Irish (Limerick via Elgin). Persecution, there was a lot of it about
I've never taken the 23&me test, nor do I intend to, but I did have a great-aunt who was super into genealogy. According to her research, we're mostly English, some French and some Cherokee on my mother's side. I know a lot of white people claim Cherokee heritage enough that some folks roll their eyes, but at least my mother's family hails from the original area around north Georgia. Apparently we're also descended from Pierre Chastain, a Huguenot (and yes, possibly distant relatives to the actress Jessica Chastain, whom I never heard of until I was reading up on the ancestor.)
Not via 23&Me or anything like that, but after my Grandmother passed away my Mum found some documents which led her to believe that Grandma might’ve given a child up for adoption.
She spent quite a bit of time and effort investigating and eventually confirmed her suspicion and tracked her half-brother down living in another state.
As often happens though, they had very little in common. He’d had a pretty rough childhood and compensated for that via alcohol. However he latched on to the idea of a new family pretty hard and now Mum gets to enjoy semi-regular drunken phone calls from her half brother.
And it could be a good initiative for him to go sober if he ever wants to one of these days.
Finding out they were hacked revealing ancestry, DNA data, birth dates, locations and profile pictures.
I have never done one of these tests and never will. I just don't trust where all the information goes
Not exactly sure if its a horror story but here you go.
Had been seeing a girl for about 2 years when she fell pregnant. There were some strange things happening around that time, and I had a gut feeling that something was off. Spoke to a good friend of mine about it and he was adamant that I get a DNA test done. Said that he'd seen blokes find out that "their" kid wasnt theirs years later, but it was too late because they'd grown attached. Supported my partner through the pregnancy anyway.
Come to when the childs born and I just had this feeling that it wasnt mine. Sometimes you just know things. This was dueing covid times so things were tricky. I ordered the tests and after some time was able to get the samples, send them off and get the results. It was an ordeal, to be frank. All in all I took care of that child for 6 months, and all that time I had to keep appearances up. Had to look like a good father, partner, and like things were fine. Got the results and it wasnt mine.
That was over 3 years ago. Still think about it everyday.
Not really a horror story but my Aunt is right into the ancestry and DNA thing. Last year, she had a young woman message her through one of the websites and say she thinks she's her Auntie. . Most of the family found out and we were having a lot of fun trying to figure out who the dad was (grandparents had 8 kids). We narrowed it down to an uncle who was usually on some adventure somewhere and becomes uncontactable for weeks or months at a time. Basically the whole family knew and were just waiting for him to pop his head up to tell him. A few weeks later he makes contact and gets told he has a kid. As the next few months roll by, a few more of his kids are popping up. Turns out my uncle was a sperm donor and didn't know he had any kids. Those kids are just now reaching adulthood which is why they're looking now. Could still be plenty more to come.
How would a sperm donor not "know he had any kids?" What does a sperm donor think they do with the sperm he donates?
Not a horror story, but a few years ago, I did 23&Me for fun. I'm half Filipina and white, and although I think I have some of my mom's features, I look nothing like my dad at all. I have a younger brother, and he looks like a dead-on mix between my two parents... I thought it would be fun if I found out I was the odd ball with an exotic bio father (I did not get along with my dad as a child due to abuse, etc.)
Did the test and found out I'm exactly what I should be, half Filipina and half white (European and Irish decent.) Got linked to a ton of people that shared < 1% DNA with me so thought nothing of it and life went on.
Then, a couple years later, I got a message on there from a woman who matched 28% DNA with me! After some back and forth, we concluded that we have the same bio dad. She's only one month younger than me. She was an orphan who was adopted as a toddler from the Philippines and the only background the orphanage gave her was that her bio dad was in the US military and that her bio mom was a very young bar hostess. My dad was in the navy up until I was a baby, and my parents actually split back when I was a teenager because dude cheated on my mom and got another woman pregnant.
Told my family about my new discovery of having a half sis. My bro was shocked and kind of excited. My mom straight up said she was not surprised and said I might even have dozens of half siblings all over the world!
