Ancestry results= family bombshell??

[SqueakyRadish]

Hey!
So... I did an ancestry thing just for fun, thought it would be cool to see my heritage etc.

Had my results back last week and it has "matched" me with another user that I share 27% of my DNA with, who it suggests is a half sibling or niece.

The most likely explanation (due to various factors) is that this is a niece.

But what the actual fuck do I do now? I feel awful because I know this and, as far as I know, nobody else in the family does.

I have one brother who has no children (or so I thought!) but who has been living, happily, with his partner and her 2 children for around 10 years.

He could have no idea? He could know and just want to keep it secret? He could know and other people in the family might know but keep it secret?

I literally just don't know what to do. I feel like I can't ask anyone in my family for advice because then I'm putting it on them as well.

Plus, if this other person does not want to be contacted or have anything to do with us then it feels like it would be better to just keep things as they are and do nothing at all.

I don't really know what I want... I just needed somewhere to talk about this and figure out what, if anything, I do next...

What do you mean by overthinking?

There is a lot of to think about, its natural it bring up questions and thoughts.

It could work out well.

A friend of mine found out he had a daughter he knew nothing about via Ancestry. A summer fling before he moved abroad for 20 years in the days before the internet or mobile phones.

He'd never married and given up all hope of ever having a family - and now has a daughter and grandchildren who he's been able to build a wonderful relationship with.

I know it's not always happy endings, but sometimes it is.

I think this is too big a burden to bear on your own, OP and yes I would discuss it with DBro. However I’d take it gently - DBro, how would you feel if you were to go onto an ancestry site and discover you had a child or niece that you knew nothing about? Would you want to know and would you tell me?

Depending on his answers, I’d decide my next steps. If he makes clear he would not want to know ever, then that is your reference if he later finds out about/is approached by her.

I would say nothing ever. It's not your secret to tell. If this relative wants to make contact that's on them .
If you are prepared to potentially ruin a whole host of lives with your "news" and are happy to live with that then go on.
Otherwise your shoulder this burden out of love and respect for your family. For Ever.

There was an insightful series on Radio 4 called The Gift which examined stories of people who had unexpected news after doing an Ancestry kit. It may be worth a listen as it was very balanced and gave different perspectives of how things turned out for families, although to prepare you, some had quite sad outcomes.

My elderly dad was adopted and traced his birth family a few years ago but he had support from social services to guide him (he chose not to contact them in the end as the social worker painted a bleak picture of longer term outcomes for family reunion - completely different circumstances to your predicament as he was in his 70s and his mother was long dead). The problem with home DNA kits is people are left with questions and no support so I hope you can tell someone in real life as a listening ear to help you think through your options.

So toxic 🙈

I don’t think we can know that for certain. I also think that being interested in family history generally is very different to being interested in a child you didn’t know you had - something most people are likely not thinking is a strong possibility when they start looking into family history. This is such a difficult situation as there are so many different scenarios here - the brother might already know or suspect, he might have no idea and not really want to know, or be devastated if he found out that he didn’t know and it had been withheld.

Where there is information about another adult that they potentially don’t know, however, in my opinion the argument for telling them/not telling them is equally weighted. The reason is that the information reflects reality and the sister has happened upon this reality by accident. By telling/not telling, she doesn’t make it real or not real - it is the truth and she would be keeping a very significant truth from him about his life.

At present, she is the keeper of this information, but she hasn’t chosen that position and it is arguably an unrealistically large moral burden to bear for her to continue to gatekeep it. It is also arguably not her decision to make to continue to be a gatekeeper of that information - in a very small way, I think it’s like playing God. While there are potentially some reasons in rare circumstances where it may be better to keep this kind of information from someone (e.g. where it creates risk to a child or someone is very traumatised) where these things have been hidden in the past and people have later discovered them, it’s often caused much hurt and regret. Secrecy of this kind is a fairly Victorian idea and generally speaking the truth is usually the healthiest path.

Don’t overthink this. If she’s done an ancestry test at a relatively young age, she’s probably hoping to connect with family. Reach out to her and say it looks like you might be related and try to work out how. I wouldn’t go telling your brother or anyone else in the family. She may not even respond! But it sounds like a wonderful opportunity to reach out and see what happens.

You don't actually get a choice - both my parents decided to do tests. I personally didn't want to but I ultimately didn't have this choice.

But so have some of their cousins and ultimately there's enough people in the database now to roughly map out the families of most people in the UK if you have British ancestry.

Indeed some of my parents matches are US based where DNA testing is much more common and privacy laws less strict - and they had mapped out large parts of the British family in trees. So the information is ALREADY out there.

