Billy’s DNA Surprise

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Welcome to DNA Surprises: Billy's Journey Begins

We wanted to camp and everything was fine and we were talking sitting around the campfire and that's when they learned for the first time that I didn't know they existed.

And talk about seeing mouths drop all around the campfire.

They just assumed that I never wanted to meet them and that's why I never reached out.

No, I just never knew about them.

So they were very upset that, you know, that that part of my history was never shared with me because they also felt like that was taken away from them.

Speaker 2

Welcome to DNA Surprises, a podcast that explores the life altering world of unexpected DNA discoveries.

I'm your host Alexis Oursalt.

This show centers the stories of people who've experienced NP, ES or non paternal events.

In other words, people who've learned that their biological father isn't who they thought he was.

We'll also hear from adoptees donor conceived people and the families navigating these discoveries.

Get ready to follow the incredible journeys that begin with a simple DNA test.

This is DNA surprises.

After adna surprise, it's common to look back and reflect on moments where the truth was right there in front of you.

A slip of the tongue.

That eerie feeling that something just wasn't quite right, but you don't know it until you know it.

In this week's episode, Billy shares how he brushed up against the truth years before he learned about his paternity.

He shares what he's learned, the relationships he's built, and how his DNA surprise gave him an even stronger appreciation for his dad.

Thank you for sharing your story, Billy.

Uncovering the Truth: A Marriage Certificate Revelation

My name is Billy, I live in Washington and I am 64.

It happened in 2016.

My mother had passed away, my father passed away in 2000.

So it she had been on her own for 16 years.

But when she passed, my sister and brother and I, we all got together, started cleaning out the house.

And then as we were doing that, we came down to the last box of papers.

And after much bragging of my sister doing most of the work, we opened it up and found my mother's and father's marriage certificate.

And as I'm looking it over, I I noticed that, well, her maiden name wasn't on the marriage certificate.

It was a different last name.

And the box was checked.

Divorced.

Now, this is a story that none of us had ever known.

And my mother had always said that, you know, her and my father met when they were in San Francisco and that they fell in love almost instantly when they told us.

When they got married there was always one year and the before I was born.

So you know, and who would question that?

You know, if you're happy and things are good, there's never a reason to question that.

So we as we opened the box and saw the certificate, we noticed 1st that the year was wrong.

They, they were actually married in 1963 and the last name didn't match.

So I quickly ran to the phone, called my auntie.

I said, hey, auntie, there's a different last name on mom's marriage certificate.

So I'm wondering what's that all about?

What gives?

And complete silence for about 10 seconds.

And she goes, I've been wanting to tell you forever, but your mom said she would ostracize us if we ever told you.

But now she's gone, I don't think it matters anymore.

So I went ahead and she goes, Your mom was married before she met your father, and you're the product of that union.

And I went into a tailspin.

Now I look like my mother.

So do my brother and sister.

They look like her and me as well, but they definitely look like my dad.

And so I just, I just assumed that I probably just took more after my mother's side than the other two.

So once I learned about that, then I called my brother who was in Portland and I said, I, I don't know what's up and what's down.

This is what I just learned.

What?

And he goes, it doesn't matter, you're still my brother.

So that was kind of the confidence that I needed to decide, well, I'm really curious.

I want to know what's going on.

Looking Back: The Phone Call and Unheeded Clues

So I took about 3 or 4 weeks and I was able to track down the birth family.

My birth father and I learned through the Internet that he had passed away in 2011.

So it had been five years.

And it gave the name of his children and his sister and his wife.

And when I saw the name of the girl, the one the daughters, I realized that in 2011, I had gotten the phone call from someone who found my name on Facebook and said, hi, I'm, you know, your sister.

And I said, no, I have one brother, one sister, and I don't know what you're talking about.

Well, we're your family from Boston.

I said, well, I'm sorry, but I don't have a family in Boston, but I wish you luck.

I hope you find the person that you're looking for.

Well, aren't you Billy?

I said, yes, I am, but there's other Billy too, so good luck.

So in 2016, when I found that article, it happened to have the phone number.

And so I I called the number and in in wonderful New England fashion, the person on the phone calls hello, I go hi.

And I'm William, and I think that we share the same birth father and he goes, little Billy, we've been looking for you for 40 years.

Oh my gosh, this is wild.

Because somebody had tried to tell you, you know, so many years before.