Knowing my daughter's father as I do, I wouldn't be surprised if she has a lot more half siblings than she knows about. She also has the same suspicions and has so far stayed away from doing any DNA tests as she currently doesn't want to know.
Found out that my (ex) girlfriend was actually my cousin.
In college I became a DJ at the student radio station and ended up meeting her through that. We became close friends almost instantly, and after a few months she built up the courage to ask me out. When we started seriously talking and learning about each other, we kept finding more and more things we had in common.
She was born in the same small town (~4k people) as my grandmother and her middle name is my grandmother’s name. “Wow, cool coincidence!”
We both have a family history of BPD and Raynaud’s. “Hey, we’ll know how to take care of each other!” Laying our arms next to each other they looked nearly identical. “It’s like we were made for each other!”
After about a month of talking she invited me to her apartment to cuddle and talk while she did some schoolwork. Things got heated and we were making out when we both had this moment of shared deja-vu like this had happened before. We made out some more but didn’t do anything further before she had to leave to pick up her roommate.
The next day she blew up on me over text, blocked me on everything, basically just gone from my life and I was so hurt and confused because I really liked her, but she’d been pretty inconsistent (BPD) and it ended up for the best.
A few months later and I’m talking to my Uncle before Christmas dinner. He’s a big genealogy nerd and has hundreds of years of our family tree plotted out on Ancestry. When I joined the conversation he was talking about a gravesite he visited from some relative in the 1700s. At this point I’m not really paying attention and just sipping my drink while everyone else talks, but eventually he started talking about my grandmother and her siblings. I’m learning about my great aunt and suddenly I feel sick because it all slides into place.
My great aunt is my ex’s grandmother. My ex is named after MY grandmother, who is her grandmother’s sister. We have the same bone structure and our families have the same predisposed medical conditions because they’re the same family.
I haven’t contacted her to tell her, because how do you tell someone that kind of news? “Heyyy, you know how we were dating and almost had sex? Well I’m glad we didn’t because you’re my cousin haha!” And I’m absolutely never telling my family because it just feels like the kind of thing I should take to the grave; but hey, reddit can know.
TL;DR: My grandmother and my ex girlfriend’s grandmother were sisters.
This isn't the big deal this person makes it out to be. Cousin marriages are normal in many cultures and legal in most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#/media/File:CousinMarriageWorld.svg
Not me, but I have 2 from people I know personally:
First one is my aunt & uncle were married for years and had multiple kids. Eventually my uncle passed, a few years go by, and my aunt receives a facebook message from a random girl, saying she found out through 23andMe that they were relatives. Come to find out my uncle had been cheating on my aunt, and the random girl was his biological daughter. Probably not an uncommon story, but definitely a horror for my aunt to find out he was living a lie for 25+ years.
Second story is crazy but wholesome also- my friend found out she was adopted through doing 23andMe! Crazy part is that growing up, she was always told she was a “twin” (has a sister the same age, they looked enough alike not to be questioned as “fraternal”), but truthfully they were never biologically related at all! Her adoptive parents never told them about it…then one year after her parents had died, she receives a DNA kit as a gift just for fun, and finds out the truth. The wholesome part though is that she was able to connect with her biological father, who apparently never even knew about her, but always wanted a child! So she gained an extra parent figure, and he gained the daughter he always hoped for. Odd story, but ultimately a really nice outcome!
This confuses me. How would it comes up that they were related to aunt if it was uncles child, and uncle was married to aunt, therefore not biologically related?
My maiden name is extremely German sounding but I have not a trace of German blood. I match with people with my maiden name so my paternity is not in question but somewhere something is amiss. I have my family tree documented back to the 1500s in Germany so maybe someone was adopted or illegitimate and it’s just not documented.
