SECRETS OF THE FAMILY TREE: one historian’s relentless search for answers
Do-it-yourself DNA tests are a popular hobby. For some the results are predictable, for others they’re a revelation. Genevieve Gannon meets historian Rose Overberg, who followed clues from her own test to find her biological father, and now helps others do the same.
We all carry inside us people who came before, wrote American author Liam Callanan. And in every new family line, glimpses of the older can be seen. A grandfather’s lopsided smile reappears in a grandson. Three generations of women have the same violet-flecked eyes. For historian Rose Overberg, it’s chestnut-coloured hair and distinctive height that she shares with her mother. “A lot of people say I look like Mum,” she says.
But while Rose has freckles and brown eyes, her mother has olivetoned skin and green eyes, and there are other features that can’t be accounted for. “Nobody in my family has my eyebrows,” she says.
For most of her life, Rose didn’t know who gave her those attributes, and she never thought much of it until she tried to find out and was blocked at every turn. Rose was conceived with the help of donor sperm in 1975, when the now-thriving fertility business was just a cottage industry without regulation or proper record keeping. Years later, when she tried to find out about her donor, she was shocked to learn that all evidence of her conception had disappeared.
And Rose was not alone. By the time the Victorian government made record-keeping mandatory in 1988, thousands of donor-conceived babies had been born. Many have files, but a significant number have not.
Rose describes herself as “pretty stubborn and self-righteous”, and she became determined to get to the bottom of this. “You’re creating a person and there are no medical records. How is that ethical?” she asks. “I don’t think they ever thought about the children. If the doctors had some foresight about our wellbeing, they’d have kept those records.”
She met other donor-conceived people and donors. They formed groups, swapped notes and created ad hoc registries, but without success. They simply didn’t have enough information available to trace their genetic histories.
Then, virtually out of nowhere, a breakthrough came in the form of a strange new fad. Companies like AncestryDNA and 23andMe began selling DNA home test kits, allowing hobby genealogists to build their own family trees. Rose, a trained historian with a passion for genealogy, realised she might just be able to use those kits to uncover the greatest secret of her life.
Detective in the making
As a child, Rose was home-schooled in the Melbourne suburb of Surry Hills and loved to draw the spindly branches of family trees whose connections revealed the spread of dynasties. “I spent hours making up family trees,” she remembers.
“It was effectively genealogy. I’d get right involved.”
This early fascination led her to pursue a career as an archaeologist and a heritage consultant. But she didn’t feel the urge to investigate her own biological history until years later, as a mother herself, she watched a documentary about another Melbourne woman’s search.
“I was looking at my kids thinking, ‘Where do they get this from?’” Rose says. “Having children made me think about what we pass on to them.”
“You’re creating a person and there are no medical records.”
She contacted her parents’ fertility doctor, John Leeton, who was living in a nursing home, and received a spidery hand-written letter in return.
“He said that all the records hadn’t been destroyed on purpose, but they’d been ‘lost’ in transit,” says Rose.
The more she investigated, the more she realised that the culture of donor conception in the 1970s was very different from today. Clinics didn’t advertise their services “and those who received them did not speak openly about undergoing treatment,” according to a review,
The History of Donor Conception Records in Victoria, by academics Fiona Kelly and Deborah Dempsey. “Donors were not necessarily tested for infectious diseases or genetic abnormalities. The identity of the donor was rarely recorded.”
“Things were done very differently, so very few families did tell their kids, and thought they’d go to the grave with this,” explains Kate
Bourne from the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA). “I think they thought no one would ever need to know, and love would be enough.”
“The crux of it was, there are no records,” says Rose. And donors were hard to trace because they’d come from far and wide. Clinics would advertise on radio and in university newspapers. One classified ad on file at VARTA is illustrated with an anchor and reads: “Semen wanted – $10. For research and artificial insemination.” A lab worker, Mary, recalled that she had handed out fliers at Flinders Street station.
Medical history
But Rose learned that many donors had been medical students, and that was enough for her to make a start.