Maybe they assumed that you knew.

So you find this out from your aunt.

It upends everything that you thought you knew.

So you grew up believing that your dad, who raised you, was your biological father.

Did you have any inkling at any point during your childhood that maybe he was not your genetic parent?

Speaker 1

Well, there was 1 memory that my mother, I think inadvertently Saturn, didn't realize.

She said it was when she was pregnant with my little brother.

She said something like, well, yeah, he wants a boy too.

He wants one someone to carry on the family name.

And I thought, I'm carrying on the family name.

So, you know, I was seven years old.

So it didn't, it didn't really register that much to me.

OK, so then 2011 you get this phone call and you dismiss it because I mean, why wouldn't you that that's a very random call to get.

But did you tell anyone about it?

Did you tell your mom or like or was it just completely pushed out of your mind?

Well, it was interesting because three months earlier I was on actually a work assignment and I was in Arizona for about two months and I'm sitting there in my hotel room unwinding and I see Ancestry DNA commercial come up.

I thought, you know what, I'm going to do that.

And so I took my, called my mother and said, yeah, I'm sitting down here in Arizona.

This is, you know, everything's going fine.

But I learned something.

I think I'm going to do the DNADNA testing through Ancestry.

She goes, why would you want to do that?

And I said, well, I said for medical reasons, one see what's going on there, but I'm just really curious.

I want to be able to go back and find where the family's from.

She basically dropped it when I started doing more research.

I read this article again, not really too concerned about DNA.

They say, you know, you don't necessarily get 50% of your both sides of your family.

Well, my father's Ashkenazi Jew.

And so I kind of expected to see some Eastern European bloodline in there, but there was none.

And at the time I'm happy.

I, I don't care.

I kind of just, you know, shrugged my shoulders and said, well, I'll look into that later.

I didn't spend a whole lot of time working on that back in 20/10/2011, Didn't really care about it.

Not until 2016 did I really, really care.

And so, yeah, I guess in a way, you know, there were signs, but if you're not looking for them, you're not seeing them.

Yeah, that makes sense.

OK.

So you did take Ancestry and just didn't think much of the results.

And then going back to when you got the call, did you tell anybody about the call or were you just kind of like this is probably spam or somebody who's confused and just brushed it off?

I told my wife who was standing there next to me.

I mean, that's back in day when we actually still had landlines, and I just shrugged it off.

I said, well, someone's looking for someone's who's missing from their family and nothing I can do to help them, unfortunately.

Navigating Identity and Connecting with His Birth Aunt

Wow.

Can you take me through maybe how you were feeling emotionally as you started putting these pieces together?

You said when your aunt told you it sent you into a tailspin.

How are you feeling as you're making all of these connections?

Well, I had this identity crisis because even though, you know, I, I grew up with a firm belief that my father was Jewish and my mother was, you know, a Christian side.

And I've always kind of gravitated towards Judaism versus my, you know, being a Protestant.

And so about a week after I learned, I actually called my rabbi and I said, this is what I've learned.

I'm not, I don't have an ounce of Jewish ancestry or blood in my, in my body.

He just looked at me and said, Billy, you have been a part of this congregation for 30 years.

Do you feel Jewish?

Yes, he goes, then you're Jewish and we will see you that way.

So that was one of the biggest concerns that I had was identity within the community.

And then wondering, you know, OK, so my dad had colon cancer.

So when I was 40 years old, I had a colonoscopy because my, well, insurance isn't going to pay for a 40 year old to do a colonoscopy, but there's family history.

They will.

So I did that.

Well, now here I am, you know, 15 years later and learning, oh, I didn't need to do that because he's not biologically my father.

Yeah, that's a lot of new information to take in and change.

So then that kind of was the catalyst to try to find out more about that family.

So once I I found that that article, I actually called my aunt, my birth father's sister that got the number from my new found brother and I called and I said, hi, this is she goes.

I know who this is because I have been looking for you since you were seven months old the last time I held you.

So I was born with a birth defect.

And so it took a village to keep me around the first three months of my life, I live with my mother's family and then the from three to six months, I lived with my birth father's family in San Francisco.

And when the last time she saw me is because my father, my bill, my birth father was in the Army and he was stationed on the East Coast.

So we ended up in the Massachusetts area.

And that's, that's the last time she saw me because it was while they were in, he was in the Army on the East Coast that things are falling apart.