This is the danger of these tests, they present themselves as a definitive answer to your ancestry, and mislead people to what the results actually are telling them. Firstly, the geographic results are based on where they see clusters of a particular gene, so depending on the sample size of a particular area, your results may change as they get more data. Secondly, the test only tells you they can see from your ancestry in your sample, it does not tell you what is not in your overall ancestry. Each parent is only passing on half of their DNA, and that DNA will only be half of each of their parents. After a few generations it's very possible that a certain branch of your ancestry is completely absent from your DNA for this test.
My cousin's kids bought her a kit for a Christmas present just for fun. We. My cousin does the test and discovers she has a half sister living in the same town and they have the same biological their fathers match.
Long story short, it turns out her biological father was not her who raised her. That man was a devoted dad and raised her and left everything to her when he passed from Covid. My aunt - who had divorced him when my cousin was little - was was confronted but is suffering from severe dementia and only recognizes the name of my cousins "bio dad" as someone who used to give her jukebox money when they were teens.
So either my aunt knew that my cousins dad was not the man who raised her but has since forgotten because of the dementia, or she never realized the guy was my cousins real dad all along.
What makes it hard are all parties are either deceased or have dementia so I doubt Iltheyll ever get a real story.
My mom is an orphan. Did the test. Discovered she's a 5th generation orphan on the maternal side (yes... Her, her mom, her mom, her mom, and her mom's mom... all orphans). Her maternal side grandfather went to prison for 5 years for arson when he was caught burning his house down for insurance money in the Great depression in the 1930s.
Her paternal side revealed her grandpa was murdered on a bridge over a river in Kentucky smuggling whiskey in the prohibition. His murderer served only 4 years in prison and it is still a case precedent in Kentucky's court of appeals.
Both of these stories/events happened within 5 years of each other and one state apart.
This all makes sense if you knew my mom. She stabbed my dad in the heart with a fork and then tried to run him over with her Dodge dart demon in the '70s.
And now all the crazy s**t I've done in my life suddenly makes sense! Genetics!
All my life, I was told my maternal Great-Grandfather was 1/2 Cherokee, he had blue-black hair, tawny skin & sky-high cheekbones. Even in his 89s his hair was gray, not white. On my Father's side, there was a take where one of the sons took an African woman as his wife...
My result 97% Irish, Scotch & English, 2.3% Scandinavian. I'm so **WHITE**, I glow in the dark!
(the remaining .7% was "Inconclusive".)
Still possible great grandpa's story was at least partly true. People don't have much DNA left from a great grandparent and it's possible there is none left after 4 generations.
Not a horror story, just made me sad. I did it b/c I'm adopted and I've always wanted to find relatives. Found a couple of 1st cousins. I sent a letter to the relative, telling my story briefly. After many months, she contacted me and filled me in on some family history, including that they tole my birth father, but he wants no contact. I have 3 half-siblings that I have not been able to contact. The cousin sent me some photos, and I look exactly like several members of the family.
Not really a horror story but I always thought and was lead to believe that my mtdna would be whiter than white and British. Nope, quite a bit of Italian, Mesopotamian and some central Asian/ Pakistani. F**k knows the story behind all that but my guess is British Empire related.
Not really horror story, just that having Irish Catholic heritage means I have dozens of second and third cousins all over the diaspora on the database, and found a couple of people on there at least so far who shouldn’t be there (ie were secretly adopted out after pre-marital sex). I helped one of them find her birth mother. Bad thing is that due to uncovering these I have now apparently Pissed Off relatives back in Ireland whom I have mostly never met. Oh Well.
It's the past. Can't change what's done. Embrace the history, learn from past behaviors, hug new relatives and love life! You only get one.
We were always told we had Native American ancestry, according to my dna however that’s not the case.
It showed no native dna but did show African, I began getting messages from African American cousins (I’m as pale as a sheet by the way) wanting to know who I was because I showed up in their family tree.
My family were dirt poor sharecroppers so I’m guessing that’s where the common ancestor is to be found.
I've been told it was common to lie about having a half native grandparent or something instead of saying the truth when you had some African heritage.
