The moment I saw him I thought I was looking at my dad ...
When LINDA KELSEY’s cousin took a £79 DNA test, the shock results led her to a brother she never knew she had
OuR Whats App video call was scheduled for 5pm, making it nine in the morning in Vancouver. My sister and I were behaving skittishly. I’d washed my hair and paid special attention to my make-up.
Susan had propped the phone up against some books to stop it wobbling and we had positioned ourselves with our backs to the garden doors, where the light was at its most flattering. Both of us were keen to make a good impression, but the faffing was only to distract us from the real matter in hand.
This was to be the first face-to-face contact with Tony, the brother we’d never known we had. A man of 78 who had lived most of his life a third of the way around the world from us and whose existence we’d had no inkling of until a few weeks earlier.
About to meet our new half-brother, it somehow felt incredibly important for this first encounter to go well. Our fear was of awkward silences and running out of things to say.
Even now, although we had the incontrovertible results of various DNA tests in front of us, and had double and triple checked our parents’ backgrounds, there was a tiny element of doubt. If only because it seemed so improbable, so out-of-the-blue.
I took a deep breath and pressed dial. A few anxious seconds later and there was Tony, sitting next to his remarkably youthful-looking partner Pat, a sprightly 80. Susan and I gasped simultaneously.
On the screen facing us was a man who so resembled our late father, it literally snatched our breath away. ‘Oh my God, it’s remarkable . . .’ were the first words I managed to utter.
More than an hour later I realised I had an appointment to get to, and reluctantly we ended the conversation.
Every day, people are discovering relatives they didn’t know they had. The new trend for so-called ‘spit kits’ means all you have to do is send off a sample of your saliva in the tube provided by a DNA testing company.
They then send you a report, which contains details of relatives, however distant, who have themselves been tested. Costing £79, more than ten million have bought DNA ‘spit kits’ from ancestry.com, while rival company 23andMe has analysed more than five million users’ DNA.
The numbers are growing rapidly, to the point where it is almost commonplace to discover that the man you always assumed to be your dad is not your biological father, and that you are the result of a secret affair, a onenight stand gone wrong or an anonymous sperm donor.
Or that you were adopted, but no one ever told you, and that your siblings are not as closely related to you as you thought they were.
BuThowever quotidian the testing becomes, for those concerned it can be a life-changing experience. As Tony, Susan and I recently discovered.
It all began with an email from a relative. Our family is pretty extensive. Sam, our dad, born in 1915, was the youngest of nine children of immigrant Jewish parents from Belarus, all of whom arrived here in the 1890s to escape the deadly Russian pogroms.
As a result, my sister and I grew up with 19 first cousins on our father’s side alone. Those cousins went on to have numerous offspring of their own, many of whom we’ve barely met other than at family weddings and funerals.
It was Simon, a first cousin once removed, who got in touch to say he thought he had something interesting to tell us. In pursuit
of information about his roots — he had been hoping to find something more exotic than his Eastern European ancestry (nothing doing in that respect, as it turned out) — he did a saliva test with Ancestry.
When the results arrived by email, they presented a DNA match suggesting a first or second cousin. Most people when they do these tests come up with a long list of partial matches, but so distant as to be of little significance, or indeed interest.
A first or second cousin, though, well that was as close as Susan and I were to Simon, and in this instance was especially curious.
Tony, meanwhile, had done a DNA test with Ancestry some six months earlier. He and his partner, Pat, had decided to do theirs at the same time, for the fun of it.
The shock of it, more like, as Tony was told he was 47 per cent Jewish, meaning one of his parents was Jewish. Strange given both his parents, who died many years ago, were Christians.
At the time, Tony had no more information than that and was told there were no close relatives on the DNA database.
Then, six months later, he got an email telling him a potential cousin, Simon, had been added to the list. Even at this stage he wasn’t sure he could be bothered to go on the hunt for a biological parent who was almost certainly long dead.
In addition to which, he had ‘no resentment’ of his dad and ‘no negative feelings’ about his mother. But he was quite excited about the idea of half-siblings as he was an only child with not a single living blood relative as far as he knew.
He and Simon began to correspond. Convinced his mum was the real deal because she and Tony looked alike, and everyone had remarked on it as he was growing up, it appeared paternity was the issue. And that’s when the plot thickened.
FIRST,Simon discovered Tony had been born in Ilford, Essex, in June 1940. Exactly where my dad and most of his siblings were residing at the war’s outbreak.
There were five sisters in my father’s family, one of whom had died as a baby, and the women were in any case discounted by Tony. That left my dad and his two brothers (a third brother had emigrated to Australia before Tony’s birth).
That was when Simon got in touch with me and my sister. It was hard to take it seriously, but when we wrote to Tony we asked him if his mum had worked, as that might have been a way she could have met one of the three remaining suspects.
Bingo! His mum, Marge, was a machinist in the rag trade. Like so many Jews of their generation, my dad and his brothers worked in the garment industry, too.
