Randy’s DNA Surprise

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Welcome to DNA Surprises: Randy's Unexpected Journey

I fantasized this one scenario where my mom tells me, like maybe when I'm a teenager, you know, that my father's somebody else.

And the whole time we're living within just like 10 miles of each other.

They, they started out in Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles, and then Long Beach.

And Long Beach is so close to Gardena, but it's also really close to Westminster, where I went to high school.

And so I imagine that I find out and then I introduce myself and, you know, it's a shock, of course.

And then I meet his wife and another stepmother.

So of course they're going to argue and whatever, but they get over it, you know, because they find me so charming or whatever.

And the the next thing I know, I now have six siblings instead of just two, and with very similar interests.

Speaker 2

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

I'm your host, Alexis Ourselt.

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.

Speaker 3

Test this is DNA surprises.

One of the things I've learned from hosting DNA Surprises is that these discoveries don't lose their impact with age.

Whether someone is 2545 or 70, learning that the man who raised you is not your biological father can shift your understanding of your identity in an instant.

In this week's episode, Randy shares how Adna Test, organized by his half sister, uncovered that truth.

With both of his parents already gone, he began the long process of piercing together the identity of his biological father.

Following DNA matches, working with relatives, and navigating a trail of clues that stretched across years.

Randy reflects on the twists and turns of his search and how the age we are when we make these discoveries can impact what happens after the truth is revealed.

Thank you for sharing your story, Randy.

Uncovering Early Family Life and Lingering Questions

My name is Randy, I just turned to 70 a few months ago.

I'm from Gardena, CA.

I was born and raised there and my mother Maxlin grew up in the hollers in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and I now only live a few hours from there near Louisville.

Soon after high school, she moved up to Detroit, MI to help out her younger sister who was in a an abusive relationship.

So that was my Aunt Margie.

She had four children by then, and then my mom met Charles, my dad, who lived just outside of Detroit, by the following year.

My mom gave birth to my older sister Cynthia in 1947 and then my brother Rodger in 1949.

And then about a year after that, they decided to move to California, which is how I ended up being born in Gardena, which is one of those many communities within Los Angeles County.

There's a large gap between my birth and that of Rogers.

Seven years, to be precise.

Three years after my birth, they got divorced.

So anyway, that was the basic story, which we always knew of.

But then in the 1990s, at some point, my sister was talking to my dad and he mentioned that actually mom and he didn't actually, they never actually got around to getting married until after I was born.

And so they were together for almost 9 years, maybe 10 years before they decide to get married, which makes the divorce even harder to understand.

But it kind of helped me a little bit.

I mean, that kind of made me feel a little better because I'd always, I thought growing up, I wonder if I was the cause of the divorce.

But now I see that maybe I was the cause of them getting married.

I don't know but.

Yeah.

And that seemed like, you know, fairly uncommon for them too.

So that's really interesting.

Speaker 1

When Cynthia heard this from dad, then she asked dad about it and she just said, well, they were living in a common law marriage and, you know, that was legal in California.

So, you know, that's the end of that story.

And the mom was always kind of kind of like that.

They were very cut and dried explanations without going into much detail.

An Email Delivers Life-Altering DNA Results

So then dad a couple of years later he meets Janie.

They got married in 1960.

They had two children, 2 girls, Nancy and Sandy.

And Nancy is very much part of this story because she was the one who dove deep into a genealogy and asked all the siblings for DNA test and a cousin John.

So we did that.

And I was, you know, excited about that.

And like I've noticed many others who you've talked with, one reason they want to get ADNA test is just to find out what their ethnicity is and to see if there are Native American ancestors, which I always find interesting that people are, are always wondering about that.

But I was, I was one of those.

And so we get the DNA test.

So it's like, you know, six weeks.

And by this time, this is in 2014, in 93, I moved with my wife and her two boys from Southern California to Perry County, Kentucky, which was the exact place, the same county where my mom had grown up.

So I had lots of kinfolk, have lots of kinfolk all over the place to take a job teaching English at the Community College.

So then I take the DNA test in 2014 and I'm waiting for the results.

And Nancy writes me a letter, an e-mail to let me know that the results are in.

And I was excited.

You know, I see that.

Oh, there's this e-mail.

So I open it up.

She says, hi, Randy, your DNA results posted this morning.

And I'm not sure if you've taken a look or not, but there was something unexpected.

I can't really find a good way to say it.