One of my cousins was not really my cousin. My cousin died in vietnam and this guy that was in his platoon or whatever took his identity.
Edit: This happened years ago and the cousin is much older than me. After some clarification from older relatives, it was my cousin that disappeared and took someone's identity. He was then located by a dna test his kids took and was reunited with our family. Lucky us.
Sis did test and found a half bro, I had this bad feeling straight away that dad wasn't our dad and she dismissed me as paranoid. Looked into the half bro, realised he was a 'family friends' son. Realised family friend was therefore her bio dad. Remaining siblings and I got tested, got the same results one after the other.
Got therapy and confronted mum about half a year later, didn't get any real answers. 2 siblings no longer talk to mum, 1 has a strained relationship and 2 of us live 2 to 3 plane rides away so barely see her.
Discovery was 5 years ago, I really struggled with it. Time, therapy and support has helped. Anyone looking for support, feel free to reach out or join NPE gateway on Facebook to access a closed and private group of us
All of this is reminding me of an Isaac Asimov short story about a machine that allowed people to see the past. The government suppressed it because it would make lying impossible, and the moral of the story was basically that society cannot function without lies.
Edit: it’s called “the dead past” and the moral is more about privacy than specifically lies, but I think it’s still relevant here.
My best friend found a whole new family and was also the product of a brief romance. The man who married her mum and was a deadbeat dad wasn’t actually her real dad. It was very big emotionally charged time.
I did Ancestry and found a half sister who's in between my younger sister and I (same dad). We love our new sister, but I'm sick of my Dad's narcissist BS and went NC.
It's not a true horror story, but it made me sad to learn I was lied to. I was told growing up that I had a very diverse background. Family members would point out features and name the associated heritage. I spent a lot of time researching and connecting to the associated cultures growing up. I was told I was of Native American (of various tribes) heritage and Asian (of various nations) heritage, with the majority of my genetic heritage being Eastern European.
I'm genetically 99.9% Northwestern European. I know genetic heritage isn't a perfect science but I've done some digging into my family history and it seems the most likely explanation is that I come from a long line of white supremacists (confirmed, sadly) and the last couple of generations invented a fake ancestry (the narrative was that my distant female ancestors would cheat on their husbands) to distance themselves from that or make themselves feel special. I wish they would've just unlearned their intense racism instead.
The good news is I've yet to come across any unknown siblings. My father is a cheating POS and I thought there was a good chance he had secret neglected children. That's why I did the test in the first place.
Yes. The realization that you are not the biologically diverse person you thought you were genetically can be a mind fk. I found out at 47. However, despite being almost 95% Irish, I still embrace being raised in a very diverse family that doesn't see color or culture as a reason to judge another person.
Apparently my bio father was a racist alcoholic who was infatuated with the military although he never enlisted. He would routinely imitate naval officers, get caught and do time, wandered from marriage to marriage, usually under a false name, and produced SIX of us children from various women. The 3 sons are dead from drug overdoses in their 30s, the others of us are little old ladies now.
I found out I’m 100% white and only from 3 major countries in Europe. So of course I also found out there was LOTS of incest not nearly as far back as I was hoping.
Not me but a friend. She had no idea who her father was as her mum was being a d**k and not saying anything.
After her mother's death, she decided to do a DNA test and found she has 9 half siblings so far, all with different mothers.
4 of them are the result of rapes back in the 50s and 60s. Most of them didn't know the father. His name is now known but he's long dead.
I don't think that's a case of the mum being a di(k. More likely was also assaulted
That french women cheat so much that the french government banned all DNA tests because they were afraid of the societal effects of so many dads finding out they were not raising their biological offspring.
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It's baffling how these service can operate with minimal oversight on reliability and data management, despite a terrible track record. There have been multiple tests by journalists and researchers where the same sample submitted to different services gave wildly different results (Gizmodo, 2018), or where the same twins' DNA returned inconsistent results from different companies (CBC Canada, 2019). US G.A.O. did an industry review in 2010 and concluded that the data provided by those services is "misleading and of little or no practical use to consumers", while posing very serious concerns on data usage and security, also recording a very high occurrence of DNA samples submitted without consent by people that is not the legitimate owner. Both the British Medical Journal of Sports Medicine and the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information published studies disproving the claims of those tests being able to accurately predict the talents and natural skills of kids.
