DNA

My son (4M) gave me a DNA test for my last birthday.  I've been meaning to do that for a while, just waiting for life (and my budget) to settle down a bit, what with three weddings and all.  I've subscribed to Ancestry.com for a couple years now, and I've been looking forward to what I might learn.  So I spit in the little tube, and sent it off.

About a month ago, I got the results.  I don't know exactly what I was expecting to find; I've been doing genealogy, at varying levels of activity, for over 30 years, on both my adoptive and birth families.  I have a pretty good idea of what ethnicities are intermingled in me.  I suppose I hoped to make some connections with parts of the various and sundry families that I didn't know very well, and maybe fill in the picture in greater detail.

Ethnicity-wise, there were no surprises - 45% England and Wales, 30% Norway/Sweden, 15% Ireland/Scotland, and 10% 'Germanic Europe'.  I guess I'd have expected a bit more German, but none of it took me by surprise.  My birth-father's mother was full-blooded Norwegian (both her parents were off-the-boat), so the large Scandinavian component wasn't surprising.

The thing I was most interested in was the connections with other people - cousins, etc, who could connect me with families I didn't yet know very much about.  And boy, was that interesting!

They gave me a list of people in their database whose DNA matches mine, along with an estimate of how closely we're related.  At the top of the list was my birth-mother (I had been at her house in California when she sent her test in last year), who was duly identified as "QQQ is your mother".  Which was no surprise, but still, it was a small measure of validation that all the detective work I did 30 years ago had been correct.

The second name on the list was one of my birth-father's daughters, my half-sister.  Again, nothing I didn't already know, but a small validation that Mom had told me the truth about who my birth-father was.  Not, you know, that I doubted her. . .

The third name on the list was a man I'd never heard of, who was called out as a 'likely first cousin'.  In checking his other connections, he was also closely connected to my half-sister, so I surmised that he was from Birth-Father's side of my DNA.  I asked my sister if she knew who he was, and she said, "Never heard of him."

Well, that was a surprising response, to say the least.  'Likely first cousin' is a pretty close connection to have 'never heard of him'.  Even if his family was somehow estranged from hers, you might suppose that she at least had some inkling of who he was.  So I did a little poking around on-line, and found his mother's obituary, and his step-mother's obituary.  Connecting a few dots, he was about the same age as 1F.  He'd been born in Utah, and now lived in Virginia, where his mother had moved after divorcing his dad when he was in high school.

Long story short, the father of DNA-Match-Guy was also born in Utah, about a year before I was.  I called my sister again, and asked if her dad had ever been in Utah.  Why, yes, she said, he'd been stationed in Utah while he was in the Air Force.  In fact, she went on, he'd told her a story about having to get a quick transfer out of Utah - something about 'woman trouble'.

Holy shit.

Of all the possibilities of things I thought I might encounter from a DNA test, it never occurred to me that I might find another unknown half-sibling (DNA-Match-Guy turns out to be a half-nephew to me, which falls into the same range as 1st cousin).  It shouldn't have been all that strange an idea to me - I mean, my own existence was evidence of certain, uh, self-control deficiencies on Birth-Father's part.  But somehow, I'd framed this story in my head that I was the only one - a few years after I was born, he'd gotten married, and had his two daughters with his wife, and la-la, how the life went on.

But I wasn't the only one; I wasn't even the first.  Turns out, he had, uh, cast his seed farther and wider than I'd suspected.

Birth-Father died a year-and-a-half ago.  For nearly 30 years, we had a good (though not particularly close) relationship.  I still appreciate having known who he was, and gotten some sense of what his life was about, even if it was quite a different life than mine (I mean, he went to the University of Michigan, for heaven's sake).

On one level, this 'new information' shouldn't matter, and it really doesn't.  I already knew of, and made my peace with, his rakishness as a young man; heck, that's why I'm here.  But somehow, knowing that it happened twice (at least; who knows if there are others?) makes me a little sad.  One thing to have a fling with my birth-mother when they were in college; another to blithely hop from woman to woman, leaving out-of-wedlock children in your wake.  But, it is what it is, and it doesn't materially change my life. . .

Yeesh.

I'd love to actually meet my erstwhile half-brother; I've had a lot of fun with my two half-sisters, even having only met them when we were all adults.  But honestly, I have no idea what his life is like, or what sort of person he is. I'm not sure what kind of rude surprise I might be for him, or why he'd ever want to meet me.

La-la, how the life goes on.  4M is sending Jenn a DNA test (he was going to send it for her birthday later this summer, but we talked him into giving it as a Mother's Day gift).  We already know of a few rather significant 'unknowns' in her genealogy, that we're (I think) looking forward to learning more about.  We will see what we will see. . .

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On a more unambiguously happy note (and not unrelated to DNA), 7M got married a week-and-a-half ago, so our cycle of three weddings in a year is complete (1F and her husband celebrated their anniversary the day after 7M's wedding; we're looking forward next year to Mother's Day weekend without a wedding in it).

There is something really happy about our kids (three of them, at least) getting married.  In my mind, it is something like a marker of a degree of strength and stability in their lives, a kind of 'well-done' to us as parents, but even more, to the lives they've made for themselves, so far.  Not that I suppose there are any guarantees - I've been around WAY too many blocks by now to think that - but it is a very good thing.  Between 7M, and 4M and 1F, I am enjoying the dynamic of bringing in-laws into our family.

1F also told us recently that she and her husband are expecting their first child together this fall.  Hmmmmm. . .  A grandchild born to married parents - how does that work?