And that's when they separated.

And when my mother found Mike, my, my adopted dad now my sister came around about nine months later.

Unraveling the Deception and Mike's Unconditional Love

How did you feel realizing that people had been looking for you for over 40 years?

And that's even longer, right?

It would be 50 something years like your for your aunt and then your brother had been looking for you for 40 years.

Like, I mean, that's a lot of time.

He he told me that my birth father told them when he is about 10 years old, he goes, you know, son, you do have an older brother and his name is Billy.

So that's when they learned about it.

When I got to do a FaceTime with them, it was faces that I've never ever seen before.

And honestly, I don't look like any of them.

So I kind of even questioned whether or not they were my my family.

But when I when I found the picture of my birth father, there's not a shadow of a doubt that he and I or are very similar in looks.

So what I learned was that that family took the rest of the children on that side took after their mom.

So I learned I gained three brothers and a sister, a brother-in-law and some nephews and some and some nieces.

And a stepmother.

After your parents, your your biological parents separated, did your mom take you?

Did your father try to find you or or protest or or?

What happened there?

That's an interesting story.

So my birth father never stopped wanting me.

It's unlike other stories that you hear.

We were living in in Brooklyn at the time and my birth father called my mother said I want to see my son.

So they set up a meeting place to get together for for him to see me with his new wife.

And so he drove all the way down from low mass down to, you know, Queens.

And my mother never showed.

So I didn't show obviously.

And with his new young wife and her expecting her first child, she probably didn't want a child from the first marriage to interfere with her family.

So between her and my mother, they were able to convince him to give me up for adoption.

And that's when my father, Mike, adopted me.

And they went to great lengths because they changed my birth certificate.

I had a baby blanket that my grandmother tore out the name and redid the name on it.

And I looked really closely at the stitching.

I can see the name there.

And so it was.

It was quite a journey to to see all the all of the deception and how it was laid out to make sure that I never learned about the other family.

Yeah, deception is a a good word.

Did finding out the links that you're mother, dad, adopted dad and family went to to conceal this from you bring up any feelings towards them?

I think I understood why my father, Mike, who, I mean honestly, he was the one who protected me from my mother, so he was the voice of reason.

My mother easily saw red, so he was the one that would calm her down and then talk with me about stuff.

And then, you know, it's all relative to the time frame in which things happen.

I mean, in the early 60s, if you are a unwed mother or you're pregnant, the idea is that either you're going to give it up, you're going to abort or you're going to get married.

And that was where the pressure was put upon her at age 18 to get married.

She had no desire to get married at age 18.

So it's all relative to the time in in 2016 when I learned about it.

Yes.

But I can rationalize the the pain away.

Absolutely, absolutely.

First Encounters and Reflecting on Different Life Paths

OK, So you learn a whole story about what happened and how you came to be and how you were adopted by Mike and you've met so many new people.

What happens next?

Do you get a chance to meet them in person?

Well at the time we raised our family in in Boise, ID, our son who is a performer dance dancer in the Netherlands right now, he was accepted and went to school at Juilliard.

So they living outside of Boston.

I decided since we were going to take our son to his first year at school that we would go up and meet the family.

So we took a long Labor Day weekend, dropped off her son basically he said get lost, dad, mom.

And we took a side flight up to Boston where we were sitting in a hotel that we were figured we were going to be staying at.

And I called the family.

And so the mother, my stepmother, comes driving up to pick us up.

And she gets out of the car and she starts crying and she goes, you look just like your father.

We get into the car, my wife and I, and we go to the family house that they've lived in since the early 70s.

And I got to meet in person most of the other family.

And they had decided to take us up to their camp where their R VS are AT.

And my brother, Jared, from my mother I was raised with, he calls me up, he goes, turn back, turn back.

They're going to get you.

You never, I'm never going to see you again.

But we went to camp and everything was fine.

And we were talking, sitting around the campfire.

And that's when they learned for the first time that I didn't know they existed.

And talk about seeing mouths drop all around a campfire.

Did you ever have any of those?

What if kind of thoughts of, you know, what if you had stayed or they had some sort of joint custody set up and and you had been raised more by your birth father?

I think that that's something that a lot of people contend with is what would my life have looked like if I had known about these people?

Well, I I did.

When I was 13, I moved from Brooklyn, NY to a small town in Idaho, not far from where I was actually born or where my mother grew up and my brother and sister that I was raised with.