Your results didn't matter, Sandy, John and me on any level of genetic relation.

Again, Sandy is her older sister and John is a cousin and the conclusion is that Dad wasn't your biological father.

I'm like really confused now and the adrenaline is running and I decide I need to calm my nerves.

So I go downstairs and I empty out the dishwasher to give me a break, you know, to try to calm down.

So I do that.

I come back up and there's only one paragraph of the e-mail left and Nancy continues.

It hurts to me that you had to find out this way because in my heart, this changes nothing.

You are my brother, period.

You were Dad's son until the day he died.

Dad and your mom had an unconventional relationship in many ways, but they both love you.

Roger and Cindy, I don't have a clue as to who knows or knew anything, but if or when the time is right for you, I'll certainly help piece it together.

Love you, Nancy.

Coming to Terms with a Lopped-Off Family Tree

So this is just as so many other people as I've heard on your podcast said, it's just doesn't make sense.

It's I'm baffled.

Dad is not my dad that my name shouldn't be the last name.

Did you accept the information or did you have any denial?

Like, that's a lot of information to take in, no?

No, I didn't have any.

I was just, you know, well, she opens, you know, in that first paragraph with with this unexpected news.

So I that's why I was starting to get nervous.

I had no idea.

I mean, it was just totally flabbergasting.

So I call my wife in Jackie and have her read the e-mail.

First thing she says is you think it's a mistake.

Oh, and then it hadn't even occurred to me.

It's like, oh, of course, yeah, that's probably what it is.

Yeah, right.

That's kind of the first thing a lot of people go to.

Obviously it was a mix up, some sort of mistake.

Right, right.

But then I think, well, what if the tests were correct, however, you know, 'cause And then I immediately think of all the ramifications.

If that's the case, then it means Roger and Cynthia are my half siblings saying to Nancy are not related to me at all.

So they were they're like what?

close family friends, I guess.

But that's no doubt why Nancy tried to reassure me, you know, that I would always be her brother, which, you know, I found very, very moving.

But now this is 2014.

My my dad had passed away in 1999.

Mom had passed away in 2011.

So I can't consult them, you know, And that's one of the disadvantages of being as old as I was at the time, like close to 60.

And now I'm 70 and I realize, OK, a whole entire half of my family tree has just been lopped off.

So I've only got half a tree now.

So we begin the search for for a father.

And this is thanks to Nancy and her familiarity with using Ancestry, dancestry.com and the family tree.

She got really familiar with the science and the mathematics of it.

So I asked her how, how do you know that this information?

How did you figure this out?

She included a little matrix of just the six people who were tested, you know, with the six names going across the top six names going down, you know, in a column and showing how much DNA we all share.

And she also introduced me to relationship charts, right, DNA relationship charts and how they they overlap somewhat as you move from one amount, a range of numbers to another.

So it's, you know, Randy, Rodger, Cynthia, Sandy, Nancy and John and where Rodger and Cynthia are.

And then you you follow their row across to my name intersecting.

It shows the amount of DNA that you would expect from 1/2 sibling.

And then if you do the same with Sandy and Nancy, Nancy and Sandy share, of course, and they share with Rodger and Cynthia the amount of DNA you would expect from half siblings.

But when you compare me to Sandy and Nancy, it's just zero.

There's nothing there.

John, the cousin, he shares amount that you would expect from first cousins, and so he shares numbers with Rodger and Cynthia and Sandy and Nancy and 0 for me.

So the only logical conclusion is that I'm not the son of my father.

Following Clues and Exploring Potential Paternal Candidates

Nancy then comes up with a plan and she gives me a job to do.

And this job is to contact anybody, anyone I can think of who might have been around at the time of my birth to see what they know.

Of course, they're going to be older than me.

And then she's got the job of looking really closely, going deep with all the cousin matches, right, Because she was the manager of my my test and had access to all that information.

So she starts looking for the paternal cousins and seeing if we can find the family, the clan, the tree that I belong to.

So I replied to Nancy in an e-mail by asking her, well, why don't you ask your mom, see if she knows anything?

Well, she, she did it immediately.

I think before the day was over, she got back to me and asked her mom if her mom knew anything.

And her mom, Janie, said, I'm sorry he had to find out this way.

That was a shock there.

So.

OK, so, so people were suspicious.

And there are all these emotions all at all at once.

You know, I'm, I'm getting angry.

There's a kind of a sense of betrayal, like people are hiding this from you.

Such an important, important thing.

