Think I've discovered my father is not my father!

[whojamaflip]

Let me start by saying I'm not particularly bothered by this - my childhood was somewhat difficult so this may be relief!

I've had notification from ancestry that a close relative has been identified through DNA.

By the name it looks like it's my brother but we only share 25% according to the results. All dna links are on my maternal side.

I've been struggling with my family tree and dna links of 3rd cousins which have come up because no matter how I tried I could not make the link to these people through my tree - common ancestors do not match on my paternal side.

Am I right in thinking 25% indicates a half sibling or have I read this wrong?

Not necessarily. 25% is more like nephews/nieces (the children of your full siblings).

Also aunts/uncles, grandparents and grandchildren will also be around 25%

First cousins are more like 12.5% (they are the children of your aunts/uncles who share 25% with you)

Because my DDs father is not my husband or my partner. We split up many years ago.

I did think of putting (ex/late) in brackets before husband/partner. Still seems a slightly odd way to describe it, by jumping a generation.

Right, but in that situation you're even less likely to care who the grandfather was.

No cousins would be less again.
Full sibs are about 50%, half sibs about 25%.
Cousins are about 12.5% but the range is much larger with each step away.

Could be half sib but could also be another relationship eg double first cousin. Or Uncle/aunt/niece/nephew.

I'm a bit confused by what you mean here. Two brothers having kids with two sisters would make the kids double first cousins, which genetically is as close as full siblings.
Unless you mean the woman had kids with two brothers in which case her kids would be 3/4 brothers.

My DD was upset to discover her grandad wasn’t her grandad. She had a picture of who we thought was her grandad on the wall in her room for years. He had died before she was born but she liked to have his picture. It wasn’t nice to have to tell her than the man in the picture that she held dear wasn’t actually her grandad.

I’d forgotten I hadn’t updated this thread after I saw my db.

Turns out he as no matches whatsoever to our “fathers” family tree and he’s in the same boat as me with dna matches but nothing fits!

We do however definitely share a mother.

No further on in finding out potential genetic father and I guess it still a case of wait and see if any more
close matches show up. Dm is still refusing to say anything and to be honest I’m not going to push it, as I said she is in poor health and elderly and I don’t want to ruin our relationship.

i have mentioned in passing that if she has anything she wants db and I to know after her day then to leave a letter for us to open after her funeral. Whether she does or not is up to her.

Ok so it sounds like your DM's husband was infertile if

1. he left no kids anywhere with multiple women over his lifetime, and
2. both your DM's kids were not fathered by him.

One kid Parent Not Expected might indicate non-consensual conception but both having different fathers to each other and to her husband is unusual. Esp since the eldest was born after several years of marriage.
It suggests to me she was dealing with the situation by finding her own 'donors'. That was not uncommon back in the day. Marriage and children were the old age security for many women and if hubby wasn't up to the task, someone else had to be found. Needs must.

Two questions OP:

1. are the unexplained matches that your brother is getting the same ones that you are getting? i.e. do you think you both have the same mystery father, or is it clear that you have different fathers?
2. you say that the man you called your father had multiple affairs, bit so far no children have turned up. But surely those children would have zero DNA in common with you, so why would Ancestry tell you whether or not they existed? There would be no match with you. Is it that some people on your non-biological father’s side have done tests and trees so you have been looking in their trees for traces of people said to be his children.

Have you considered going on the Donor Conceived Register?

https://www.liverpoolwomens.nhs.uk/our-services/donor-conceived-register-dcr/

Yes, sharing 25% DNA typically indicates a half-sibling, aunt/uncle, or grandparent/grandchild relationship. Since all matches are on your maternal side and not paternal, it’s likely this person is your maternal half-brother.

There’s a podcast I listened to about a man who discovered he had an NPE that you might be interested in. It’s called Inconceivable Truth.

In France these tests are illegal. For so many reasons I think that’s probably not a bad thing.

Yes, two sisters must’ve hooked up with my dad and uncle. My brother is 1726cm, cousin is 926cm. Don’t know what their cm is to each other? Both have the same surname. Both are mid to late 50’s.

@HotCrossBunplease No common dna matches on the paternal side that would link me and db so it looks like we have different fathers.

as for your second point - <face palm> of course! If he’s not my father then I wouldn’t have any connection to any kids he may have running around.

are those the correct figures for height in mm or cms? one of them might be 3 feet tall and the other 5ft 9 or they can both be giants if it is in cms

It refers to how closely related they are in terms of DNA. The measure is centimorgans (cM rather than cm).

For example, my father shares 2,491cM with his sister, 1,651cM with his niece, 830cM with a first cousin and 483cM with a first cousin once removed.

Centimorgans not centimetres!!

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centimorgan

That makes a lot more sense - I thought the same as @allthemiddlechildrenoftheworld 😅

I thought of someone walking around at 57 feet tall!! lol

This! My father wanted me to look into the family tree of a family friend of ours, as their father was unknown and never spoken of. When I mentioned that it might be because the mother was a victim of rape, he was aghast. The thought had literally never crossed his mind.

There's a BBC tv series with Stacey Dooley where they contact people, and on occasion they find a father who doesn't really want to engage. I always wonder if it's because they know they raped someone 35 years ago.

And on that BBC radio series linked in the thread, they found a situation where the father of the baby (who had been abandoned at a hospital) was the mother's brother.

The whole thing is a massive can of worms.

Sperm donation seems very likely OP. Both you and your db could probably get close to finding your biological fathers via cousin matches, or at some point half siblings may appear. I hope your Mum does tell you the truth. Affairs are possible, and may explain why she doesn’t want to tell you, but given the length of time from marriage to your birth, it’s likely that your parents had fertility testing and could well have been advised to use donor sperm. Medical students would donate sperm as a way of earning a bit of cash. In the 70s it was assumed that any children would never need to know their actual origins.

Centimorgans. Distance of chains of DNA.