The two-second test that changes lives forever

The two-second test that changes lives forever: When Linda Kelsey wrote about finding a brother after a relative’s DNA test, Inspire was flooded by stories from readers – their remarkable accounts will amaze you

• Linda Kelsey spoke to people whose lives have been changed by DNA testing
• Karen Lesley, 57, from Kent, discovered her birth father using an Ancestry test 
• She recalls being determined to find out why she was put up for adoption 
• Richard Bond, 73, from Sussex, grew up unaware that his sister was his mother 
• After he found out, Richard used a DNA test to trace his biological father  

When I wrote for Inspire about the accidental discovery of a half-brother after a DNA test earlier this year, the Mail was inundated with stories from readers who had made astonishing discoveries of their own.

I went to interview three of them, and they were all moved to tears as they spoke of their findings; proving that the threads that biologically bind, that tell us who we really are, have an emotional impact that goes far beyond the blithe adverts for simple DNA tests from the likes of firms such as Ancestry and 23andme.

Taking one of these tests can present you with way more than you bargained for. Once your DNA results are on the database, anyone who shares a link with you might try to contact you.

You might be curious to see if you have Viking forebears — but could well end up discovering your dad is not your biological father, or a previously unknown sibling wants to share a family inheritance.

For as much as these discoveries can create new, life-enhancing connections, they also have the power to tear families apart.

Karen Lesley (pictured), 57, from Kent, who struggled with issues of identity after being adopted, began tracing her birth family at age 44

‘My mother said: “i gave you up — you weren’t supposed to come back”’

Karen Lesley, 57, mother of three daughters, Rosemary, 28, Annie, 26 and Nancy, 19, lives with her second husband, Paul, in Kent. She says:

Being adopted, I’ve always struggled with issues of identity. But the real trigger for beginning the search for my birth mother was the birth of my own daughter.

I remember holding Rosemary for the first time. She was the first person I’d ever met whom I was truly related to. It was an incredibly powerful moment. I looked at my baby and wondered, how could anyone give away a child? That’s when I realised I had to find out where I came from.

I was 28 when I first gave birth. It wasn’t easy to trace people in those days and my then husband insisted it would only ‘end in tears’. It wasn’t until I was 44, in 2006, when my marriage had ended, that my search got under way.

My adoption was never a secret and I remember being told I was given away because my father, Paddy, had died in an accident when my mother was pregnant and she wouldn’t have been able to look after me as a single woman.

After a trail of investigations, and two different DNA tests eight years apart, my complicated story is still unfolding, but I am beginning to get closer to the truth about my past.

I’ve met my birth mother — and the birth father, who, despite being recorded on the birth certificate as deceased, turned out to be alive. And I’ve discovered three younger brothers.

My initial inquiries involved going to court to open my adoption files and tracing my mother to the street where she lived when I was born. That’s how I found her landlord, who told me that Paddy, my dad, definitely wasn’t dead when I was born in 1962 because he distinctly remembered bumping into him in the supermarket on the day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy was assassinated!

Krystyna Bracey (pictured), 66, from Devon, who never felt that she belonged with her adoptive family, began trying to find her blood relatives online after signing up with Ancestry

This was the first of many shocks. If he wasn’t dead, why did it say he was deceased on my certificate, and why had my mother lied? Why hadn’t they kept me?

I managed to trace one of my brothers. At first I didn’t tell him who I was. I simply said I needed to ask his mother, Margaret, for some information.

When I finally got her number and spoke to her (she was living back in Ireland, where she came from), she said: ‘When I gave you up, you weren’t supposed to come back.’

This was devastating to hear, but I was determined to find out why she had rejected me.

Eventually, in 2007, she agreed to a meeting at Dublin Airport where she told me she’d given me up ‘to give me a better life’.

She was cold and she sat there with her arms crossed, though we did have sporadic contact afterwards. My father Paddy was there, too. He held onto my hand and was much more emotional.

When the issue of having declared my father deceased came up, Margaret maintained it was all a mistake and she had no recollection of it.

My brothers seemed to accept me and we went on to spend about 18 months getting to know one another. We even had a big family holiday together at Center Parcs.

But I still sensed something wasn’t right, that there must have been a more compelling reason for giving me away than ‘a better life’.

Karen (pictured) found a first cousin once removed, after completing an Ancestry test in 2017 and was supplied with a family tree

That’s when I asked my brothers if one of them would do a DNA test so we could compare our parentage. One of them agreed.

This was in 2009 and it was a one-off test at a private clinic. Somewhat surprisingly, the results came back indicating that we shared only one parent. I assumed I wasn’t Paddy’s after all.

Margaret then admitted I was the result of a one-night stand shortly before she married Paddy, though the mystery of Paddy being dead according to the birth certificate remained.