The next person I ask, even though my sister and brother are 7-8 years older than me, you might have thought I would ask them next, but instead, for some reason I still can't figure it out.

I decided to ask my first cousin Linda, who is my maternal cousin.

She is the the daughter of Margie who I mentioned earlier.

I called her up and I said well oh hi Linda, how you doing?

So I took Adna test and before I could say anything more she goes Oh my God.

When Margie, my aunt Margie moved with her girls and their oldest was a boy John, they needed a place to stay.

So they actually moved in for a little while, less than a year, but they moved in with my and again, this is before I was born with my mom and dad and Roger and Cynthia in a modest 2 bedroom house.

My Aunt Margie told years later, you know, would tell Linda some things about what life was like in our household.

And they both my mom and dad both had kind of fiery tempers.

So Linda recalls her mother telling her that Marge was in the other room and she heard my dad and and mom arguing when my mom was pregnant.

And my mom blurts out, he's not even yours.

So it's really, you know, turning into a soap opera.

My dad was kind of, he had a short temper, but, you know, he was out of the house by the time I was 3.

And then they did the every other weekend, you know, visitation with the father, that kind of a settlement.

She didn't she didn't get any alimony.

She didn't want any.

She just got child support.

Linda told me that as they watched me growing up, they were suspicious just from because I looked so different and acted so different from my dad.

Cynthia and Roger were clearly the children of dad, but but I just seemed like I was from another family.

It was actually John, the oldest, who asked Linda, have you ever noticed that Randy just doesn't seem to to be anything like, you know, Charlie?

And she goes, Oh yeah, that's right.

And then as I got older, it just that just became more and more apparent.

Besides the negative feelings, I had the sense of betrayal, There was also kind of an excitement because it was like, hopefully maybe my father is a really good guy.

Not that my dad wasn't a good guy, but but, but maybe, you know, I, I was now all of a sudden my life had become interesting, more interesting than I could have ever imagined.

I was on a quest to learn about, you know, myself and, and to find a father.

Navigating Confusion and False Leads in the Search

And so Linda, she came up with, she came up with three candidates right off the bat, after a lot of searching, she gave me the name of the guy.

There was this married couple that lived around the corner from us I didn't know anything about.

But Jack and Juanita, they were the ones who first moved to California around the 19.

Yeah, it would have been just before dad and mom, and they were good friends of theirs back in Detroit, and they encouraged them to move out to California.

So we're living right around the corner from them.

So Linda thought maybe, you know, Jack was, he's kind of tall, WAVY hair and that I looked more like him anyway than I did my dad.

So she thought that might be a candidate.

And then there was Linda's own father, Frank, who again, not so tall, but he had the WAVY hair and he also had bad acne and he had those, you know, acne scars, which I had.

And I had adolescence.

Of course we didn't think of it immediately, but of course he couldn't have been my father because Linda had taken the DNA test and she, you know, she had, She had.

She was on the 1st, yeah.

You're just trying to find any any connection though, so you're thinking of all possibilities.

And she was only, she was definitely a first cousin, which meant that Frank, you know, her father couldn't be my father.

And then she suggested her stepfather, Margie, married again, had four more children.

So eventually they had eight children, and they're all girls.

But he had a brother, Linda's uncle Bob, and both Bob and Jim were tall with the WAVY hair.

Again, she showed me a picture of him.

I didn't remember much about Bob.

I knew Jim really well.

So I did all this research on ancestry, looking at documents and records and trying to see what I could find.

She even suggested I asked Jim if he would take ADNA test.

And so I did.

And begrudgingly he agreed and he took the test and he and I remember the reply in the e-mail.

He said yeah, just like I thought, yeah, we're not, no, we're not related.

So then the other job I had to do was start messaging my paternal cousins and seeing what I could find.

This took over 2 years of this kind of research and because partly I really didn't know what I was doing and when I would get messages, when I would contact my paternal cousins and ask them questions and they reply to me, I just assumed that everybody else out there in ancestry land knows more about it than I do.

But I realized, no, that's that's not true.

Many are as confused as I was.

Expert Help Narrows Down the Family Tree

You know, about how this all works.

So there were two cousins that that came to play key in unlocking the mystery, and that was Stephanie and Leslie.

And at first this is an example of how Leslie wasn't quite sure how to understand the information because, you know, I told her who I was and where I was born and, you know, gave her my last name and all that.

I listed the these other men, their surnames in my profile just in case.