Tbh Ancestry is unlikely to sell data on any time soon because financially it's doing well based on it's privacy being good - it's big enough to dominate the market. 23andme was always much less privacy focused (which is partly why it failed in the first place) and I'd be much more concerned if my parents had done DNA tests.

DNA tests for all newborn British babies is due to be launched soon for health reasons - in some ways I trust this LESS than Ancestry as I don't think the government are good at preventing data leaks. So soon this is going to be very normal and I can easily imagine creep on this in terms of usage.

It comes back to the point that once DNA tests were developed, there was no way back and parentage secrets are no longer secrets that can never be found out. We all know this. The solution is to be honest and don't have sex with someone you shouldn't.

Could the niece potentially be the child of an unknown sibling? Could you approach your brother about it by discussing whether it's possible your parents could have had a child they gave up for adoption? That way you are making him aware of the info and it's more up to him where it leads.

Indeed. But you'd have to be able to 'sort' the shared matches by either having a family tree on there perhaps OR you have other relatives on there from both sides of your family and you know who some of those people are in real life or at least where the connection lies. In the latter case it may be possible that another relative will become aware of this individual match and therefore it won't remain a secret or - well, I thought it would be useful to clarify in any case (family tree may offer some clues as well as to how the person is related)

Any genetic problems in your family or e.g. a history of breast cancer? If so you have a duty to tell your niece.

Do you have sisters? If so dont assume it's your brother's child and not a sister's child given up for adoption. It could also be that your parents had a baby together that they gave up. Make no assumptions yet. Speak to your brother privately and tell him something unexpected has happened. It may be his child and he was never told. He may have been told but wanted not to be part of the child's life. You can only speak to him and find out whether he wants to know more.

If he doesnt want to know best thing is to contact the niece yourself and tell her that. You could also provide some information about your family.

There may be more distant relatives who have already seen this. It wont stay a secret.

we had this - after a test being a thank you gift from my sister .... my parents both discovered they had a secret grandchild!
The thing is - you could email them and they might not look at the ancestory emails anymore which is what happened to my parents.
But my brother worked out who it was. And I have a new adult niece and its been nice getting to know her at her pace.

Hmm I think I would send your brother the results and say something along the lines of, did this for fun and thought I'd share the results. And then leave the rest up to him - he may then approach you and ask you to help him find her, he might tell you to keep quiet, but I'd just give him the information and do nothing more to start with. Then you're as neutral as you can be - you're not hiding it from him, nor are you spilling any secrets. Just leaving it to him.

I would discuss it privately with my brother. He may not know and I think he should be told now as if he doesn’t it will be much more of a shock if an unknown DD tries to find him and then it comes out that you knew all along…

This happened to me. I was contacted by someone who turned out to be a first cousin and was the illigitimate son of my Dad's youngest brother. We have all accepted him into the family. Dad and his brother died a while ago.

Sorry, I had a gym class to go to and there have been so many replies since I left!!

To answer a few questions:

She is between 19-29, so a sensible age to potentially be my brother's child.

If she is a half sibling, she would have to be my dad's, because I'd have noticed if my mum was pregnant!

Ancestry says that the DNA matches both sides. I don't know enough about DNA to know how they know this, other than presumably they can tell which of my DNA is from which parent, and they can see that she has some of both??

I only have one sibling (my brother) that I know of. I guess it's possible that we have an unknown sibling that neither of us are aware of who could have had this child which would then make her my niece.

The biggest news is that she has messaged me! So now I'm super paranoid that she's on here!?

She said that she knows "the story" but it isn't just hers to share and she knows who her dad is but has no relationship with him.

So, it doesn't seem like she's particularly interested in finding out more about him. I'm assuming this means he likely knows about her and has chosen not to share this within the family, which I will respect. I do wonder if I should still bring it up with him though, because if anyone else does a test they're going to find out

I'm sorry this happened to you, and that it has been so difficult. I don't think this situation is ever easy to deal with. I wanted to tell the flip side to your story, though. I've NC for this just in case.

My parents had a child at 18, in the late 1960's. Because my mother was unmarried she was sent to a mother and baby home, where she stayed until the baby was 6 weeks old. The baby was then taken from her and adopted and my mother was sent home in disgrace and it was never spoken of again. My parents went on to get married (big mistake) and this child became the Big Family Secret that we (their later children) were never told about. Then the law was changed and adopted children were allowed to know who their birth parents were. She came looking for us because her adoptive father had died and she had promised him she wouldn't look for us until then.