AncestryDNA, MyHeritage and 23andMe all had at least one major data breach in the last few years, with sensitive data stolen by unknown third parties. The latest occurrence -on December last year- saw 23andMe leaking data about 8 million people including names, relationships, location, and health data. This was just two months after a separate hacking exposed data of about 4 million people, including the publication of names and location of about 150.000 users belonging to sensitive minority groups.
Load More Replies... Or that you found out that the DNA company sold your info to your insurance company..?
My DNA horror story is that we don't know what they are going to do with your dna years down the line but I would guess it will be nothing good for anyone who taken these tests. For all we know if they find something in your DNA that is marketable, you could possibly lose the rights to your own DNA. There's been plenty of books and papers written where this can happen. Look at Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were harvested without consent in the 1950s, and her DNA sequence is being used commercially now, today. Her family had to file a lawsuit to get -some- control over access to the DNA sequence and also to share in the profit that a company was making. That harvesting initially happened SEVENTY years ago. Imagine what they could do now. Imagine seventy years from now. Don't give private companies your DNA, people.
I'm sure the raising families are thrilled that all these adopted kids, and even the sperm-donor kids, make it their life-mission to look for the bio-parent who never ever wanted anything to do with them...
In Switzerland it is, as far as my knowledge goes, actually illegal for the clinics to tell a kid who their sperm donor is IF he refuses contact. And if such a kid violates this rule, there can be legal consequences (side note: anonymous donations are forbidden for health reasons, so the child can at least have the potential knowledge about health issues that could occur).
Load More Replies...
Any doubts I might get about who my biological father was would be dispelled by one look in the mirror.
It's so weird how people have so many cousins and aunts and uncles and everyone has kids. My family is single bio dad and his single sister with no bio kids that raised me. I don't know don't care about bio mother that abandoned btw, in case someone wonder.
I'd love to take a test, not just to learn my percentages but to find a hypothetical aunt and hypothetical aunt/uncle. You see, back in the baby-snatching 60s of the Balkans, my paternal grandmother had 4 children - 2 "stillborn" and two sons - my father and uncle. Her story fits like a glove with the baby snatching horror stories of that time, she never got the bodies for burial, never got any paperwork whatsoever from the hospital, and my great aunt and nurse (her sister) swore until the day she died that she snuck in to the ward where her sister was giving birth and heard the baby girl cry. The doctors later announced that she was stillborn. It's been on my mind ever since I've learned that info...
I probably won't ever bother to take one of these tests; there's essentially zero doubt that A) I and my sibling strongly resemble both of our parents and extended families, and B) we're very Pennsylvania Dutch with maybe a bit of French thrown in - surname comes up online as from the Rhine Valley, which was bounced back and forth between Prussia/Germany and France about 50 million times, so even answering that 'question' would say less about family heritage than it would about how DNA databases work and the arbitrary nature of national borders.
My horror story: finding out that my abusive a*s of a father is in fact my biological father..
My "horror" story is that after joining & getting results, I reconnected with a 2nd cousin I hadn't seen for 50 years. I flew out to visit her over Memorial Day weekend & it was a total disaster. She was hateful, vulgar, judgemental, narrow-minded & made it very obvious that she took an immediate dislike to me & that I wasn't welcome. Then why did you ask me to come visit you? Geez.