But Leslie responded by saying that she doesn't know she she doesn't have anybody in her family tree with my last name.

And of course he doesn't, because.

Right, because that's, yeah, it's, it's not about the last name.

It's the DNA.

Right, right, right.

I'm not because I'm, I, I shouldn't have that last name either.

And she was slow to respond and I would contact her occasionally and, and then there was another cousin, Stephanie.

Stephanie was, was obviously much more experienced with analyzing, you know, the matches and looking at the DNA shares.

And she had emailed me early on with some questions, but I didn't really understand the significance of it at the time.

But she had asked me about, she knows that I had a name in my tree, but that turned out to be the wrong name to ask me about because she was looking at my maternal information.

That was another complication because later I would find out from Nancy that who understood it better that I had a lot of regional endogamy, right?

I had a lot of cousins from Kentucky who are my cousins on both sides of my tree.

So Stephanie is asking me about somebody on her tree, but that was that was the wrong name to be.

That was the wrong last name to be looking at.

But I didn't understand that.

So finally, close to two years, Stephanie emails me again and she's figured some things out and she has this new last name and she tells me that she's a part of this family and she sees that they.

So we're on the like we're on the second cousin level, maybe second cousin once removed.

And so I'm giving Nancy, of course, I'm forwarding her all these emails.

And finally Nancy, through her digging and doing the math, she comes up with this proto family tree.

There were seven children at the grandfather level.

And she was able to narrow that down as we found out more about this family, what we needed to find at second cousins, right?

Second cousins are people who share great grandparents.

So if we could find great grandparents then we can narrow it down to the grandparent family.

Then they have to have a male child and that male child or its brothers, whatever would, would most likely be my father.

There's another person that Nancy pulled into this conversation, which is a good friend of hers from Wisconsin named Carla, who is who has a statistics like expert, but she studied DNA genealogy herself as an amateur.

And so she's providing her insight.

And eventually we found a family that looked like it was my family.

And so I had a name, I had a father.

And also with Leslie's help was providing this information about the family.

She mentioned that the this couple, John and his wife, had four boys and that the couple were still alive in their 90s.

Which means that I got immediately excited about that because it meant that it was a possibility that my my own biological father was still alive and maybe I'd have a chance to meet him.

Shared Interests and Fantasies of a Different Life

What did you think when you narrowed it down?

Well, it was getting more and more exciting because of what we were discovering about John the father.

The first thing that happened was I was on on Ancestry, looking at the documentation, and there's a picture and it looks like a yearbook picture.

I enlarged it and so there's this person looking at me and it's in the USC Trojan yearbook of 1949.

That's when John had graduated.

Then I clicked on another picture and another section of the yearbook which showed him as a member of the journalism club.

And when I started college myself in 1973, I began as a journalism major.

So that sent, you know, tingles up my spine.

And then and there were a couple of other pictures of him with that club pictures.

And then I found another picture of him in another yearbook, only he was on the faculty that in the faculty section and turns out that he was teaching English, which is what I do and or did I retired a couple of years ago.

So that was amazing.

Yeah, to see these connections.

And did you feel like you had anything in common with the person you believed was your biological father all those years before?

Right.

So dad was, he was kind of a difficult man to love, at least with, with as far as his children go, because he had kind of an ego and he didn't really know how to have a conversation.

He liked to tell stories and maybe what do you call it?

You know, go on and on.

I I remember one time we were over at his house this after I was married, you know, for dinner, he was saying something and, and all I said was I think you might be exaggerating, you know, kind of jokingly, but with a straight face.

He just says and his eyes kind of go kind of go cold, you know, kind of dead.

He says, you're calling me a liar.

You know, that's the kind of Congress said you would have.

So I just said no, he wasn't really abusive or, but he thought, for example, college professors were eggheads.

You know how much respect for, for that kind of education.

He was a very conservative Republican.

My grandfather, his father was a member of the KKK back in Detroit back in the day.

I think I had a pretty good education and, and, and what it was and what it meant to be a racist.

So there wasn't much.

I felt kind of alienated from him a lot of the time.

That would change just before he he passed away, fortunately.

So no.

So to find this kind of information that what appears to be my father is an educated man teaching English in high school and he had these four sons.

So we searched for them.

We had their names.

And so Nancy once again told me to, you know, go, go on Facebook and wherever else on the Internet to see what you can find out, which I did.

One thing we learned right away that the these four brothers were all born in the 50s just like me.

