San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New siblings, old secrets
For four strangers connected by genetics, at-home DNA tests reveal family links, lies
The message was waiting in Karen Meyer’s Facebook inbox first thing one morning.
“Hi, Karen. This is going to be completely out of left field, but I’m doing some family research . ... Do you know whether your dad was a sperm donor at Stanford?”
Meyer was stunned. She’d never even considered such a thing.
The question had come from Sandra Tofte, a stranger to Meyer. By the end of the day, they would know each other as half sisters, in a new world opened up by the rise in online genealogy.
There were further discoveries for Meyer: another half sister and a half brother. Half nieces and half nephews, cousins of all degrees. An entire web of family that had existed only in shadow.
Over a matter of weeks, genetic testing by Meyer, Tofte and others exposed the decades-old secrets of at least four families — creating new links, answering questions that had long been festering, and in some cases shattering bonds of trust between children and
parents.
“It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me,” said Meyer, 61, who lives in Portland, Ore., but, like her new siblings, has family roots in Northern California.
Her dad, it turns out, had never told his family he was a sperm donor, but he seems almost certainly to be the biological father of at least three people who were conceived at a private fertility clinic in Palo Alto near Stanford.
Her new half siblings are Tofte, who lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle; Lori Stone of Redwood City; and Thomas Lesondak, who lived in San Jose for decades before moving to Colorado in March. They are all 55, born within a few months of each other in 1963.
The 1960s were pioneering days in artificial insemination. The practice started in the United States in the 1940s among a handful of discreet doctors, but wouldn’t become mainstream until the late 1970s. In those first decades, infertility, especially in men, could be a source of shame, and parents were advised never to tell anyone that the man at the head of the family was not the biological father of his children.
Most doctors didn’t keep records of the sperm donors. No one would ever know, they assured their patients.
They couldn’t have foreseen that 40 years later, scientists would map the human genome, identifying every gene and the sequences that distinguish one person from another, and that five years after that, people would be able to do genetic testing in their own homes.
They couldn’t have known, as well, that social media would make it exponentially easier to make connections with strangers that otherwise would have required years of detective work.
Over the past decade, people have used at-home genetic tests to track down parents who had given them up for adoption. Others who knew they were conceived by sperm or egg donation have sought to find donors who once had been promised anonymity. Identifying donors has become so simple that the days of anonymous donation may already be over, though most fertility clinics still operate under that premise.
The case of these siblings is still unusual, fertility experts say, because it’s centered around a deeply held deception, bolstered by the social and ethical norms of another generation.
None of them had been seeking information about their biological parents when they did genetic testing. Only one had known that her parents had undergone artificial insemination, and even she hadn’t expected to find siblings or the man who donated his sperm.
To learn of their origins well into middle age, after raising their own children — and after most of their parents have died — has been disconcerting for all of them to varying degrees.
Fertility medicine isn’t practiced that way anymore, experts say. Research has found that adults who learned their parents were not biologically related struggled with issues around identity and trust. Now, parents seeking artificial insemination are counseled to be transparent.
“Research tells us it’s best for children to find out about sperm or egg donation before age 7. Then there’s no jarring moment of discovery, it’s just something that they grow up and make sense of over time,” said Lauri Pasch, a psychologist with the UCSF Center for Reproductive Health who counsels people on infertility and family building.
“Otherwise they have anger, resentment. There’s a feeling of mistrust and deceit,” Pasch said. “It can be very jarring to one’s sense of self.”
Dr. Roy Cauwet started his obstetrics and gynecology practice in 1956 near Stanford, where he’d gone to medical school, and seems likely to have started offering artificial insemination around that time. The donors Cauwet recruited were almost always Stanford medical students or young lecturers — a selling point for many families he treated.
Shortly before Cauwet died in 2014, a man contacted him to ask about the identity of a particular sperm donor, said one of Cauwet’s daughters, Marianne Dugoni. But her father had no records to share and wasn’t able to help. She said Cauwet took great pride in the children he helped bring into the world.
“My dad was one of the pioneers in infertility,” Dugoni said. “There are a lot of babies because of him. A lot of happy families.”
In the 1950s, Tofte’s parents were living in Monterey and unable to have children when a doctor referred them to Cauwet more than 80 miles away. They had their first child in 1959, then returned to Cauwet and had Tofte four years later.
Tofte learned all this four years ago, when her mother was dying and suffering from dementia and revealed she had undergone artificial insemination. A few months later, her father said the story was true and that he was not her biological parent.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Tofte asked him. He responded, “It just never came up.”
In 2015, not long after her parents had confessed, Tofte and her sister took genetic tests with the company 23andMe and learned they were only half sisters.
Tofte looked more closely at the report only this year. Genetic testing results sometimes include the names of people who may be related, often distant cousins. Tofte noticed a new name on her report, Simon Puckett, listed as a possible first cousin. She didn’t recognize his name, and that struck her as odd — surely if they were that closely related, she should know him.
She contacted Puckett through Facebook. Tofte mentioned that her parents had gone to a clinic near Stanford for fertility treatment; Puckett said he thought his grandmother might have gone there, too. He connected Tofte with his mother, Lori Stone, on Jan. 26.
They quickly figured out that both of their mothers had seen Cauwet for fertility issues — and that they’d been born within two months of each other. Next they swapped
photos, and the similarities were striking: same coloring, same nose, same almondshaped eyes. Tofte thought they looked more alike than the sister she’d been raised with.
Tofte and Stone realized they were probably half siblings. Stone’s son wasn’t Tofte’s cousin, but her half nephew.
