‘Gene test lead me to family of the Dad I never knew existed’
AN American woman has met her Irish family for the first time – after discovering that the man who raised her is not her biological father.
Carol Simpson, 55, from Kansas, Texas, discovered her Irish roots after her curiosity was aroused when her daughter took a random DNA test.
The US Army veteran decided to investigate her own ethnic heritage after being shocked by her daughter’s results – they were completely different to what she expected.
The mother of two told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘Morgan, my daughter, and I were having a conversation about our German heritage.
‘We always believed we were of German descent because my mother’s family, a few generations ago, emigrated to Pennsylvania and New York a few generations back where many Germans settled. It was a wide assumption.
‘To my surprise she had no German
‘Always believed we were German’
ethnicity whatsoever, and instead there was a lot of Irish.
‘My daughter asked me, “Mom, what does that mean?” and I said “That means I’m getting a DNA test!”, and so she took a test from Ancestry.com which came back as 60% Irish, Scottish and Welsh. She then uploaded the result to MyHeritage.com, which is an online platform that gives people the option to explore their ancestry through DNA results.
It is there where she got a 25% match to her uncle, John ‘Jack’ Sullivan, who lives in Ballsbridge, Dublin. He had shared his DNA results five years previously. A 25% match normally refers to an aunt, uncle or half-sibling.
MyHeritage put her in touch with Mr Sullivan in July 2020 and she learned that the parents of her biological father, Tim Sullivan, emigrated to the US in the 1920s.
His mother was from Co. Armagh and his father was from Cork. They married and had three boys in Chicago: Carol’s dad Tim, and uncles Jack and Tommy. Carol also learnt she had a half-sister and two half-brothers from Tim.
She contacted her half-sister Marisa Sullivan, and they have since met, as Marisa lives in Chicago. Carol then asked her mother about her biological father.
‘My mother was a young Catholic girl when she met my father. She told me the stigma then for an un-wed Catholic girl to be with child was probably the most horrible thing to happen in a small town in upstate New York.
‘She moved on to Kansas City which is where she met the man who I grew to know as my father.’
Carol’s biological father, Tim, died in 1986 aged 42. He had been married twice. Her oldest halfbrother is from the first, and Marisa and her second halfbrother are from his second.
After getting to know each other, Uncle Jack invited Carol to Dublin to meet the family. ‘It was heartbreaking that I had this missed opportunity to meet my biological dad,’ she said, adding, ‘In the long run I wouldn’t change a thing.’