The DNA Saga

Years ago, I asked if I was adopted on this blog.

There's a lot of paths that led me there, it was hinted at all the time, I wasn't like my family nor did I looked like them. There was also the issue of the extreme DNA, leading to the 1 in 5 million body that took me to 700lbs and diseases like Lipedema and near deafness. Of course epigenetics would be a part of this too.

I always thought my name was "wrong", this may surprise you but I was RIGHT and I'll explain why.......

Intuition for me has always been a funny thing, in me it is strong, whatever foundation it has. The Christians taught me it was evil, and knowing things before they happened or dreaming about things, was from Satan so I shut some of that stuff done. I don't consider myself psychic but friends have witnessed weird things, like me telling them I dreamed about something and then it would happen that day or I guessed at things I wasn't supposed to know.

I got an Ancestry account and DNA test, a generous kind friend helped with this, and since I was no contact, there was no asking narcissists, minions or flying monkeys what the truth of my origins was. I used second and third cousins to deduce my genetic ties. There was even a few obscure and distant relatives whose name's I recognized. I built a family tree up to 1300 people, it definitely was going to give me answers and did.

Sadly I ended up having the narcissists be my egg and sperm donors. I was saddened by this. My disappointment took some time to process and get over. My childhood was odd, I realize it is not usual for a child to be sent to relatives to live for a periods of months. This happened with two different set of relatives in two different states. Of course this only advanced my theory I was adopted or something else was funny about my origins. I lived away from home around age 5-6 with the loving aunt, and around age 4 with the adoptive/step-grandfather I believed to be my real grandfather, grandmother and their household.

Ancestry is good for finding out family secrets. I found out my father was the product of an affair or other happening [rape?] where my grandmother who had been married for 10 years gave birth to my father, but he was not that man's son. I don't even know if my father knew. Sometimes I think Aunt Confused knew, just the funny way she treated me. Maybe she always knew I was not a full niece. This is explains why I never saw any relative outside my father's immediate family growing up.

If some relatives find my public family tree they may be in shock, but I don't care. Most narcissists don't care about the past and have no interest in delving into it so I consider the risks low.

I wrote in the notes that this information is backed up via DNA. I had multiple cousins pop up from this 'new" side of the family based on my Ancestry DNA test. I could not figure out who the exact biological grandfather was. I narrowed it down to three brothers and made notes to that fact.

I was related to several of their descendants including one person who grew up in foster homes and never knew who their father was. She was labeled as a first to second cousin.

My adoptive/step-grandfather's family did know the real grandfather's family and all attended the same church. There was even one news article from the 1930s where brothers from both families all got arrested together. I did find some strains of criminality that backed up the talk from one aunt about how several relatives were most likely "mob involved". One odd thing was noticing that Aunt Confused's son followed in the same exact vocational footsteps of many of the biological family's footsteps. I don't know if he knows either.

There was always this feeling that there were so many lies. My father told me tales of his grandfather being a multimillionaire and his father [the adoptive one] being disinherited. I found no evidence of either of the families being that wealthy, one would move up in a certain career field, but that was a generation later. My father even sent me an email in 1997 telling me these tales. I still have a paper copy. That email was so off the ranch, I spent months trying to build the family tree off misinformation. He was wrong about his adoptive father and his real father.  Most were hard working people and far more economically stable then myself, but they were far from millionaires.

My name was not the "correct" one but it's my legal name so maybe those odd feelings had reason to exist. Did intuition tell me, I did not have a "legitimate" last name nor did I look like the ethnic group it strongly hinted at?  I found out I am not half of one ethnic group, I thought I was life long. I did learn I am half German and took those family lines back to the 1400s--a few second cousins were really into genealogy too, and half Hungarian.

Some may consider it odd, that someone childless is so into geneaology, but I was into it beyond trying to dig up facts about my own life. I know a man in my community who is the last of his family line who has complied his family history. Maybe it's a way to connect with and preserve the past. Maybe it's the history or trying to figure out where I came from. I did look for fat people. One great grandfather in 1911 was very fat, and upwards of 400lbs. I found his picture. There was information that he had very bad legs. The biological paternal family of my father had some very large members, I found some pictures. The pictures backed up what the DNA told me. One descendant looked just like my brother. I did get cut off from one member of the "new family" who I think got freaked out that "great-grandfather" had other children. It's funny, I was looking 3 generations back and people still got upset, but I didn't impose or make announcements about affairs, I guess they just figured it out.  So genetically I got it from more then just one line.

There were other family secret discoveries too, I was told one uncle was murdered viciously my entire life and told he died at the hands of a jealous husband of another race. I found newspaper articles about what happened to him, he was found dead and they didn't know the cause of death, but no murder was investigated. The first thought I had was that he had committed suicide [the second would be suicide in my mother's immediate family besides the aunt that drove into a tree at a high rate of speed] and they just wrote it as inconclusive to spare the family feelings, and having someone denied burial in the Catholic graveyard like my aunt almost was. This uncle died only 3 weeks before I was born, and I have considered that this is one way I became a family wide scapegoat. The timing of my birth simply meant I was never welcomed.  Genetics proved he was not my father, as I was related to the known maternal line of my father and of course the new paternal line from the same distant community.

In other religions, people try to contact their ancestors. This is important to a variety of world religions. There were harsh faced relatives like my grandfather's grandmother or my second great grandmother and others who looked nicer.  I had some weird moments such as finding one ancestor that looked like me so much that when I put her picture up on Facebook, friends were shocked. She was like a thin version of me. Funny thing was this particular daughter of my great-grandfather, never married or had children. She was a life-long school teacher who lived independently.  As a child I saw her one room school house, she taught at in the fields on the way to my grandmother's house. If there is an after world at all, I can picture myself going to find some of these other relatives, asking what was it like and what happened? I was reaching so far into the past. Maybe outcast status in one's own family worsened as time modernized.

One thing I noticed is families lived far closer knit in the same communities, on both sides I was doing research in a particular town they lived in for the majority of relatives. Yes there was the line where people left the old country, but even in America, families stayed close by. This ended with the boomers and the new economic nomadism that took over the country. I got the feeling that others grew up with a wide variety of relatives as the norm until my mother's generation changed this. It also occurred to me on one side of the family, I was the first to leave the family church, it's hold remained over generations and generations. That was a strange idea to think about.

I was glad to find out if I was adopted or not even if the results were disappointing. Maybe I had hope for more explanations, but some of us must face sometimes we were birthed to people who were not real parents to us. I also realized there was a lot of weirdness in my childhood where there was little bonding and ambivalence and wonder how much appearances meant I never got to grow up in a relatives home where I may have blossomed. Life in the adoptive/step-father's, grandmother's home was not pleasant either but life certainly was with my aunt.

Some may get angry thinking how dare someone go and dig through family secrets, there's people out there who hate places like Ancestry because they are exposing a lot of family lies. Some people are finding out they were adopted. It is better to know the truth either way things go.



No more Family Secrets



Update: I did figure out which of the brothers was my grandfather from new DNA contacts being found.