She threw a grenade into our family. My mother was forced to tell us what had happened. I don't think she really wanted to, TBH, but her hand was forced. The adopted sibling tracked our father down first. My parents had not been divorced for very long. He had been controlling, abusive, violent. I don't know what stories he told her because I wasn't in contact with him. She met my younger sibling via our father. My mother didn't want to talk to her and I was forced to act as a go between for the pair of them. After a couple of weeks, the adopted sibling got her husband to phone me to say that she'd decided looking for us was a mistake, that she shouldn't have done it, she didn't want any more contact with us, and I wasn't to try and contact her again. My mother then decided that she wanted to meet her and I was faced with having to tell my mother that adopted sibling didn't want contact with any of us. It was a fucking mess. She waltzed in without asking us how we felt about it, then waltzed out again in the same manner. I felt and still feel extremely angry about how selfish and entitled she was, and angry at her rejection. How dare she. She got a better deal than I did. By all accounts her adoptive parents were lovely.

When my father eventually died a few years ago, he left her everything in his will, and I was disinherited and got nothing. She then wrote us this friendly letter saying she hadn't realised he was ill and wasn't it sad blah blah, and asking for contact. Seriously? She told us she didn't want to know and gave us no choice in the matter, she didn't try to make things right with the inheritance, and now it suits, she wants to be friends? She can get lost.

Sometimes these things are best left alone.

Relationship = not always certain (will often give you a possible range of options)

Percentage of DNA shared = pretty certain especially if its high (0.1% might be coincidental that you share DNA but 27% absolutely wont be)

I have over 100 people linked to me at 0.3% - 0.5% they are 5th cousins or higher so we shared a 'great-great-great-great-grandparent'. So 6 generations removed, any further back than that and it starts getting far more blurry as the amounts are so low and genealogy harder to trace.

27% would be as OP said niece/nephew or half sibling but could also possibly be a grandparent, grandchild (OP says unlikely from ages) or and aunt, uncle (could be possible OP? any chance your grandparent might have had a secret much younger child - theres 22 years between my dad and his sister) or in rarer cases a first cousin (especial if one set of siblings married another set of siblings sibling, like your mams sister had a child with your dads brother etc...).

Like @Bookmissing I absolutely recommend The Gift on Radio 4.
It has some really memorable stories and covered a huge range of reactions.
I'm in my 50s and quite a few of my friends do anonymous sperm donation for beer money. It was absolutely viewed as a bit of a laugh and at best a kind thing to help infertile couples. One chap was particularly proud that his sperm were complimented on their ability to withstand liquid nitrogen.
My lovely midwife was very aware that things weren't always straightforward and if there was a 'dad' on the scene would absolutely be ramming home how much the new born looked like him. Whatever was best for mum and baby was the thinking.

All DNA tests should come with a warning. Its a Pandora's box for sure. You start to find out things about grandparents and aunties and all kinds. You think it won't happen to you....but I have found all kinds of shocks and I'm aware of people who have found entire hidden siblings that their parents hid from them.
Personally I think these commercial companies that take our money as a gimmicky type thing just dont provived sufficient support or advice beforehand. Its almost unethical.

I would think about what my brother would want- would he want to know? If I thought he would I would meet him privately and share the DNA results without comment, just saying you thought he'd like to know, and it's up to him what he does with the info. If I thought he wouldn't want to know I would do my best to forget I knew.

My mum's uncle was a fraudster and her cousins had lost touch with him - they are half siblings. They know he changed names. They have been searching for him for a number of years.

There was an expectation that he probably moved somewhere and had another family hence why they did tests - hoping for closure.

I think there's two distinct camps of people in the UK who have done tests. There's those who have heavily got into their family history through paperwork and it's the next step to take it further and those who fall into the camp of having a particular question they want to answer. In my experience it does answer a lot of questions about why each family is like. Going back five or six generations has answered questions about my parents grandparents which in turn make sense of my parents lives. It's not really about the past, it's very much about present.

In the US, Canada and Australia there seems to be a third camp where it's about finding out about their ethnicity and what part of the world their family came from - this is the 'fun' camp. I'm really a lot more dubious about these people. There's whole forums which get excited about results with the mentality generally being that it's 'boring' to be 100% from somewhere, with certain ethnicities highly prized (generally ethnic groups like native American tribes are prized. English, Scottish and Welsh aren't viewed as interesting but Irish is) and a general celebration of having as many as possible a bit like Pokémon (Gotta catch em all!). It's pretty fucked up tbh.

Brits don't tend to have this because they are less genetically diverse. Now you can tell whether you are Yorkshire or Cornish but that doesn't have the same appeal to us.

I think there are very valid reasons for taking a test. You might help someone who has a mystery and this has a massive impact on their life. It's not all negative.

You just have to understand this before taking a test. As I say that's when the ethical dilemma is.

Yep, I agree entirely. Don go looking if you don’t want to deal with what you find.

But wouldn't OP also show up as a connection if he does the test? Then he would know that she knows, IYKWIM...