Mark’s DNA Surprise

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Speaker 1

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Speaker 2

They had a wonderful relationship as the 63 years would testify.

And the daughters, all remember him fondly.

He was to them their their hero.

And now these girls are my heroes.

These sisters of mines and are my heroes.

They obviously lived in a home environment that was loving and accepting and kind and thoughtful, because they couldn't have treated me in the way they did.

Had they not learned that kind of Pasadena us as children.

So, I see them as a reflection of our

father.

Imagine spitting into a tube, sending off your DNA, and unknowingly turning your life upside down for me and thousands of others.

This is our reality, I'm your host Alexis ourselves in July of 2021, I discovered that I am an NP e someone who is experienced Anon paternal event.

In other words my biological father isn't who I thought he was this podcast shares.

The journeys of people who were shocked by a DNA Discovery.

Mostly through Modern DNA testing.

We're telling the stories of npes adoptees and donor conceived people and their families.

This is DNA surprises when Mark received a call from, who he It was Newfound, half-sibling, he wasn't surprised little did he know that this Revelation would lead him to his own npe journey in this week's episode Arc shares?

How he uncovered his truth.

He connected with his family and how he finds peace with his mother, who died before he could speak to her about his DNA surprise.

He also offers valuable advice to parents and nve's.

Hurley to men.

Thank you, Mark, for sharing your story.

My name is Mark, I am 59 years old and I am from Tennessee.

Well, I guess every DNA story has a starting point and here's mine, I was traveling out of state.

And I received a text from a friend of mine who asked me to call him because he had an interesting story to share with me.

I was driving on an interstate.

I didn't expect any heavy conversation, And so I gave him a call right back.

And after a lot of small talk, he proceeded to share with me that he had given a DNA test to his older, sister as a Christmas gift and that she had received some results that were surprising to her.

He described her as kind of the genealogist in the family and she was a great detective, using whatever tools social media, the ancestry.

With whatever tools that she had available to her.

And was able she thought to determine who her biological father was and had reached out to this individual and he had supplied, his DNA, had done a test and they were able to confirm it when once that was done.

My friend said, he went through the DNA process himself and lo and behold the same individual that was his sister's biological father.

Was his as well.

Well, the real twist was, that was my father that they were referring to, and I had no earthly idea.

And keep in mind, these are people that I knew I went to high school.

With the older sister, the younger person was a friend of mine, they had lived across the highway from us and town, and somebody I've known for for quite some time.

So, in some ways, I feel fortunate that I Intend my life on the interstate crashing.

So I pulled over to the side of the road to to have a more concentrated conversation.

Had you remained close with this friend throughout your life.

I mean how you'd known him since high school or had you known him before

that?

Well, I'd known the the sister since high school and he's a little younger so he and I became acquainted as adults.

Were we close know, but but we were certainly on good.

Crimson.

And he had my phone number and I had his.

And so we talk from time to time, it wasn't anything, big deal and I didn't expect the conversation that we had to be to come to that sort of turn for sure.

Did you find out more like what happened

next?

Well, I can't say that I was terribly surprised to find that I had new half-siblings.

My my father had a much older half-sibling from a different relationship that I was aware of ever since I was a Youngster and had a much younger than me half-sibling after my parents had divorced.

So there was another child in there.

So too, when I woke up that morning I knew I had at least two half-siblings and a full sibling that I had grown up with and so to have two more added to that bunch.

I guess it wasn't all that shocking.

So we laughed about how unusual this thing was and we were trying to figure who was Going to buy the first person's collection of Christmas presents that we had missed for all these years.

But something interesting did come out of the conversation and part of it was that he didn't know that.

I had done a DNA test myself and had used the the same company that he had used.

And I was not an active member.

I had done this this back in 2015 and Michael Le phone call with my friend was in May of 2021.

So not not all that long ago, but I knew I hadn't received any messages from ancestry saying that I had new DNA matches that were that close.

