Real Life
Investigating your ancestry online can bring surprises, as Tanith Carey found out
A wife’s surprise discovery after taking a DNA test
When I met my husband-tobe, anthony, one of the most intriguing discoveries I made about him was the fact he had a family coat of arms. I spotted it on a signet ring worn by another relative – three stags’ heads and the motto, ‘facta non verba’: ‘deeds, not words’. I also discovered he had a huge family tree, full of well-to-do landowners who could be traced all the way back to the 14th century.
Part of the reason why it intrigued me is the fact that my family are from much more humble origins. They are a mix of Irish immigrants who left after the potato famine, East Ender Jews, plus some Welsh craftsmen and an Indian grandfather who arrived in London in the 1930s and made his fortune setting up a vinegar factory.
I’ve always been interested in family history. In 2011 I became one of the first British journalists to sign up to the gene-testing company 23andme, which promised to tell me a bit more about who my ancestors were – and the health issues I might have inherited from them.
All I had to do was send off a sample of saliva to the firm’s California headquarters. Then six weeks later I logged onto the site.
Family shocks
As well as telling me that I have the gene for smelling asparagus in urine and producing wet earwax, it also correctly identified that I am, indeed, the mother of my children (and that my husband is their father) – as Lily, Clio and Anthony also sent in their samples anonymously. So there was no doubt in my mind that the service works.
23andme also allows you to see details of other individuals who have used the service and with whom you share DNA. Over time, I received more and more notifications, usually telling me about distant cousins whose Irish ancestors had headed for America.
However, a couple of weeks ago I had a big catch-up on the site and spotted that one of the names on the list of 500 distant relatives was none other than my posher husband.
According to the analysis, it turns out we share a section of DNA on the 18th chromosome, due to a relative four or five generations back.
In other words, we were fourth or fifth cousins. As our families haven’t exactly been moving in the same circles, this immediately led to all sorts of fevered speculation about illicit upstairs-downstairs-style affairs. This wasn’t the first time 23andme had opened a can of worms for me. Four years go, its ancestry service told me that the woman I’d always known as my late grandmother’s much younger sister was, in fact, her daughter. She’d been born out of wedlock – and raised by my great-grandmother instead. Even my late father believed the woman was his aunt. Cue all sorts of family drama about what had really happened and how secret this family history should be.
With ancestry services becoming more and more popular, it seems that uncomfortable DNA bombshells are becoming more common too. Over 12 million people around the world have used one of the home-testing kits provided by these firms (which cost between £60 and £120), decanting their saliva into a test tube or taking a swab from inside their cheeks.
These kits are uncovering secrets that would otherwise have gone to the grave. In fact, so many are surfacing that there is a now a global network called the NPE Friends Fellowship – NPE stands for ‘Not Parent Expected’ – to support individuals who have discovered their family relationships aren’t what they were led to believe.
The network’s founder is Catherine St Clair, who was given an Ancestry DNA test for her birthday, two years ago. When Catherine’s brother took a test too, she was stunned to see that the results revealed he was her half, rather than full, sibling. It meant that the late father she’d always known as Daddy hadn’t fathered her after all. She managed to track down her biological father, a man her mother had once worked with, who had also since died, and she later went on to find two half-sisters through the site.
Catherine says the NPE Friends Fellowship, whose Facebook group has 3,500 members from 12 countries, helps individuals come to terms with a wide variety of scenarios.
Catherine says, ‘People don’t realise that having an NPE discovery can really be a significant trauma. It makes them question everything.’
Be cautious
To be fair to 23andme, the company knows this can be an issue. For this reason, 23andme’s spokesperson, Andy Kill, tells me signing up to site’s ‘DNA Relatives’ feature is only an optional feature. ‘We do alert customers to this fact, and this is exactly why you must make an active choice to participate in the tool as it may discover unexpected information or relationships,’ he says.
However, while a home DNA kit might have uncovered an uncomfortable truth in my family’s recent past, Adam tells me I am probably wasting my time digging for any scandals that might help explain how Anthony and I are related. And our shared DNA is not so shocking after all.
Robin Smith, a senior researcher for 23andme, points out that I share about only 0.1% of my genome with my husband. ‘Generally speaking, fourth cousins – of which the average person is expected to have about 1,000 – share a set of third great grandparents, people born about 150 or so years ago. We all have 32 third great grandparents, so there are a lot of possibilities [for uncovering distant relatives].’ But while my relationship with Anthony is less scandalous than we thought, DNA discoveries about the more recent past will continue to change family dynamics and rewrite family histories.
After all, the post-war generation, whose secrets are now being revealed, could never have foreseen their children and grandchildren would find it so easy to open their Pandora’s box. As the popularity of genealogy grows, keeping family secrets will become much harder.
‘It can Be a significant trauma’