... to ask for experience in dealing with sensitive/surprising info following family DNA testing

[MindMyRead]

Any advice on practical examples of checks, verification, etc. To give some basic context: one long happy marriage with 4 great kids, but the surprise was 3 different fathers.

I don't work in this area, and would not be able to follow the details with spending a lot of time/effort. If you have experience of any similar situation:

• Is there any external 3rd party reference/source you went to for advice on interpreting and explaining the result?

• Is there any value in re-testing?

Obviously, I'll have to educate myself on this to some level. Any pointers much appreciated!

No personal experience but there some support organisations in place for this:
isogg.org/wiki/Unexpected_results

Was it an era IVF was possible?

Is the mother still alive?

@pomegranatepillow, Wow! thank you so much! I never knew such a resource existed.

I'm wondering about the importance of re-testing on something so important. The "news" is just so hard to understand based on what we know.

Yes, IVF was technically possible, but currently considered very very unlikely.

Mother still alive, but ill.

I have done this testing for myself and family members.

Some of the ancestry and ethnicity stuff can be a bit off, but there is no doubt about whether your parents are or are not your biological parents.

For context, various sites correctly identified cousins as distant as 2nd cousin twice removed and got the relationship exactly right.

Parents are crystal clear. It won't be an error.

Dani Shapiro was spoken a lot about this In her book Inheritance. She was very close with her father who she later found out she wasn't biologically related to. We have some similarish history in our family and I found her raw discussion of her emotions helpful along with her perspective once she'd had time to process itm

I'd always assumed that these types of things are very rare and the material for chat shows, i.e., their putative biological father is not their real biological father.

Is it possible there was a period of time when the couple were separated? Or partially living apart? My DSis was in a similar situation and resulted in a paternity test to clarify things.

Yes, IVF was technically possible, but currently considered very very unlikely.

You've obviously got good reason for saying this, but sometimes people do keep things like this very private. I have a friend who had two (now grown-up, in 20s and 30s) children by IVF (both biologically hers and her dh's, in this case), but has never told her dc.

Same here for IVF for our kids (both DH & I biological parents) and we've never discussed with family or kids, just never felt the need too!

The next question after the data is clarified I guess would be a natural question as to who the fathers are. In that case it's really only the mother who would know (unless something incredibly rare like IVF mix up or stranger rape).

I think these issues will become more prominent with DNA testing becoming more routine.

I found out at age 23 that my parents were actually my grandparents.

I never told them I knew. I realised that they had made such a huge effort to keep this a secret from me that there was absolutely no point in telling them as it would have achieved nothing at all.

I told my biological mother that U knew the truth 10 years later. The outcome was not good. I ended up losing the only family I had ( albeit they were not aware of the real family relationship) completely. My bio mother just wanted the lie yo continue. Even though she is now dead the lie about who I really am continues.

I know my real father's name but haven't tried to trace him. Apart from medical records I can't see the point of contacting him. After 50 odd years what relationship would there be? My view is that he was the same as a sperm donor.

Therapy really helped me to deal with all this.

Just re-reading your post: From the results, is the mother the same in call cases? That's not clear to me.

So two out of of the four children have the same father? Do any of them have their mother's husband as their biological father?
Sperm donation goes back much longer than IVF and if Dad was infertile this might be the explanation. Early on people didn't tell the kids because they never thought they'd find out or need to know - genetics & DNA tests weren't a thing then.

Mosaicism could account for maybe two different genetic variants coming from a single parent, but I doubt it could account for 3 (though I've not reasearched much into it)...

The DNA results are extremely solid as long as they’ve got the right samples assigned to the right person. Obviously there’s the possibility of an admin error where they’ve done the DNA test correctly but put the wrong label on so you get a random person’s results, but if the results are correctly identifying all the samples as having the same mother then that’s not going to be the explanation.

The dates of the births might give you a bit more of a clue as to what’s behind it. And tying the results into a wider database will probably enable you to work out who the three fathers are through links to their other relatives, if that’s what you want to know.

I agree that if neither of the three men are the mother’s husband then sperm donation is a possibility and perhaps the happiest outcome.

The results are just about impossible to misinterpret when it's this close a relationship.

And far from it being a rare thing that you just hear about on chat shows, statistics indicate that up to 10% of us have mis-attributed paternity. It's just that with the increased use of Ancestry-type DNA research people are finding out far more easily.

A few people in our family have done one. A second cousin wasn’t a dna match with me, went digging and discovered his grandfather wasn’t his biological grandfather. His dad had suspected it for a while but him and the cousin not being a dna match to anyone else on that side confirmed it. Unfortunately anyone who could shed light on it and answer their questions is now long dead.

I’ve also discovered some second cousins I didn’t know I had and when we’ve worked out our trees, the predicted relationships have been spot on.

Sperm donation might be the answer, as that was going on before IVF days. I hope you get some help in dealing with this emotional situation, OP.

This is why I’m not ever going the DNA testing route, despite being a researcher. I love my family just as they are, even if there’s something unexpected in their ancestry, and wouldn’t want there to be any possibility of tearing apart happy lives with this sort of information. I think it should only be available with counselling and support, and not as a ‘fun’ gift, without thought to these sorts of consequences.

There are some Facebook support groups I forget the name google things like dna results not expected facebook