“I got a list of all of the medical students who graduated from Monash and Melbourne universities in the couple of years around when I was conceived. It was about 200-300 people. I did all these crazy, wacky things like looking up pictures of random men on the internet, because you think you’re going to know when you see the person.” But time after time, she hit a dead end. “It was really depressing because you get your hopes up,” she says.
Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. Through a support group, she met Courtney du Toit, who had been born at the same hospital as Rose, the Queen Victoria. Like Rose, she had one of Dr Leeton’s scrawly, handwritten letters explaining that her records had been destroyed.
“You get to know people quite intimately when you have such a thing in common,” Courtney says. “We were from the same non-existent hospital with non-existent records. We connected.”
Growing up, Courtney didn’t know she was donor-conceived. But when she accidentally found out, it made sense to her, because she had always felt she didn’t quite belong.
“Looking back on it, I didn’t fit,” she says.
When Courtney was 21, she got a job at the local medical clinic in her home town of Horsham in country Victoria. Before she started, she needed a Hepatitis B vaccination.
“The nurse gave me my shots, then said, ‘Go grab your file and write that you’ve had them.’ I opened my file and I read that I was donor-conceived. That was how I found out. It was a file note made by my doctor.
“It was a surprise, but not a shock,” she says. “It actually made a lot of sense. I used to have teenage tantrums and say that I was adopted. I think a lot of young people say that, but it was less about being facetious and more about feeling not quite right.”
Courtney searched her file for more details, then found her parents’ files and read them too, but there was no donor information. She confronted her parents, who confirmed there had been a donor, but knew no more.
“I completely get why they would keep that secret from every single soul they knew,” Courtney says. “It was the ’70s. I know the attitudes of a small town at that time.”
“There was a great deal of shame associated with having to use the sperm of an unknown man to conceive,” according to The History of Donor Conception Records. The Catholic Church was vehemently opposed to donor conception, and some parts of the community equated it with adultery. Courtney appreciates this. “The betrayal really was as an adult, when they couldn’t then give me the dignity of telling me,” she says.
Courtney travelled to London to live for a time, but couldn’t shake the desire to know more about her biological father. So when she returned to Australia, she contacted the Infertility Treatment Authority (which later became VARTA) to ask for their help, only to be told again that there were no records relating to her conception. “They were lost or destroyed or never kept in the first place,” she says.
“Very few families did tell their children in those days.”
Like Rose, Courtney felt she had been cheated. “I desperately wanted to know and I had no paperwork or information whatsoever.” So she started doing what she could to find answers. “Writing letters, pointless searching,” she says.
While she was doing that, Courtney created her own ad hoc register in an attempt to connect the dots between offspring with no data and donors who wanted to connect with offspring. “We used to meet up and exchange blood types. It was a very rudimentary way of ruling people in or out,” she says. “Over 20 years, we had all of these funny little ways of trying to connect. The time spent going down wrong tracks is just phenomenal. You get obsessed with it. Then you get drained and you have to step away.”
On the trail
At the same time, Rose heard about consumer DNA tests and thought, ‘I understand history and I understand DNA. I know how to use these tools.’
“I did DNA tests at all of the major direct-to-consumer DNA test companies,” she says. She asked her mother to do the same so she could isolate the ancestors on her biological father’s side. She found one distant cousin whose great grandparents were her great-great grandparents.
“That’s back five generations,” Rose says. “It’s an extremely distant match.” But it was a start.
Each night for eight months, she would retreat to her study and meticulously repeat her childhood hobby of constructing dynastic family trees for hours at a time. Only this time, she was trying to piece together branches that would lead her to her biological father.
“I had such distant matches that it was just an epic slog,” Rose says. “I knew it could be done, but I didn’t know if I could do it.”
After eight months, she had three gigantic family trees that she needed to somehow fit together.
“I still remember the night I found one person from one tree marrying a person from another tree,” Rose says. “I thought, ‘My God, if I can link these two trees together, then those two people are my ancestors’.