So he texted me a screenshot of what his DNA match.

Profile looked like an included within that, not only himself and his sister but a few other persons that were slightly less connected.

And I wasn't, I wasn't on there and I that that certainly changed the tone of the conversation.

Had I been on there?

We would have been half half siblings and but the fact that I wasn't messed meant that, or something Askew.

So he just kind of blurted out.

You will your the adopted one, right?

I've had no earthly idea what he was talking about.

I'd see my birth certificate.

Difficult many times, I did not think I was adopted.

In fact, I knew I was not adopted by that birth certificate and the fact that no one had ever told me otherwise, but I had another three hours drive to contemplate that so I got on the phone with his sister and I asked her about the adopted thing and she said yeah your dad told me that you were adopted that he married your mother knowing Does she was pregnant with somebody else's child and that he just thought you knew.

So I found out that I was and the word adopted is the the word that my birth certificate father chose to use.

Not the word that I'm choosing to use, but it's the way it played out.

So, I found out that I was quote-unquote adopted by a relatively a stranger, in a sense, not for my own parents.

So you went from kind of this light-hearted conversation of ooh, yeah, I've got a couple other siblings out there, too.

I don't actually have these genetic siblings and I'm adopted.

Yeah, what was that thought, like, what were you feeling?

As you got that information,

in some ways, numb, is probably a good way to describe it again.

I'm so grateful that I made it home driving through the thick traffic.

And, and thankfully, I had made that drive many Many times before.

So I was on autopilot.

But as I was driving home thinks that I had suppressed, I guess for, for many, many years started to kind of creep up into my Consciousness part of this was the fact that my birth certificate father and me were are completely different people.

There is never been to more people different than he and I are and people that knew us both.

Well would commonly say Say to me, you got to be the milkman's son, you know, you and your father are nothing alike and my wife has known my birth certificate father, now for 35 years and she never once.

Never once in those 35 years had said that she thought that we were related.

She always thought that we weren't those.

Those are sentiments that that I had always shared, but suppress he was 6 feet.

Plus, I'm 6 feet That's where the similarities ended almost everything about us, our temperament, or personality, our worldview.

They're just so much about who I am as a person was so different than who he is as a person.

And I could not ever shake that feeling and it was so problematic for me that that I began reading about nature versus nurture and and how much of this part of who he is.

Well, I did inherit and Later become that.

So, in some ways, I lived fearful that I would be inheriting some of those temperament and personality predispositions.

He says that he adopted you, but your mother, she was pregnant, so she is your biological mother.

Yes.

Were you able to ask them what happened or confront

them?

Yeah, good question.

My mother passed away in 2017.

I had done the ancestry test and T.

So six years had gone by.

I had all the information that I needed six years ago and I never never bothered to check it because I was doing the ancestry for for two primary reasons.

One of them was because I was ethnicity curious.

And there was this family Legend of having a Cherokee in my family and here in Tennessee.

That's a big deal.

And, you know, I looked at myself, as kind of a bland character with with primarily Western European roots and I thought, well, it'd be exciting to have something beyond that, but at that turned out to be nothing and which is the usual case here.

And the other reason is my mother was a, was her family's genealogist and had collected.

A treasure Trove of artifacts and at archives and photographs and scrapbooks about the family.

And I kind of, I guess inherited that, that predisposition from her.

So, I joined ancestry Yes, if this city part and for the extensive genealogical database, I did take a peek at the DEA name, DNA matches and I matched rather close with somebody that I didn't recognize.

So this would have been a 2015 and that person I was able to determine lived.

He's much younger than me and and lived in Central Florida.

I knew that my parents both from Tennessee had both currently lived in Central Florida during the late 50s and early 60s.

And the first assumption I made was erroneous, but I thought perhaps I had another half sibling out there somewhere as a result of my father.

Okay, so I did a little bit of Investigation about this this close match individual.