Now it was time for the three sets of first cousins, the living
offspring of the three brothers who could potentially be Tony’s dad, to do the DNA test. My sister, excited at the prospect of a brother, was first off the starting blocks. A cousin in the States went the same route, but the third set decided they weren’t up for it.
If their dad (my father’s older brother) was the culprit he would have been married, and their father, at the time of Tony’s conception. In their 80s, they weren’t interested in upsetting the status quo.
But we worked out that by a process of elimination we’d get to the result we needed anyway. By this time we were determined to find out the truth, even if it turned out to implicate the father of the cousins, who preferred not to know.
As we awaited the test analysis, emails were batted between London and Vancouver. Photos of Tony as a young man and our dad were exchanged. My sister became obsessed, communicating frantically.
I was more reticent. First, I couldn’t process the idea my dad might have sired a son we didn’t know about, despite the fact Tony’s age meant he would have been conceived well before my dad met my mum. And Tony was a complete stranger regardless of
his genes. While I always thought it would have been good to have a brother, what would I do with one at this stage of my life?
I sussed right away what was going on with Susan. She adored our dad to the point of hero worship. When he died in 2008 she was devastated.
I was deeply sad, but at 93, I recognised Dad had lived a good, long life, suffering little in the way of illness until the end. He was a charming, funny, intelligent man, and I loved and admired him, but for me he was flawed mortal, not a God.
I said it right off. ‘If Tony does turn out to be ours, that doesn’t mean you’ll get Daddy back, you know.’
She did know, but I’m not sure she felt it at that point. We were both concerned for Tony, who seemed a likeable enough bloke, as gleaned through various email exchanges. We decided to go low-key on just how great a man our dad was, in case William Weall — the man who had raised Tony as his own — turned out to pale by comparison, and our newly minted sibling ended up full of anger and regret.
Meanwhile, the other cousins who’d taken the test were sitting back quietly for the results.
But, slowly, I began to warm to the idea of Tony as a half-brother and said to my sister: ‘I hope we share more of those centimorgan things than the cousins do. I hope we win.’
Centimorgans are the measure by which you can tell the closeness of your relationship — the higher number you have in common, the closer that person is.
And indeed we did win. The day the results pinged into the inbox we felt shock and awe at the confirmation of a new halfbrother, especially one who seemed so keen to make our acquaintance and appreciative of the warmth my sister in particular had already shown him.
Mostly what buzzed through my brain were questions. Like the nature of the relationship between Marge Ballard, Tony’s mum, a 30-year- old machinist who had been married for ten years to William, a milkman, when she became pregnant by Sam Cohen, our dad, a dashing 25-year- old factory manager (a job description I later discovered from the 1939 census records).
Were they in the grip of a grand passion or was it a quick fling?
Did they discuss running off together, only for the war to intervene? Was Marge working in the same place as Sam as her belly burgeoned, sitting in plain sight of the man who’d impregnated her? Or had she stopped working and cut communications so my dad never even knew she was soon to have their baby?
Two months before Tony was born, my dad was called up and went on to spend the war in India and Burma, serving as a major before returning in 1946 and meeting our mother shortly after.
In 1947, Tony emigrated with his family to Canada where he has lived ever since. Was there a scandal? Or did Canada simply offer better prospects?
There is no correspondence to shed light on the relationship. The only letters Tony has found are from his dad, William — then working in local government — to Marge when she’d just given birth. He’d written because she was in hospital and he was only allowed to visit on a Sunday. The letters were ‘ sweet and goofy’ Tony told us, with no hint he thought himself to be any other than the proud father.
Surely his mother did know. She had only to look at her boy to know exactly who the father was.
Despite all the unanswered questions, some of which I intend to investigate further, this is one of the good news stories. Tony has described his discovery of us as ‘a blessing’ and he’s having a lot of fun with it, sharing with us snippets about his life.
‘You must remember,’ he wrote, ‘that my father has been dead for 54 years and my mother for 48. The relationship with my parents is cemented in my memory. I feel absolutely no change in that relationship. I always thought my mother was fun and interesting.
‘The harshest thing I can think to say is that she may have been a little more interesting than I thought.’
TOnYhad no siblings to call his own; his two children by his first wife were adopted and he has a close relationship with the three children of his longterm partner, Pat.
From no blood relatives at all, he now has dozens, though he’s unlikely to get to meet more than a few when he visits, which we hope he will do in August.
I’ve discussed with my sister what we’d have done about the results if we’d taken this test a decade or so ago when our father was still alive.
Would we have approached the old man with the astonishing news? Or would we have stayed silent because it would have seemed cruel to confront him at the end of his life? And how might our mother have felt?
We’ll never know. But what I do know is this: as we age we tend to lose more people than we gain. Right now the gaining of a brother feels like a gift. A gift from our dad, even though it was clearly never intended as that.