I took an ancestry DNA test and accidentally uncovered two generations of family secrets
I’m a bit of a history nerd, and what started as me digging into my family tree has turned into uncovering a lot of stuff that was clearly never meant to come out. So yeah… I’m airing it out.
After my grandmother passed away, I inherited all the family documents — photos, letters, certificates, everything. There were some really cool things in there like marriage certificates from the 1800s, old love letters from the war, even my grandmothers handwritten job references.
But mixed in with all that… were secrets.
We already knew my grandmother had a child out of wedlock back in the 50s/60s and gave that baby up for adoption. She came from a very upper-class, religious family, so that kind of thing was very much hidden.
Then there’s my mum.
We always thought she was the second child born out of wedlock. The story we knew was that my grandmother went to a girls home to give birth, like women did back then, and originally my mum was going to be adopted out too.
But this is the part that stuck with me.
My grandmother saw her in the nursery — all the babies from married mothers were up the front, properly cared for. And my mum was at the back, in rags, with a dirty diper.
She went home and fought with her own father to bring her back and keep her.
Fast forward to me going through all these documents and following up on those old references… I realised something didn’t add up.
There weren’t just two babies.
There were three before my mum.
Three children my grandmother had given up for adoption that no one really talked about.
My mum already had a strained relationship with her. When she was young, she ran off with an older woman (which, in that kind of family, did NOT go down well). She was basically judged and pushed aside for it, which is pretty ironic given everything my grandmother had hidden.
My mum has always loved kids and became a teacher, but back then, being gay made having children a lot harder. So she started looking into options.
Then somehow everything collided.
One of my grandmother’s friends mentioned a young woman looking for her birth mother — same religion, same kind of background. At the same time, my mum’s best friend kept saying there was a girl she saw on the train every day who looked and laughed exactly like my mum.
Yep. Same person.
One of the adopted daughters.
Even though they were born in completely different parts of the country, they ended up living near each other.
My mum was angry. Not just about the secrecy, but because she had been judged so harshly for her life, while all of this was hidden.
At first, she refused to meet her. The rest of the family did, but she couldn’t.
Eventually, she came around. They started talking on the phone and actually got along really well. They made plans to meet after the daughter came back from an overseas trip.
But she never made it back.
She was hit by a car on that trip and died before they ever met in person.
After that, my mum decided to have a child her own way. She literally put an ad in the newspaper looking for a donor.
Long story short… after what I can only describe as literally film canister full of “donation,” I was born.
I’ve only met my biological father twice. Every year he’d send me a birthday card with $20 in it, but that was about it.
So recently, I decided to take an ancestry DNA test. Originally, I just wanted to confirm whether my mum’s adoptive dad was actually her biological dad.
Turns out… he was.
Cool. End of story, right?
Nope.
Instead, I got a really strong DNA match with someone listed as my half-sibling on my dad’s side.
I already knew about one of his kids.
But this match? She had no idea about me — or anyone else.
After a bit of back and forth, it became pretty clear that her dad (my biological father, who has since passed) hadn’t exactly been upfront about his life.
Which meant I ended up being the one to tell her that her beloved, now-deceased father had actually fathered not one… but two more children she never knew about.
Yeah. That was an interesting conversation.
To her credit though, she handled it incredibly well and has been nothing but kind about the whole thing.
So yeah… both me and my mum ended up finding out we have more siblings than we ever knew about.
All because I wanted to look into my family history.
So… that’s my family’s dirty laundry.