I've had about 1,000 centimorgans so that would have made him really close and I Most of the actors in his family, mostly his parents and siblings all were still alive.

And I did not want to be the person to jump into a situation that would create chaos and somebody else's life.

So I just closed that DNA match chapter in my computer, and I never opened it again.

I never ever looked at it until 2021, and all of a sudden as I'm driving home, the DNA match thing which I had initially blamed on my father now made sense that it was actually my mother.

And the connections were from that side and for my father's side.

So I owe him an apology for for my thoughts, back in 2015, but no my mother had Alzheimer's at 2015.

So even if I would have figured it all out, then I couldn't have Her about it because she was far enough along and she didn't 2017 and my biological father died in 2017 as well.

Wow.

So you are not able to connect with them.

Were you able to connect with your birth certificate, father?

Well, we've been estranged for for many years.

The differences between us have created some, some gaps.

And I don't know that we've spoken really in five or more years.

So I can't foresee a time in which I will be reaching out to Him about about this and really, it doesn't matter much.

I know that there will be a lot of why questions that would never be answered and it's okay.

I am not able to jump back to the 1960s, early 1960s and and understand the context of what was going on.

I'm not angry about it.

I'm not upset.

I'm not sad about it.

It's just one of those things that I'm 60 years old now, Just don't have room for those kind of emotions in my life.

Some questions are just never meant to be answered and there's no point for me to Welling on those.

That's a really interesting perspective.

What happens next?

Do you decide to reach out to family?

What what do you do next in your kind of Investigation of where you come

from?

I was very fortunate in that this Revelation to me was in many ways liberating knowing that I I was not genetically attached to my birth certificate.

Father gave me permission to no longer be fearful that I would be inheriting his genetic temperaments and personality characteristics that I just didn't approve of, so that part light and bowel owed, quite a bit.

It was almost liberating and validating validating in that.

I had always sensed there was something ask you although I could not put my hands just on quad and and From that fear that I would went day, turn into to him.

And so, I was, I had a lot of energy as a result of learning this.

And I told myself that really all I was interested in was closure at the time, I did not know anything about the circumstances regarding my biological father.

I didn't know if his spouse was still alive.

I certainly did not want to be a person who jumped in and created a lot of family chaos in the same way.

I didn't want to do it 2015.

That's Not in my, in my nature but I was very curious about who this mystery person was but I had a lot of luck on my side that individual who had the closest match to me.

Also had a publicly available family tree over 1,000 members.

Also Lucky in a way that my paternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother, both shared the same surname, they were fifth cousins.

If I recall the surname, meant that As I was looking through my clothes DNA matches, I could find the surname over and over and over and over and over again.

So when I combine that surname with the public publicly available family tree, it was surprisingly easy for me to figure out who my paternal grandparents were.

It's so surprising though that at some point down the line I contacted a search Angel at DNA angel to help me with this.

So as I'm reviewing the the genealogy from This close relative thought that given his centimorgan relationship with me that he was going to be a half nephew and it turned out to be correct.

So confirming, a, he was a half nephew and knowing who my paternal grandparents were that helped me to figure out who the likely source of my parents would be and I just started going through a bit you Ares and look.

For family names and then looking up every single son that that family had and and found him that

way.

So you find your your biological father and you see that he has passed away at what point?

Did you decide or did you decide to make contact

with this family?

My biological family father's obituary was written for me in advance.

I'm East of that, the biographer of that obituary left me, breadcrumbs to help help me find the clues.

A photo of him taking when he was younger look, just like me.

I stopped me in my tracks and even though at the moment I saw the photo, I wasn't certain that he was my biological father from a factual point of view.

I was certain he was my biological father from an emotional point of view.

I knew where my mother had worked and when and It's in Florida and it within the obituary where he had worked and win was labeled and it matched up perfectly.

So I was absolutely convinced that this was, this was the person.

And before I decided to reach out to family members, that's when I contacted the search Angels because I just felt if I was going to reach out to another family and potentially cause them stress, I needed to be a certain that the knowledge that I had, was the correct one.