And so I came across the one brother, his name is Robert.

I discovered that he taught chemistry at Community College.

Just unbelievable.

And then John, they had a brother, John.

John was a very popular name in this family as as there were in many families back in the day, was a Carpenter in the school district.

And then there was Paul.

It was a little harder to find.

I couldn't find him on Facebook.

I found him through just a Google search.

He taught history at a Community College just outside of Sacramento.

So now I have two brothers who are Community College professors like me and a father who's a high school teacher, an English high school teacher.

And I mean, it's just incredible.

And and, you know, I've heard stories like this before, but, you know, to have it happen to you.

Well, and it and there were times I, I would cry a little bit.

I know this probably didn't do me much good, but I would, I imagine what could have been.

Yeah, that's.

Common.

Yeah, but what if so, what what were you thinking about?

I mean, I imagine being raised by someone who is who is more like you, similar career.

But what were the the thoughts that you were having?

Well, I, I fantasized this one scenario where my mom tells me, like maybe when I'm a teenager, you know, that my father's somebody else.

And then I meet his, his wife, and another stepmother.

And the the next thing I know, I now have six siblings instead of just two and with very similar interests.

Acknowledged as Sibling, Bound by Family Secret

I think about how what if John had been around to offer me advice because I wanted to go to USC myself, but to save money, I ended up going to BYU because at the time I was a Mormon.

So I was really had that, that fervent, you know, Mormon, the passion.

I thought that he would have been this, this father would have been a good person maybe to receive some counseling, some advice about how to proceed with your college career.

So Nancy and Carla talked to me about how to I need to make contact with these four brothers.

They decided it would be better to contact the brothers instead of the father.

They coached me on writing a letter, an e-mail, this first e-mail where I just kind of put some feelers out and I emailed Robert mentioned that, you know, I took a test DNA looks like you were related just as a way to to see how receptive he would be.

Maybe I was being a little deceptive, but I didn't want to scare him too much.

I wanted to verify some information, like, so you have you have these brothers and a father and a mother and these names and whatever.

He wrote back within an hour.

So yeah.

Hey, Wow.

That's crazy, you know?

I don't know where where you fit in, but, you know, if you need any more information, go ahead and contact me.

So then my next e-mail, Nancy suggests I just come out and to tell him that I thank your father is my father.

And then silence for a while.

A week passes without any response and I asked Nancy if I should contact him again and she said no, no, you're going to have to play it cool here, just wait.

And another week passes and she explains how Robert may have shown this e-mail to his brothers, or maybe not, but he's he may be in shock and doesn't know what to do.

But eventually she says OK, go ahead and write another letter.

And so I do more silence.

And then finally her and Carla persuaded me to write a longer, more detailed letter and to include providing information about where I was born and grew up and the to include three photos in the letter, one of me and my two boys around the age of 10 or 11.

So that's what I do now.

Before I was just writing to Robert individually.

By this time we had found Mark's e-mail address, so we wrote to all four.

And then we waited.

At this point, you've been waiting two years, right?

Just to really like.

Yeah, we're now getting to test was in 2014.

We're getting close to like December of 2016.

That was after a lot of red herrings and false leads and bump steers and just taking a lot of time just to get a response from people in the early stages.

I thought, well, there's no way we're going to.

This is like looking for a pen, you know, in the proverbial haystack.

But you know, we did find it thanks to and I was just again, like I said, really lucky to have Nancy there to help guide me.

So we get this letter back and it's from the four brothers, a very well written letter and they say the information that you've provided that leaves little doubt that you are a sibling.

And then they laid out next steps is the way they phrased it.

So they had no problem believing that I was their brother, but given their parents old age, they did not want to cause them any unnecessary distress.

So their father and mother cannot know about me.

They apologize for that.

But that's just the way it it's, you know, it has to be at this point.

So that was sad to hear.

But I understood it completely and said, yeah, I no problem.

I, you know, I understand.

And then they said maybe in in the future, you know, we'll be able to, you know, maybe meet or, or whatever to get that long detailed letter.

I appreciated it, but that's, you know, then I realized for sure, yeah, there's no way I'm going to.

I'm going to be able to meet my biological father.

Shared Memories and Hopes for Future Family Connections

It seems so close.

Sure.

And then in it would have been the two 2017.

Oh no, it was actually 2018 when I learned that that John, my biological father, I passed away and one of the brothers wrote this really touching, beautiful eulogy commemorating their father.