We were all involved in sports.

We all were very good in school.

And you know, my mother smoked.

None of us ever smoked and then the other side.

And so we're, you know, we're very active people and I still cycle many miles every week.

My other family exercises not necessarily within the vocabulary.

And so in terms of Physiology, physically, we don't look anything alike.

I'm, you know, just a few pounds heavier than I was in high school.

And that just wouldn't be the case on the other side.

And they smoked.

I and I saw some of their home home movies and that lifestyle is so foreign to how my brother and sister, I feel like my brother and sister, I raised each other.

We were always had each other's back.

My mother was kind of a, you know, non existent parent.

And so I can see how my life would have been vastly different had I had I been with them.

So again, one of those things where I like my life.

I'm I don't know if my life would have been better.

I definitely could see where there have been different and I may not have been doing the things that I did in my life.

Understanding the Complex Motivations of His Parents

The other thing that I really wanted to ask you is, so all of the key parents aside from your stepmother have passed and so you can't ask them any questions.

How has that shaped your processing of this?

Well, you tend to no look back at events in your life and you you see things that you may not have heard before seen before.

So a double meaning.

My my birth mother was not the most faithful woman and and known known by her sisters and her her brothers to be that way.

And my other aunt said to me, she goes, honey, the only reason why your dad is still with your mother is because of you.

He loves you beyond measure, and that's the only reason why he stayed with your mother.

So I think about that and knowing the new information, here's a man who truly wants to help a child not biologically his to the best of his ability and took that responsibility seriously.

And so to me, it, it makes it me appreciate Mike more than you can ever imagine.

In terms of my mother, her behavior in life, this would easily slip in to her the way she looked at life.

Again, I love my mother because she's my mother.

I just don't love the person my mother was.

She was very much, how does the world affect me?

And so her whole life was about everything, about just me, me, me, me, me.

So she didn't want to get married.

So the birth father 1960s wants to well, you're the woman, you're staying at home, you're going to take care of the baby.

I'm going to make all the money.

I'm in the army.

We're you know, we're going to this is how it's going to work.

That's society for you.

And my mother, coming from a very small town, did not want to be in the same situation her own mother was with raising children.

She wanted to go out and have the nightlife and she wanted those things.

And so when he tried to hold her down, she resented him even more.

And so to punish him.

My belief is that that's probably why she, I never learned because she wanted to punish him.

Also, when we saw their marriage certificate, the year that they got married was obviously not the year that I was born.

They backdated their marriage certificate and their rings so that they had a valid story.

The San Francisco story was partly true.

That's where she met my birth father, not Mike.

She met Mike when he was in the military alongside my birth father in Massachusetts.

So, you know, she, she had enough truth in the story that it didn't need to be questioned too much.

Wow, makes me think.

I wonder how Mike felt about her telling the story, swapping him in for your for how they met and everything.

That's the that's interesting choice.

Well, you know, I think partly the reason he fell in line with that is he himself had had to deal with loss his father at a very early age of 12.

His father died in a plane crash and his younger sister a few years younger died of leukemia when she was about 12 years old.

And then rather than his mother raising him, she handed Mike over to the grandparents, her parents.

So that what do you do in the in the 40s while you're looking for a husband?

At least that's my way of looking at it.

So she was out trying to find another husband.

And when she did, the new husband did not want Mike as a part of their family.

So Mike wanted to be wanted, wanted to be loved and he wanted to love back.

And so it makes sense that if he got attached to this baby or this toddler, something he cherished, he was going to be fine, whatever the stories were, as long as it didn't make him look negative because he wanted to make sure that we loved him.

Yeah, wow.

Forging New Sibling Bonds and Uncovering a Hidden Past

I'm really just struck by Mike's story and this that he was a little boy who had a mom that found a new husband and he was left behind.

And then when he met you, he took you in.

That's pretty powerful.

And I love my dad.

I still follow the New York Mets.

My brother and I go to baseball games together.

He lives about two hours away.

We celebrate his birthday.

We celebrate his death day.

We talk about him to a lesser degree, our mother, But you know, I understand my mother's story, too.

She was one of five kids living in a very small town.

Her father wasn't drunk.

My grandmother supported the family because the grandmother was a teacher and a nurse's aide.

My mother was tasked with being the mother of the house.

And so at a very early age, she was helping to raise her four siblings, two brothers and two sisters.