And within hours of them, looking at my DNA, and they couldn't find a thing wrong with my proxy tree that I created, and everything that I had determined, they found was factual.

They suggested that I contact.

One of my, my new siblings to get a DNA test, just mostly for their peace of mind and it turned out to be a good choice.

But you know I told myself Ask again that my goal was closure but the closer I got to finding out my biological family, there was just an irresistible undeniable urge for me to go further than that and to reach out to them, specifically within a week of finding out within a week, I had already made some inroads in that regard.

As it turns out this F nephew, his wife had had some npe Appearances in her own DNA journey and he was unusually empathetic with my situation and such a gentleman and so compassionate with with me as much younger guy and I'm reaching out to him and he was an exceptional young man and and helped me around the edges and I started around the edges just to make sure that my facts were were correct.

And it as we got closer and closer to having a more Ra picture, then I shared with him, the larger story that I thought, hey, your mother's father.

I think as my, my father and he said after he had all the evidence in hand, he said, well, okay, I'm gonna I'll share this information with my mother.

I don't know what's going to happen, but I'll do that.

We'll see where it goes from there and within hours of him, sharing it with his, his mother, his mother then shared it with her sisters and one of those sisters was reaching out to me.

Me, I found the I-5 and I'm just going to call them sisters rather than half sisters.

It just feels better on the tongue.

I have five sisters, one of them passed away years ago.

So for living sisters, all living in Florida, they won by one over the course of the next.

Several weeks reached out to me, either through social media or through just a pen to paper, all of them were so warm.

And so inviting and so loving, so compassionate, not a single.

All negative thing was found in those Communications.

Not one.

Are they all younger than you?

Are they is it

a mixture?

Yeah, it's a mixture.

I had all of them be a bit alive.

I think.

I would it be third or fourth in line right now?

For sure.

I'm the square in the middle.

Okay, were they able to give you any insight into your father?

Oh, So yes, I'm the very first Contact that I had from one of them was an explosion of photographs of my father, our father and various ages.

And one of those led to another sister also sending me photographs digitally through Facebook and then a few weeks, a few weeks later I get more photographs and and press clippings from another sister and yet another sisters against me even more memorabilia.

And so I have had a Riches of materials about my father and the stories that they share with me have been phenomenal.

And it as it turns out, he and I are very, very similar to one another and to paraphrase one of the sisters that he is living through me right now and that's a warm warm.

Feeling like to have.

Yeah.

Was there any sort of complication around the fact that I am assuming your father had an affair with your mother?

Yeah, I worried about that a lot and I think it's I'd like to say that before I reached out to the family, I wanted to make sure that my biological father's spouse had passed as well.

And she had, she passed in 2008.

Teen.

So I wouldn't have reached out at all.

Had she still been alive?

I think that it's important to realize that there's another emotional side of this.

The people who are receiving this information, have their own sets of issues that they have to process.

And for them, it was an understanding that their father, despite 63 years of marriage, 63 years of marriage, the same woman had had The time in his life, where he was unfaithful and that, that infidelity resulted in May.

There's no evidence at all that he was aware, that I was his child.

Unlike on the other side in which my mother didn't know, there's no evidence in a, my mother reached out to him.

So I don't think that became a source of any kind of issues within the family.

The sisters.

Certainly, no, don't recall anything like that, but I can empathize greatly with them.

M, because I was on the receiving end of that as well in the phone, call that I got from this friend.

I realized that my birth certificate.

Father had a relationship with another married woman for at least three years and I was barely two years old or less than three anyway when he was having this other child in a different family.

And so I understand that.

You've been on both sides of it truly.

And I try to be Compassionate and careful about that reality as I can be.

I'm not throwing stones life is complicated and it gets messy and people do things that sometimes they regret and they don't, they don't need my permission or acceptance of it.

It's just the way life sometimes is, I'm not throwing

stones.