Stone had already done genetic testing through the company AncestryDNA, but hadn’t yet gotten her results. They arrived in mid-February, and though Stone couldn’t use them to connect herself to Tofte — different genetic testing companies use different techniques for analyzing DNA that can’t be compared — she did find yet another mysterious close relative, a young woman in Morgan Hill.
Stone reached out to Caitlin Souza and asked the pertinent questions: Had anyone in Souza’s family undergone fertility treatment near Stanford? Were there questions about paternity?
Souza answered yes and told them about her father, Thomas Lesondak. His parents had been treated for infertility by a Stanford doctor. Rumors had long swirled in the family around her grandfather and the paternity of his children. Lesondak had been born a few months before Stone and Tofte, and almost certainly was their half brother, making Souza their half niece.
On March 1, Tofte flew to the Bay Area. The three presumed siblings — plus Souza and Stone’s mother — met at a Chinese restaurant in Los Altos. Stone’s mother couldn’t stop staring at her daughter and Tofte. The physical resemblance was less obvious with Lesondak. But, Souza said, “Sandra, my dad and I have the exact same cowlick.”
The natural next step was to try to track down the sperm donor. That proved more challenging.
They contacted Cauwet’s family, who said that if he’d ever kept records, they were long gone. Stone went to Stanford to look at photos of medical school students from the time they’d been conceived, in the far-fetched hope that one of them would look familiar. None did.
The breakthrough came when Souza contacted Elaine Dependahl of San Jose, a woman who was on her list of possible relatives on AncestryDNA. Dependahl, fueled by an intense interest in genealogy, had compiled a roster of hundreds of relatives going back several generations.
Souza told Dependahl about her father and his possible half sisters. She explained they were looking for the sperm donor and that he probably would have been a medical student at Stanford in the early 1960s. Dependahl said only one man in her extended family tree would fit those criteria.
Souza passed the name to Stone and Tofte, who took to Google to learn everything they could about him. He’d died in 2008, and they found an obituary that listed his surviving family — including a daughter named Karen Meyer.
Tofte sent the message by Facebook on March 9, just six weeks after she’d first made contact with Stone. Meyer confirmed that her father had been a Stanford medical school student in 1962. He’d studied obstetrics and gynecology, which made it possible that he interacted with a doctor doing pioneering work in fertility medicine.
By coincidence, Meyer had done a genetic test through 23andMe a few weeks before. On Tuesday, she got her results: Tofte was a likely half sister.
The rapid unspooling of their shared family history has hit each sibling — and the extended families — in disparate and unpredictable ways.
Tofte has been mostly unruffled. Learning that her parents lied to her was hard, and she asked herself, “Did everybody know and dupe me my entire life?” But the man who raised her was still her father, she said, and the new information didn’t change that.
Souza said her father is slowly digesting each revelation as it comes and he’s enjoyed meeting his new siblings, but he hasn’t wanted to explore the consequences too deeply. Lesondak declined to be interviewed.
“I’ve been very excited about all of this, staying up all night researching,” Souza said. “But I think it takes him a little time to get used to each piece of information.”
Meyer spent a day feeling protective and jealous, recoiling at the thought of sharing her father with these strangers. But she came around quickly and realized she’d had a lifetime with him. She figured he’d want her to be generous with the children he never knew.
She asked that his name be kept private, because he’d always assumed he would remain anonymous. But she thinks of her new half siblings as his “encore children.” She thinks he would have been proud of them.
Stone has struggled more than the others. She never had a clue that the man who raised her was not her biological father. Now, her origin story has changed. In her mind, she was made in a doctor’s office, not conceived of love. That awareness has shifted her world perspective. Her very identity is askew, she said.
“We were brought into this world disconnected from our biological parent or parents. I look at artificial insemination as doctors playing God a little bit, and that’s a weird thing,” Stone said. “Maybe it would feel different if you’re told when you’re young.”
But perhaps more upsetting are the decades of lying that now define her relationships with her parents, Stone said. Her father, who died in 2013, was a secretive man.
“It’s easy for me to believe he was deceptive” about her origins, she said. But that her mother had lied was disappointing.
Even after Stone talked to Tofte and they worked out they were probably half sisters, Stone’s mother continued to deny that she’d undergone artificial insemination. She was deeply committed to the old secret. If donor sperm had been used, she insisted, she hadn’t been told.
Finally, in mid-March, Stone’s mother gave in and confirmed the whole story.
“I don’t really know what’s going to happen with my family, to be honest. This is a big thing,” Stone said. “As things are, I can’t really move forward in the old way. And I don’t know what the new way is yet.”
As it stands, Tofte, Stone and Meyer have confirmed by genetic testing that they are almost certainly half sisters. Lesondak has not yet taken any genetic tests, but the links they’ve identified so far have them convinced he’s also their half sibling.
All four siblings don’t yet have plans to meet. For now, they continue to exchange old photos, to gently get to know one another over phone calls and texts and emails.
Meyer said she’ll be in Seattle in a couple of months and may meet Tofte then. She and her husband will celebrate their 40th anniversary in San Francisco in August; she may see Stone while she’s here.
Meyer was raised with a brother and sister. They have, so far, expressed no interest in meeting their new half brother and half sisters, she said. She’s not pressuring them. She’s still not sure how she feels about these people who are strangers, and yet are not.
“It’s premature to say they’re family, because we don’t have that relationship established yet,” Meyer said. “We’ll see where the road goes.”
Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday
“I look at artificial insemination as doctors playing God a little bit, and that’s a weird thing.
Maybe it would feel different if you’re told when you’re young.”
Lori Stone, who discovered she has three half siblings