Of you throw 100 dice enough times you will get the same result (ie all ones) occasionally, so whilst there are supposedly infinite ways for a persons dna to be made up statistically there must be people who share the same code, not necessarily alive at the same time but if you think about how many humans have ever lived there just has to have been ‘repeats’
Probably not. This article (https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2005/ask149/) goes into more detail on the math, but basically, there are so many possible combinations that even though the number isn't technically infinite, it's impossible to calculate, and much, much higher than the number of humans who have ever lived. Especially when you take into account that we haven't just been recycling the exact same genes with the same mathematically possible variants 100 billion times. We picked up genes from the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Our DNA regularly collects bits of code from bacteria and viruses that have snuck their genes into our cells. Evolution doesn't stop, it just isn't very noticeable when there isn't strong selective pressure.
Load More Replies...
Sometimes the results can just be discouraging. I did a DNA test hoping to find some extended family, as I only have seven relatives who are first cousin or direct family. Every week I get DNA relative reports sent to me from 23 and from Ancestry, and the closest I've found over the past three years are fourth and fifth cousins.
I took one of those tests, because my grandfather was orphaned at the age of 9. He, knew his siblings, but none of them knew their ethnicity. I was curious. I never did figure that out, because there are 12 regions on my test, all under 20%. But, I did find out that my oldest uncle, is not my grandfather's son. I haven't told anyone. My uncle is in his 70s, and I don't want to be the one to tell him.
Back in 1980s it was calculated that the number of Americans with some German ancestry had reached over 50%. I took a small pride in thinking that I was in the minority but after taking the National Genographic test discovered that I am 128th German (that's a 5x great-grandparents). I'm not anti-German or anything. Just a surprise.
This article reminds me of a RUSH song with the lyrics: "Better the pride that resides in a citizen of the wolrd, than the pride that devides when a colorful rag is unfurled". I can trace my ancestry to at least 3 differnet nations going back 3 generations but I only care about the county where I was born and raised by parents who were born and raised here as well.
I can’t answer the poll because I actually want to uncover some family drama (hopefully another sibling!)
I did research that traced my family back to England. Later, my nephew did more digging (thanks to the wonders of the internet) and traced us a couple hundred more years ... but it turned out we were French (which, ironically, a really, really old family history had told us). Then, my son did a DNA test and found out he was almost half SCANDINAVIAN! I did some background checking on our name, and yup: it's originally Swedish.
i used to dream that i could take of these tests and prove my bio mom isnt my real mom. she was not a good person. the story goes when i was born, they gave my mom the wrong baby briefly but switched us back when she noticed the wrist band didnt match. ive seen the birthing video and the pictures. its definitely me. i also realized if i wasnt her kid, that would mean i wasnt my dad's kid either. and i dont want to lose my dad. so i have to live with my bio mom being who she is. even if i was somehow switched, i wouldnt want to know if it meant finding out my dad wasnt my dad. plus he is basically my twin looks wise so i know hes my dad. its just wishful thinking that my "real" mom was a good person and waiting to find me. i now consider my step mom to be my real mom and she loves me like im her daughter, so i guess i found my real mom in the end after all.
We always hear from my Great Aunt that her mother (my great grandmother) confessed on her deathbed that my Grandfather was fathered by a different man than the one that fathered my Great Aunt. Problem was, she didn't tell us this until after my Grandfther passed and she (my Great Aunt) was the last one was alive, and she was always telling wild half-true stories, so we never knew if it was true or not. My family (me, sister mom and dad) all did Ancestry one year and not long after I found out the story was true. The crazy part is that a man, "R", that was my Grandfathers best friend his whole life was actually his half brother. R's parents - a minister and his wife - were best friends with my Great Grandparents. Except Great-Grandma was a little too friendly w the Minister, and that's where my Granfather came from.
According to family lore, sometime in the early 1900s a great-uncle (I think it was) left his wife and children in St Louis MO to "look for work" and was never seen again... Turns out he had just drifted down the Mississippi a few miles to the next town, got a job and started a new life with a new wife/children family... I think this was discovered sometime in the '50s or '60s, when an effort to do some genealogy tracing turned up some duplicate name discrepancies
It's baffling how these service can operate with minimal oversight on reliability and data management, despite a terrible track record. There have been multiple tests by journalists and researchers where the same sample submitted to different services gave wildly different results (Gizmodo, 2018), or where the same twins' DNA returned inconsistent results from different companies (CBC Canada, 2019). US G.A.O. did an industry review in 2010 and concluded that the data provided by those services is "misleading and of little or no practical use to consumers", while posing very serious concerns on data usage and security, also recording a very high occurrence of DNA samples submitted without consent by people that is not the legitimate owner. Both the British Medical Journal of Sports Medicine and the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information published studies disproving the claims of those tests being able to accurately predict the talents and natural skills of kids.