After the DNA revelation, my brothers abruptly brought an end to our relationship.

I felt that they thought that if I was the mistaken outcome of a one-off encounter, I didn’t even merit half-sibling status in their eyes. What’s more, my presence was upsetting their mother.

I still hoped one day Margaret would relent and tell me who my birth father was. I was prepared to play a waiting game.

But in 2017 I saw an ad for Ancestry. That’s how I found Mary, a first cousin once removed, who was born in Ireland but now lives in Essex. She was a keen genealogist who went on to supply me with her family tree — which linked me straight back to Paddy.

According to the new DNA test I took with Ancestry, Paddy really was my dad! I had no idea that second test would bring me straight back to him and his wider family. Now Paddy’s sister, my 83-year-old aunt Alice, has embraced me into her side of the family.

Karen (pictured with her birth parents) revealed she has no regrets about searching for the truth, despite finding three brothers and losing them again

But Paddy and Margaret both died in the intervening years between those two tests.

Although rejection has been part of the story running through my life, I have no regrets about my search for the truth. There have been repercussions, of course, but as an adopted person, I felt compelled to seek my origins.

I had hoped it would be a sad, but simple, story of a young woman whose husband had died and had to give her baby away. I imagined my birth mother would have often thought about me, especially on my birthday, and that she would be pleased to know how my life had turned out.

I’ve found three brothers and lost them again, which makes me sad. But I’ve made gains on Paddy’s side of the family. I’ve discovered my bloodline as a source of identity and belonging. I had first understood what this meant when people would see me together with my own kids and say: ‘Don’t they look like you!’ It would make me well up.

It means so much not to feel totally isolated. And my story is not yet ended. I’ve discover-ed Margaret gave away another child before I was born. Now I am looking for him.

Karen Lesley’s self-published memoir, Coleman, Female: A Remarkable Story of Adoption, is available on amazon.co.uk

‘I was a Catholic Englishman. Now I’m the half-jewish son of an American GI’

Richard Bond, 73, a former project manager with IBM, has one adult daughter from a previous marriage and lives with his partner Val in Sussex. He says:

Although the results of my recent DNA test and the subsequent revelations were overwhelming, at 73 I can say I feel reinvented, almost a new person.

Before, I was a Catholic Englishman with some Irish blood. Now, it turns out I am half-American, half-Jewish and that my biological father was a much-decorated GI and airman who served with a bomber squadron in Europe in World War II.

Born shortly after the war, on June 5, 1946, I grew up in London with my parents, and my older sisters Bridget and Georgie. Georgie was 16 at the time of my birth.

I had a perfectly normal childhood with loving parents and was spoilt by my older sisters. But in the summer of 1965, when I was serving in the British Army in Cyprus, and home on leave, I received the shock of my life.

Richard Bond (pictured) , 73, from Sussex, who grew up unaware that his older sister Georgie was his mother, used DNA testing to find his birth father

Georgie, by this time married with a child, had been very ill and was back at my parents’ home convalescing. Diagnosed with terminal cancer and told she had a year to live, there was something she had to tell me.

She was lying there in bed and started this long, rambling speech about what people do when they are in love. It was as though she was trying to tell her 19-year-old brother the facts of life, and it was deeply awkward and embarrassing. And then it came out. That she wasn’t my sister, she was my mother.

I was totally numb. All I kept thinking was that I had to get back to Cyprus and forget all about it.

For 20 years it was never discussed. Despite the medical prognosis, Georgie got better and, in fact, only died in 2016.

Not once during that time did she introduce me to other people as her son, only as her brother. It may seem strange, but we all carried on as though nothing had happened. The only thing I did find out was that when Georgie married in 1948 when I was two, her husband offered to adopt me. But my grandparents refused to allow it, so the cover-up carried on.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s when I was about 50 that I plucked up the courage to confront my mother Georgie about the identity of my dad. She told me his name was John Cotton and that he was a dental surgeon.

That’s when I tried to track him down and discovered he had died in 1988. It all came to a dead end and once again I did the thing I’m so good at: I parked my feelings.

When I decided to go down the DNA route last year, mostly to provide my daughter and grandson with a family tree, I thought I’d find out more about John Cotton. But the discovery that I was very likely to have a parent of Jewish descent took me down another path altogether and made me realise that John Cotton couldn’t be my dad.

Because the relations matched with me on Ancestry were quite distant, I was advised to upload my data to GEDmatch, a site that enables you to share DNA information with people who’ve used any of the growing number of DNA websites.