And that's when I learned that he was he was at Pearl Harbor in World War 2 on a minesweeper in 2018, might have been 2019.

I was trying to since they were opened to a, to a meeting sometime.

I wanted to make it really easy for him to meet me.

Two of the brothers are in Northern California.

The other two are in Southern California.

And I thought, boy, wouldn't it be nice if I could find a conference to go to, an academic conference in the Bay Area, which I knew there were plenty of those during spring break, would be perfect.

And then I could let him know that, well, I happen to be going to a conference in San Francisco or wherever, and if you'd like to get together, you know, I'd love to.

Well, that's exactly what happened.

So I was able to write that letter and I got to meet Paul and Mark.

I was very nervous.

Of course, it's kind of awkward at 1st.

And we brought pictures to exchange.

So it was a very nice conversation.

And after a couple of more years passed, Paul sent me an e-mail out of the blue asking me he had a couple of books from his their father's library that he'd like to send me if I was interested.

And I said, yeah, you bet.

A few weeks later, I received their dad's copy of Gulliver's Travels, an edition which had come out in the early 40s that his that, well, our dad had purchased in Honolulu in a bookshop, a used bookshop.

And so it's, it's inscribed on the inside.

You know, their dad has his name there and the year.

So I was very, very attached by that.

And the other book was this thick and thought English literature anthology that John used in his grad school days.

And then a similar thing happened with by let's see, 2023 was my high school 50th reunion.

So that allowed me that gave me an excuse to go see the other brothers at a restaurant in Huntington Beach.

So I've been able to meet with all four brothers once so far.

I don't know if I get a chance to see him again.

The final complication is that while John, the father, passed away in 2018, their mother is still alive, age 104.

So they still can't reveal my identity.

So they can't let everybody know you know, who I am.

So that's kind of ironic, I guess I'm, I make a joke about it to, you know, friends and family that she's just doing that out of spite to frustrate my plans.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, what are what would you like to see happen, you know, in the future?

Well, I don't have to be honest, I don't really have high hopes.

I mean, the distance is a problem. 2000 miles if we don't get to ever see each other in person again, you know, I'm fine with that.

After their mother passes away, there might be more of an excuse to They might want me to come out, introduce me to the extended family, but maybe not I I don't really know what, given my age and the distance to California and all that, who knows?

We'll just just see how it unfolds.

Randy's Wisdom for Parents and Discoverers Alike

What advice do you have for a parent who might be keeping adna surprised from their child?

Like others, I feel that a child has the right to know who is mother and father are, and that children want to know where they come from.

It seems to me I want to know who I am, and a big part of that has to do with who your parents are and why you are the way you are, to not reveal that information.

And I understand my mother committed adultery.

Well, the more I read, the more I've realized over the years that adultery is a very popular thing all down through history.

And it happens and then there's some very interesting stories out there.

And so I understand the shame.

And fortunately in the modern world now, this does have quite the same stigma as it used to.

So I've I've accepted the idea that I'm a bastard.

There's a lot of us, but it just doesn't mean anything.

That word like it used to where you could lose out and on an inheritance simply from that.

But parents need to because so I have this kind of resentment now towards my mother that she couldn't tell me.

This may be the most important thing she could have told me.

She decided not to.

And both my parents went to the grave with that secret.

That's just really, really unfair to the child.

That's not right.

No, And what advice do you have for someone who just uncovered Adna surprise?

Having a support group to help you get through it.

And of course I had Nancy in my experience, but I also came across DNA detectives on Facebook.

There were a lot of very supportive, friendly people out there who who answered questions for me and provided that support through this ordeal and that.

And I saw a lot of stories, very, the happy stories, very tragic stories.

That's a, a good resource.

I, I found DNA detectives and of course there's tons of books out there and there's the resources of how to read and analyze your DNA results.

In my experience, I was baffled, confused.

But we're older.

But it takes time.

Well, Randy, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your story.

I'm always fascinated by these stories that take a while to kind of come into focus.

I hope that, well, I, I guess I should say I, it's not like I'm hoping for anyone to pass, but I do hope that soon, you know, you'll be able to maybe be a little bit more public or, or see what the next phase of a relationship could be with the newfound family that you discovered.

So I I just wish you the best and thank you for your time today.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thanks again to Randy for sharing his story.

If you have Adna surprise that you'd like to share, submit your story at dnasurprises.com and for early add 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.