AncestryDNA, MyHeritage and 23andMe all had at least one major data breach in the last few years, with sensitive data stolen by unknown third parties. The latest occurrence -on December last year- saw 23andMe leaking data about 8 million people including names, relationships, location, and health data. This was just two months after a separate hacking exposed data of about 4 million people, including the publication of names and location of about 150.000 users belonging to sensitive minority groups.
Load More Replies... Or that you found out that the DNA company sold your info to your insurance company..?
My DNA horror story is that we don't know what they are going to do with your dna years down the line but I would guess it will be nothing good for anyone who taken these tests. For all we know if they find something in your DNA that is marketable, you could possibly lose the rights to your own DNA. There's been plenty of books and papers written where this can happen. Look at Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were harvested without consent in the 1950s, and her DNA sequence is being used commercially now, today. Her family had to file a lawsuit to get -some- control over access to the DNA sequence and also to share in the profit that a company was making. That harvesting initially happened SEVENTY years ago. Imagine what they could do now. Imagine seventy years from now. Don't give private companies your DNA, people.
I'm sure the raising families are thrilled that all these adopted kids, and even the sperm-donor kids, make it their life-mission to look for the bio-parent who never ever wanted anything to do with them...
In Switzerland it is, as far as my knowledge goes, actually illegal for the clinics to tell a kid who their sperm donor is IF he refuses contact. And if such a kid violates this rule, there can be legal consequences (side note: anonymous donations are forbidden for health reasons, so the child can at least have the potential knowledge about health issues that could occur).
Load More Replies... Any doubts I might get about who my biological father was would be dispelled by one look in the mirror.
It's so weird how people have so many cousins and aunts and uncles and everyone has kids. My family is single bio dad and his single sister with no bio kids that raised me. I don't know don't care about bio mother that abandoned btw, in case someone wonder.
I'd love to take a test, not just to learn my percentages but to find a hypothetical aunt and hypothetical aunt/uncle. You see, back in the baby-snatching 60s of the Balkans, my paternal grandmother had 4 children - 2 "stillborn" and two sons - my father and uncle. Her story fits like a glove with the baby snatching horror stories of that time, she never got the bodies for burial, never got any paperwork whatsoever from the hospital, and my great aunt and nurse (her sister) swore until the day she died that she snuck in to the ward where her sister was giving birth and heard the baby girl cry. The doctors later announced that she was stillborn. It's been on my mind ever since I've learned that info...
I probably won't ever bother to take one of these tests; there's essentially zero doubt that A) I and my sibling strongly resemble both of our parents and extended families, and B) we're very Pennsylvania Dutch with maybe a bit of French thrown in - surname comes up online as from the Rhine Valley, which was bounced back and forth between Prussia/Germany and France about 50 million times, so even answering that 'question' would say less about family heritage than it would about how DNA databases work and the arbitrary nature of national borders.
My horror story: finding out that my abusive a*s of a father is in fact my biological father..
My "horror" story is that after joining & getting results, I reconnected with a 2nd cousin I hadn't seen for 50 years. I flew out to visit her over Memorial Day weekend & it was a total disaster. She was hateful, vulgar, judgemental, narrow-minded & made it very obvious that she took an immediate dislike to me & that I wasn't welcome. Then why did you ask me to come visit you? Geez.