Richard (pictured) advises others who are hoping to find a parent to be polite while persisting in their search, he says you will encounter resistance and suspicion 

From there, I matched with an American with an overlap of 941.5 centimorgans [the measure by which you can tell the closeness of your relationship], making me his first cousin. [With a parent you would share around 3,400 centimorgans]. Then I discovered two more second cousins in America. After extensive research we were at last able to build a credible path to my biological father.

Finally, I was linked to who I believed to be my biological dad’s son. I tried to get in contact and kept posting messages on Facebook, which he ignored, thinking I was doing some kind of phishing exercise. But eventually, his daughter looked at the message and soon after he wrote back: ‘I’m really sorry that I disrespected you. I know you meant this with the best intentions.’

He signed it ‘Your brother, Larry’. It just broke me. It was massive — 50 years of pent-up emotion. I wept and wept.

We hope to meet Larry and are working on a plan for going to America this year or next. Although I’ll never be able to meet my father (he had already died), I feel I’ve found a man who would have been a nice father to have. And I’m quite pleased, smug even, to have discovered this interesting heritage.

War hero: Richard’s father, pictured in uniform, with his own parents

Finally getting to the truth has made me feel complete. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, my father Malvin Falk flew as a gunner mechanic in B17 bombers as part of the 8th Bomb Group Command.

I don’t know exactly why he was in Winchester at the time of my conception, but he earned eight campaign decorations and a squadron Presidential Citation, completing his service with the rank of Master Sergeant. His remains have been laid to rest at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

I’ve often wondered if my mother, Georgie, really believed the dentist John Cotton to be my dad. Or maybe she felt that was a better lie than admitting to a fling with a GI she’d met at the end of the war, who was about to return to the States.

For those like me looking for a parent, I have this advice: the key is polite persistence. You’ll encounter resistance from suspicious links; you will be ignored and rebuffed. But with well-researched evidence, you should be able to convince the most sceptical of the veracity of your research.

I call it the magic of DNA.

‘Now i’m no longer a dark secret’

Krystyna Bracey, 66, a former school secretary, lives in Devon with her third husband, Jeff, and son Liam.

If you are going to do a DNA test, you’ve got to be strong enough to take what it throws back at you.

I needed to find my family because I never felt I really belonged with the parents who adopted me. From earliest childhood I dreamed that my real mother would come and get me.

My adoptive mother could be cruel and spiteful. Today she might be labelled emotionally abusive. If I did something that displeased her, she would say: ‘That will be the foreign blood in you.’

Krystyna Bracey (pictured), 66, was inspired to do a DNA test after watching an episode of Long Lost Family

And sometimes, referring to my figure, she would say I looked like ‘an old Polish washerwoman’. It was never a secret that my biological mother was Polish.

For the first four years of my life I was brought up in a children’s home, after which I was fostered, and then finally adopted in 1958 when I was six. I always felt beholden to my mum for having been ‘chosen’ by her. It was only in 2016, when she died, that I felt free to find my birth mother.

With the help of an adoptive cousin, Georgina, who has been like a sister to me, we went to Devon County Council to find my adoption papers.

There, I discovered my original surname for the first time, but we didn’t get far tracing the family. Then one night I was watching an episode of Long Lost Family, and I said: ‘I’m going to do a DNA test. Whatever it throws up at us, I’ll deal with it.’ And so I signed up with Ancestry.

When I got my results, I tried to make contact online with some possible matches. Initially I received no response, but I later got a message from someone in New York, who said: ‘I think we might be related.’

From there it snowballed. Soon I had the names of my birth mother’s sisters and discovered one of them, Ursula, was living in London and had two children — my cousins Richard and Ania.

Krystyna’s birth mum (pictured far right with her own family) died in 1973. Krystyna discovered her blood relatives were unaware of her existence

My mother, I was to discover, had died long ago, in 1973. When Richard rang me for the first time, the two of us were crying and laughing together. I was made to feel so welcome.

The extraordinary thing is that neither Ursula nor anyone else in the family ever knew of my existence. For my cousins, my birth mother had always been a favourite aunt who spoilt them. She was a lovely lady, according to Richard, though he wonders now if her involvement was to do with the guilt of having given me away.

I discovered my birth mother had had an affair with a married man, almost certainly my father, whom she later married then divorced. But it’s only ever been my mother I felt the need to know about.

I’ve never borne any malice towards her for what she did, but I can better understand why, as a single woman, she didn’t keep me, and why she sought a better life for herself.

My cousin Richard has taken me to the Polish town where my mother was born and I have seen old film footage in which her mannerisms and mine are so alike.

I’m proud to be part-Polish and I can live with having been a dark secret because now it’s all in the open. Before I felt lost, but now I feel complete.

Has your life been changed by the results of a DIY DNA test? Write to us at [email protected]

Source: Read Full Article