Hmm.

Okay, so you've connected with your sisters, have you had a chance to meet them?

I have in.

So the phone call from my friend came in late May by late October, the sisters and I all met for a week in Florida and it was wonderful.

I wanted my sister's has a guest home that she let me in my wife stay in and we shared stories and photographs and memories.

And she took me to where they've gone to college and help me recreate some photographs from my father's.

Action of photographs back then they gave me pieces of his life, not only the photographs which mall trophies and has a letter jacket from high school and and a watch.

And a few other things that were symbols of him and it was an incredibly uplifting experience and we communicate regularly.

In fact, the planning another trip down to Florida perhaps this spring to continue our conversations.

We don't know where this is going to go, there's no script and we're not trying to press anything into that something beautiful and not having to have it all figured out.

We're just going with the flow.

Oh, that's so wonderful.

I'm so happy for you.

What has your family's reaction been to this?

Your wife and your son and your brother?

Well my wife was not one tiny bit surprised.

She told you so kind of thing.

She's been telling me for 35 years that this gentleman was not my father but Been incredibly supportive and she's been a long with me in this journey of the entire way.

She's giving me the space, to be obsessed about it during the first several weeks.

As many people are, and I just could not turn away from digging and digging and becoming a social media detective and trying to figure out every detail.

My son is a college student and like many college.

Students, just takes a strike and moves on.

He's not not terribly surprised, but not, not terribly invested in the process.

Is my, my brother has taken it the hardest.

He and my father, my birth certificate.

Father don't get along at all either and I did not know that he and my biological mother didn't get along.

I just didn't know that.

And for him, I was the only person left in the family that did and somehow he was threatened, the fact that that we weren't genetically full siblings.

And for him, his definition of family.

Is is different than mine and and different if different definitions of what brother means and father means and I'll have to say that I'm not completely solid on what my definitions are just yet.

But he's working his way through it and and I'm trying to be reassuring that because the genetics that doesn't change any of the family relationships.

Otherwise, but friends have been supportive.

It's I've not had much in the way of negativity other than the fact that it Some people who think they're trying to say something nice end up being completely out of bounds in their comments but it's not personal.

What's an example of that?

Because I think we've as npes we hear a lot of that.

So I think maybe that's helpful for people to hear.

So I told my story to to some folks that I thought were empathetic and most of them were and one of them wasn't in his comment was well nothing's changed really then, right?

Nothing has changed, but everything is

changed, right?

Part of my own issues early on was projecting onto other people.

What emotions they should have and reactions, they should have.

And when I stopped doing that because I always walked away disappointed in some way.

They didn't care as much or they didn't understand as well.

And so I felt guilty that I wasn't a good Storyteller or that.

I just wasn't saying the right words.

I didn't possess the vocabulary.

I was fake.

Failing words, but then I realize I was just projecting what I wanted them to do or to say, or to be on to them.

I want to stop projecting, then I felt much better about it.

You know, there's just no way that anybody can fully understand this and there's no sense in me getting upset when they don't.

It's just expected.

You

seem like you're in such a peaceful place with your mother specifically given that, you know, she knew and and Tell you, and I know you touched on it earlier, in terms of it was a different time and and you don't hold anger about it.

But how did you get to that place?

Where you just always there, or have you kind of reached a point where you've you accept

this next one question that?

I don't know that I could answer that fully, but what I can say is that I know how my mother grew up.

She grew up in a very mountainous Community without electricity.

Without indoor plumbing, her father died, very early, she and her family were very, very poor.

I know I saw a census report from 1940 in which her father said that the entirety of the year they made $200 in that sense this year.

So it was a very, very tough life and Mom had fortunately some Damn it gifts, which she ultimately parlayed into high school graduation.

And then, after that college, and a benefactor from her church, helped her and her mother or father passed away.

By this time, with some tuition and Mom couldn't afford to travel.