Of you throw 100 dice enough times you will get the same result (ie all ones) occasionally, so whilst there are supposedly infinite ways for a persons dna to be made up statistically there must be people who share the same code, not necessarily alive at the same time but if you think about how many humans have ever lived there just has to have been ‘repeats’
Probably not. This article (https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2005/ask149/) goes into more detail on the math, but basically, there are so many possible combinations that even though the number isn't technically infinite, it's impossible to calculate, and much, much higher than the number of humans who have ever lived. Especially when you take into account that we haven't just been recycling the exact same genes with the same mathematically possible variants 100 billion times. We picked up genes from the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Our DNA regularly collects bits of code from bacteria and viruses that have snuck their genes into our cells. Evolution doesn't stop, it just isn't very noticeable when there isn't strong selective pressure.
Load More Replies... Sometimes the results can just be discouraging. I did a DNA test hoping to find some extended family, as I only have seven relatives who are first cousin or direct family. Every week I get DNA relative reports sent to me from 23 and from Ancestry, and the closest I've found over the past three years are fourth and fifth cousins.
I took one of those tests, because my grandfather was orphaned at the age of 9. He, knew his siblings, but none of them knew their ethnicity. I was curious. I never did figure that out, because there are 12 regions on my test, all under 20%. But, I did find out that my oldest uncle, is not my grandfather's son. I haven't told anyone. My uncle is in his 70s, and I don't want to be the one to tell him.
Back in 1980s it was calculated that the number of Americans with some German ancestry had reached over 50%. I took a small pride in thinking that I was in the minority but after taking the National Genographic test discovered that I am 128th German (that's a 5x great-grandparents). I'm not anti-German or anything. Just a surprise.
This article reminds me of a RUSH song with the lyrics: "Better the pride that resides in a citizen of the wolrd, than the pride that devides when a colorful rag is unfurled". I can trace my ancestry to at least 3 differnet nations going back 3 generations but I only care about the county where I was born and raised by parents who were born and raised here as well.
I can’t answer the poll because I actually want to uncover some family drama (hopefully another sibling!)
I did research that traced my family back to England. Later, my nephew did more digging (thanks to the wonders of the internet) and traced us a couple hundred more years ... but it turned out we were French (which, ironically, a really, really old family history had told us). Then, my son did a DNA test and found out he was almost half SCANDINAVIAN! I did some background checking on our name, and yup: it's originally Swedish.
i used to dream that i could take of these tests and prove my bio mom isnt my real mom. she was not a good person. the story goes when i was born, they gave my mom the wrong baby briefly but switched us back when she noticed the wrist band didnt match. ive seen the birthing video and the pictures. its definitely me. i also realized if i wasnt her kid, that would mean i wasnt my dad's kid either. and i dont want to lose my dad. so i have to live with my bio mom being who she is. even if i was somehow switched, i wouldnt want to know if it meant finding out my dad wasnt my dad. plus he is basically my twin looks wise so i know hes my dad. its just wishful thinking that my "real" mom was a good person and waiting to find me. i now consider my step mom to be my real mom and she loves me like im her daughter, so i guess i found my real mom in the end after all.
We always hear from my Great Aunt that her mother (my great grandmother) confessed on her deathbed that my Grandfather was fathered by a different man than the one that fathered my Great Aunt. Problem was, she didn't tell us this until after my Grandfther passed and she (my Great Aunt) was the last one was alive, and she was always telling wild half-true stories, so we never knew if it was true or not. My family (me, sister mom and dad) all did Ancestry one year and not long after I found out the story was true. The crazy part is that a man, "R", that was my Grandfathers best friend his whole life was actually his half brother. R's parents - a minister and his wife - were best friends with my Great Grandparents. Except Great-Grandma was a little too friendly w the Minister, and that's where my Granfather came from.
According to family lore, sometime in the early 1900s a great-uncle (I think it was) left his wife and children in St Louis MO to "look for work" and was never seen again... Turns out he had just drifted down the Mississippi a few miles to the next town, got a job and started a new life with a new wife/children family... I think this was discovered sometime in the '50s or '60s, when an effort to do some genealogy tracing turned up some duplicate name discrepancies