“It was about nine o’clock at night and I was sitting in my study and feeling sick. I was so overwhelmed by the potential. I had this couple and they’d gotten married in the 1920s. They had to be my grandparents, and they had one son. I knew he had to be my donor.”
With shaking hands, she typed the man’s name into a search engine and a photo popped up.
“He looked like me,” she says. “I knew conclusively, without a doubt, that there was no one else in the world who would have all those same ancestors and would look like me. It blew my mind. It was so powerful.”
For months, Rose had been writing a letter to her biological father in her head, but another hurdle presented itself. She had followed the DNA trail and found her father’s place on the family tree, but she still needed to find him in real life.
Fortunately, he had written several letters to The Age newspaper, which had been published along with his suburb. Rose crossed-checked his name and suburb with electoral roll records. The only records she could access were from the 1980s, so she couldn’t be certain it was the right address, but she had to take the chance. “I took a punt and put it out to the universe.”
The perfect match
Three days later, she had a voice message.
“He sounded like an old teacher and he said, ‘I’m very chuffed. I’m amazed that you found me, and I’d love to talk’.”
“We talked for hours nonstop,” continues Rose. “We talked and talked and talked and talked. He was delightful. He was interested in my kids.”
She learned he shared her love of history, too.
“He was a campaigner for social justice, and self-righteous as well,” Rose laughs. “He was well-spoken and kind and all of the things I was hoping for.”
He told Rose that he had decided to become a donor because he had family friends who were unable to have children and, being a father himself, he was very sympathetic.
“He valued his own children so highly he didn’t want other people to miss out,” Rose says.
Sadly, Rose’s biological father died not long after they made contact, but she cherishes the connection they did build and, equipped with the skills to unlock family trees, she has helped others in their quests. The first person she called was Courtney. “I said, ‘Hey, I’ve done it’,” Rose says. She felt sure she could do it for Courtney too.
They began to identify ancestors, and “all of a sudden I was obsessed as well,” Courtney laughs. Pretty soon they were “off the family tree” and talking to new-found relatives in Queensland to try to find who in the family was Courtney’s donor. It was no small feat: “My biological dad’s grandmother had 13 kids,” Courtney says. “But I was meeting cousins. It gained traction and we had a whole cheer squad with these cousins.”
They found someone who was able to give Courtney an email address. “He emailed back a great big, long story,” Courtney says. Before she spoke to her donor, Keith, on the phone, she was gripped with nerves. “I remember pacing up and down the house, then we ended up talking for four hours,” she says.
When they met in person, it was no less special.
“We walked and talked for eight hours straight, just learning as much as we could about each other. I ended up staying for dinner. It was so easy and comfortable and natural. It just made perfect sense. It answered every question I’d had. It made everything right. I’d always felt wrong. It was quite incredible.”
Courtney now has a close relationship with her biological father, and Rose is still helping people track down their donors.
“I reached out to some other people who I felt had really suffered injustice,” Rose says. All up, she has cracked about 50 cases. “I wanted people to have that same feeling I had,” she says.
Rose and Courtney’s stories are positive, but consumer DNA tests sometimes reveal secrets that aren’t always welcome. And VARTA has had so many inquiries from people who have found surprises in their family histories that it has started running a seminar series called The Genie’s Out of the Bottle.
“People buying their own DNA test or being given one as a present are discovering very different results and finding out they are donorconceived. It’s been extraordinary, the impact that it’s had,” Kate Bourne says. “Family secrets are coming out everywhere. Not just donor conception – adoption, affairs. DNA has changed everything.”
People with no records, like Rose and Courtney, are now in a minority. Successive governments have stripped away the barriers between donorconceived people and their records piece by piece. Nevertheless, Kate estimates that each week at least one person contacts VARTA to say they have made an unexpected discovery about their lineage. “Sometimes more,” she says. And Rose is doing what she can to help.
“Every time I get really close to solving it, I get the same rush,” she says. “It must be like what a detective feels. It all comes together and it’s so exciting. It’s life changing. It’s something I can do that can change people’s lives.” AWW
“It made everything right. It was quite incredible.”