And if she did something wrong or the kids did something wrong, she was the one who was punished because she didn't keep them in line.

So my mother was forced to grow up with a very early age.

And when she left the house is like, I'm done with this.

I'm, I want to live life.

So I I also understand where she was coming from.

I don't agree with it, but I don't have to.

Right.

And I think that that's important, right, is to have that understanding, even if we don't agree with the choices, but kind of some of that compassion and empathy for maybe why they made some of the choices that they made.

It's under it's understandable why choices were made and you know, I again, it, it helps piece together my life and understanding how things happened in my life.

Yeah, yeah.

So take me back to these new relationships that you've developed and and your new siblings and family members.

How are things with them today?

Do you feel like you have a sibling kind of relationship with these family members or or how is it?

Well, that's a good, interesting.

I I spent my whole career in government service and I was a leader within the organization.

So I'm all about information and trying to make things, understand things.

So that's going to be a little piece here.

When I made that first phone call, I was talking to my brother Eric at the time.

He was going through a really tough divorce.

He's the next oldest, his brother, next brother is 2 years younger than him.

Then the other other children, the two younger ones are of another generation now.

He doesn't really get along well with his younger brother, the one just behind him.

He doesn't get along with his mother.

So he didn't have anyone to talk to about his feelings and what he was going through through this divorce and how was affecting him and his children.

And so I had gone through a divorce many years ago as we as a family now have the his, hers and ours.

And we are of the same generation.

We were both blue collar workers, so we understand each other quite a bit.

And so we were able to talk and I, I used to walk around very long block over and over every night talking to my new found brother.

And he told me years later he goes, you don't know how much you helped me going through my divorce and having someone to talk to because he didn't feel like he ever had that.

And he and I now are still close.

We text each other fairly often and we call each other once or twice a month.

And if I get to the East Coast, I try to make a point to get up to his area to see him back to the information area.

So I'm trying to gather information.

I want to know more about my birth father.

I want to know what he did in the service.

I want to know what he did out of the service.

I want to know about the way he raised his children, how he treated his wife, how he treated the neighborhood.

And because those are the things that are important to me.

So I started questioning the the two younger siblings about what, what was what was Bill like?

What do you know about his military service?

What did he, what did he do?

And well, we're not allowed to talk about that.

You're 50 years old, you're not allowed to talk about it.

Mom and dad said we that that's OK, fine.

So when I was asking those questions, the stepmother was not there.

Later on, the siblings tell their mother that I was pumping them for information about their about the father.

So she calls me up and says, I don't ever want to talk to you again.

I don't want to hear your voice.

You're using me, you're using your this family.

And I don't want this stuff dug up about your, your father.

I'm a veteran.

I, I did FOIA Freedom of Information and I petitioned to get the information on my father's military service and got that information to learn more about him.

And it was, it was very telling that this was a man who really cared deeply for his country really and, and did things sometimes he didn't necessarily want to do.

But it was, it was in his wheelhouse of things that he could do.

So part of the reason why he passed away in 2011 of I think it was congestive heart failure.

Well, when he was in the service, he was stationed in Okinawa and he was doing some things on the side.

According to his OPF, his personnel file that he was on deep, he was given time away from the service.

Well, what he was doing was actually flying missions in Vietnam with the CIA and he got exposed to Agent Orange.

But because he was not acting in a military capacity within the Army, he couldn't make a claim against that.

And so it took a, it affected him and he had lifelong health issues because of that.

In 1985 or 86 for my youngest brother was born, he had a stroke.

My stepmother took amazing care of him.

My siblings took amazing care of him.

They were.

So he was everything to them.

They were great.

But they didn't, they didn't necessarily know why this happened, why he had a stroke or a cerebral hemorrhage.

They didn't have any idea.

And honestly, I haven't told them either.

I told my I told Eric, my brother, because he's in this with me.

He wanted to know more about his dad.

He didn't want this stuff hidden away from him.

So it was important for me to understand the that aspect of it and that how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I was in the service, I was in the Army, he was in electronic warfare or communications.

My oldest boy is in the service and he's in that same line of of military operations.

So there's there's a history there.

Were you surprised by their reaction to you asking questions?

I think it seems like it was kind of a 180 to me as you're telling your story, that they were just like I now we don't want to talk to you at all because you're asking questions about your birth father.

Did you just take that in stride or was that painful for you at all?