She, this this little Mountain Community, was very, very small, very, very Bible.

Belt ish raised in the Presbyterian church and and so when she had the opportunity to to leave this region and kind of grow as a person, she ended up in a much larger area and things happen.

You experiment, you you do things.

You were nearly might not have wanted to do but you did.

And when she decided to return back to this region to have me, she would have been a single pregnant school teacher.

In the middle of central.

Appalachia, in the Bible Belt must have been terrible for her and there, she must have been very afraid about what that would be for her.

And I can't put myself into those shoes.

I don't have those lived experiences as she did and she must have felt terrible about it and a failure.

How can I criticize somebody who lived the rest of her?

Entire life, trying to make me the kind of person That I feel that that I've become as a result of that, I've just happy that things turned out the way they have.

And I have a wonderful new family, who I'm quite close to already.

We share a lot of similarities.

They have made my life richer as a result of this experience.

So now, I'm not going to spend my time looking backwards.

I'm going to spend it looking for it.

That's wonderful.

What advice would you give a parent who might be keeping a DNA surprise from their childhood?

Else.

Well, that's a tough one.

First of all, I think all of us would acknowledge that every individual has a right to know about their biological family.

But that said, I do think that every circumstance is different that age of the child, the maturity of the child life circumstances, the situation of the parents, probably advise them to consult a a skilled family therapist to help walk them.

Them through this process about sharing the information with their child about when where and how the Y seems easy because they have the right.

The rest seems a bit complicated and I think people need to take their time and do that in a way that gives their child, the most strength, and support that they can.

What advice would you offer to someone who just discovered that they are in NP

e on the worst person to ask?

Had to because the very first thing would be to take this slow and I didn't.

I jumped right in the deep end of the pool from time, I found out the time I first had a connection with my one of my sister's.

It was 22 days and that's just too fast.

I think I would say to make space for the emotions that this process brings to you.

That every emotion you have is valid that and they're often conflicting, you don't have to have every answer.

You don't have a transcript, you don't even possess the vocabulary to sort this all out.

So taking the time is probably in your best interest.

It's I think it's also true that you need to find somebody that you can speak with about this.

Stumbled into the DNA Facebook groups just through researching, what the next steps for me were.

And once I got into those, those groups, I spent several weeks, probably just reading posts, and in that time, it gave me an opportunity.

To First realize that I wasn't alone.

That many people are going through this.

I learned acronyms and I've got now.

A acronym a phobia because there's so many of them.

But it was it was nice to have the acronyms in my life as a physician.

I had acronyms all the time, so I was comfortable with that and if you have an acronym, it happens a lot to need an acronym for.

So it's comforting to know that MP E and M, PE all were things that were discussed long before I found them to not project your emotions on someone else.

They just don't Possess the capacity to understand what you're going through particular in the beginning.

So finding someone who has a deep listener is probably in your best interest for men that it's okay to have these kinds of conversations that it doesn't make you less of a person less masculine for having these kinds of communities to have support with that.

The women that I have found in my life.

Now they used two new sisters of mine.

Are some of the strongest people that I know and I'm grateful for them and the women predominantly in the support groups, the DNA and PE groups have been phenomenal and they too are my superhero.

So I hope that everyone has a story like mine but I know that most don't so I guess I would suggest that finding a good therapist who has an understanding about These kind of issues is likely in nearly everyone's best interest.

Great advice, great advice for parents and for npes or anyone who's uncovered, a DNA surprise.

Well Mark, thank you so much for sharing your story today.

I'm so happy for you that it has been a positive experience and I hope that your journey just continues in a positive

direction.

Well, thank you.

I look forward to whatever chapters in this new book that the my sisters and I are, right.

Ting materialize, and thank you for inviting me on the show.

Thanks again to mark for sharing his story if you have a DNA surprise story that you'd like to share, please email, DNA surprises at gmail.com.

And if you haven't yet, please rate, review And subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts and Spotify.

Until next time.