Well with the knowledge after piercing together that it was a combination of my father, birth father having in my opinion terrible choice of women.

He ended up marrying my mother a second time when he married their mother.

And and so I, I honestly think knowing that they, she didn't want an interloper in there in her family.

I think she, she pumped me for information as much as I try to get information out of her.

And when it came to a point where she figured that that, well, has dried up on her side, that she didn't need me anymore.

And because of the two younger ones living at home, I've, I've sent them a text, I've sent them, you know, happy birthday notifications.

And they'll answer, but they never initiate a new conversation.

But the oldest 1, he and I do and relationship, Yeah.

And then the the the chunkiest brother, he he said he got away from the family as well, loves his mother, but they live in another state and he's raised his family.

But we don't have much communication.

Billy's Reflections, Gratitude, and Wisdom for Others

How would you say that this experience has impacted you?

I think it reinforces my belief of giving back to community.

You do things even to the point of you know, it's not going to benefit me, it's going to benefit them.

It's going to take something out of me to do it.

That's OK because for the greater good, it's what you do.

So and reinforced that my father was that type of a person.

I think that's one of the things that maybe in conjunction with my brother and sister that I've learned that that's just what we do.

So that was I think that was that was good.

Then again, you wonder about nature versus nurture.

And I realized that there's, even though I look like that, that man, I didn't have to live in that environment.

And so I'm very lucky that I got to do and live the life that I got to lead and realize that I may not be where I'm at today, nor would I have met my wife in the life or have the children that I have.

I'm very blessed with the life that I got to lead.

I can honestly say that without the support of my my brother and sister Lynn and Jared that I was raised with, I'm not sure how I would have been able to get through some of this.

Because had I lost those those two relationships, my life would be in a still a different track.

Because I mean, my brother and sister and I, we have our own text thread that we're writing back and forth to each other pretty much every day.

We talk to each other fairly often.

My brother and I travel to the other so we can go on long bike rides.

We my sister lives in Stockholm and we all get together to see her.

My brother and I love her so much that we surprised her for her birthday and just showed up on their doorstep in Stockholm and knocked on the door.

But at the same time, how lucky am I to learn about a brother who when I had a cycling accident a few years back and he was calling fairly, fairly often, like every other day, asking my wife how I was doing, being on the other side of the country.

So we have a connection too.

So I'm, I'm lucky I got to see meet him and I'm lucky that I have the family that I was raised with.

I guess that's, you know, that's it in a nutshell for me.

Yeah, such a positive outlook.

What advice do you have for a parent who is keeping adna surprise from their child?

Well, with the new technologies that are going on, depending upon the age of the child, I can understand why you might want to maybe not let them completely understand this situation till they get older.

But once the children get older, there's so many tools out there now that you can find out anything.

So why do you want them to find out on their own when you can help run the narrative of the story and tell them you know exactly what happened rather than making letting the imagination run wild of the children?

I think you're better served to to be upfront with the kids.

And yeah, is there going to be pain?

Absolutely there's going to be pain.

But the benefits so far outweigh it.

What advice do you have for someone who just uncovered a DNA surprise?

I think to to learn that you have a surprise back there someplace.

It's just another facet of your life.

You can decide if it's positive or negative, but it's something that you get to learn about yourself.

And rather than being angry that you were never told, take it as an opportunity of growth, take it as an opportunity of, of a new facet of who you are.

Learn the history of, of your DNA of where your people came from.

It's, it's such an enriching story to be able to learn about the travels of the generations before you.

And you might have known the story, but now you have a whole new area that you can look at and you can discover.

And you know, that to me was a part of the journey that is just so wonderful for me.

Host's Final Thoughts and Podcast Information

Philly, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and sharing your story.

You have really just reinforced the importance of appreciating the beautiful relationships that we already had in our lives while, you know, opening your mind and heart to new ones.

I just wish you the best as you continue to navigate this.

Thank you again for joining.

Well, thank you for the invitation and thank you for the opportunity.

Thanks again to Billy for sharing his story.

If you have adna surprise that you'd like to share, please submit your story at dnasurprises.com and for early ad free access to episodes, join me over on patreon@patreon.com/DNA Surprises.

Until next time, DNA Surprises is hosted, produced and edited by me, Alexis Oursalt.

It is mixed and mastered by Josh Oursalt of Siren Recording Studios.