South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
She was a stranger for 55 years, until DNA test made her a sister
For most of her life, Sally Griffith suspected the man she called “dad” wasn’t really her biological father.
Griffith, 55, first found out there was a father she never met because of a relative’s offhand comment. And it left her with this mystery that lingered into her adulthood.
“I wondered, does this person know about me?” the Sarasota woman asked. “Do they keep tabs on me? I wondered what the scoop was.”
So Griffith enlisted the help of 23andMe, one of a rising number of DNA-testing companies that aim to identify genetic relatives and regions of the world from where ancestors came. She sent in a saliva sample and paid $100 for the service, unsure of what would happen. A quest of regional proportions unfolded. It ended happily in May with Griffith driving to South Florida to meet her half-sisters for the first time.
“The test should be called, ‘Brace yourself,’ ” Griffith said, laughing.
One of her newfound family
members was Christie King, 60, of Pompano Beach, who thought she knew every twist of her family tree back to the 1700s. Itmade no sense at all when her 39-year-old sister, Jessica McAtee, texted her to ask if she knew they might have a new sister.
But it wasn’t a mistake. DNA matching technology — and a little sleuthing— indicated these total strangers could be linked biologically as half-sisters. Griffith, King and McAtee found themselves in a rare instance of siblings being reunited through DNA tests, a story that’s becoming more common.
They hugged at McAtee’s home in Margate, pulled out decades’ worth of family photos and marveled at their resemblance.
Death leads to journey
Griffith grew up in Indianapolis as the fourth of five children, without any suspicion her family’s story was anything other than a typical American family’s.
Her mother and the man she thought was her biological father divorced when shewas very young. When he moved to Florida, shewent with him soon after she turned 16. But then shewas floored by some information she got from a cousin, she said.
“When Iwas 18, one of my cousins said, ‘You know that’s not your real dad,’ ” she said.
It seemed so far-fetched she never discussed it with Donald Duncan, the man who raised her, other than one time when shewas 19 years old. Theywere arguing when she blurted out what her cousin had said. He denied it, she said.
Cleaning up her mother’s papers after her death in 2012, though, she found letters from her father figure to her mother that shook her to the core, she said. It had been written soon after that argument.
“It said, ‘Who did you tell?’ ” and ‘Why would you risk her finding out?’ ” Griffith said. “And it also said, ‘If she brings it up again, I’m not going to lie.’ ”
Not wanting to hurt the man who raised her, she didn’t consider looking for her biological father until 2017, after Duncan died at age 84.
“He died in September, so in December, I bought myself a DNA-testing kit for Christmas,” she said.
A kit fromthe 23andMe sat on her kitchen counter, untouched for months. She was having misgivings and thinking maybe some secrets were meant to stay buried, she said.
“I didn’t want to go barging in and wrecking some families,” she said.
Two months went by and finally she got sick of seeing the package. So she opened it and produced enough spit to make a sample. Six weeks went by and then she got the emailed results.
The service had winnowed possible relatives to about 1,800 people who shared her genetic characteristics and had sent their DNA into 23andMe. It seemed like finding a needle in a haystack, she said.
“I slammed my laptop shut,” she said. “I didn’t recognize anyone.”
The test
Many of these online, matching-DNA platforms connect people whowould not be considered relatives, said Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University professor who has written numerous books on bioethics and a consumers’ guide to DNA testing.
People with similar genetic markers— who get matched as possible relatives—“come out of a population of a million people with similar DNA markers, but who you wouldn’t consider part of your family tree,” said Krimsky, who isn’t affiliated with 23andMe.
There are no quality guarantees for this type of testing, Krimsky said.
23andMe states on its website that it uses “wellestablished scientific and medical research.”
In some instances, though, the results of such analyses have produced irrefutably accurate results.
One such case involved its use in cracking the long-cold case of the Golden State Killer, for example.
Using DNA found at the crime scene, police matched markers to DNA posted on a service similar to 23andMe to find the suspected killer’s relative. More sleuthing produced a suspect.
Ultimately, though, these services don’t provide information beyond a shadowof a doubt. It winnows down possibilities that can lead to more definitive answers, Krimsky said.
“Ancestry DNA testing is for recreational purposes,” he said.
On the trail
More than a million people have had their DNA tested as Griffith did since the service debuted commercially, Krimsky said.
He expects more families will discover longburied secrets as Griffith did about her family.
“There are secrets in families, and genetics can reveal those secrets if they are analyzed properly,” Krimsky said.
In the case of Griffith and her family, it also took connecting some dots beyond genetic analysis.
Taking a closer look at the people who 23andMe listed as possible relatives, Griffith saw many with the last name “Morgan.”
23andMe allows people to contact relatives through the platform, if they have given the company their permission to be contacted.
Griffith contacted different Morgans in North Carolina and Kentucky but that didn’t instantly lead anywhere.
Still, two of the people phoned by Griffith suspected their two cousins might have the answers about her father. They put her in touch with their cousins, sisters Christie King and Jessica McAtee, who lived just 220 miles away from Griffith’s Sarasota home.
It turned out theywere Griffith’s half-sisters, and that their father still was alive.
King and McAtee heard fromtheir cousins— the people Griffith initially reached— and found Griffith was searching for her father. To assist Griffith, the sisters agreed to register their DNA with 23andMe to get their DNA compared.
“We wanted to help her,” King said.
Itwas going to take six weeks for the analysis to come back.
And because McAtee was leaving for her summer home in Oregon shortly, onMay1, Griffith said she couldn’t wait any longer and drove to McAtee’s Margate home.
Immediately, the three women were struck by the resemblance between them.
It took more face-toface talking for them to find the thread that linked them together: Griffith’s mother had been a dancer at an Indianapolis nightclub and the father of King and McAtee had been a drummer at the same club. And they realized why their father hadn’t agreed that he knew Griffith’s mother.
Before that meeting, “we weren’t saying her mother’s name right,” King said, explaining theywere saying “Margie” with a soft “g” instead of a hard one. They also were using a last name, “Silvey,” which their dad wouldn’t have been familiar with.
As theywere putting all the facts together, to ask their father, Bob Morgan, the phone rang.
They put it on speaker phone, and Morgan was on the other end of the line. He confirmed Griffith could indeed be his daughter.
Itwas all overwhelming, all three women said. They posted a Facebook selfie of themselves with a poster announcing, “It’s a girl!” and tagged all their relatives they could think of.
“We all sort of stared at each other in disbelief,” McAtee said.
Fromnowon, May 1 will be known as “Sally Day.”
On Mother’s Day, all three women went to Tennessee so Griffith could meet her 81-year-old father.
Since then they’ve celebrated Griffith’s 55th birthday, King’s 60th and compared troves of family photos.
They are all planning to celebrate the holidays together, trying to make up for the decades of stories they have to tell each other and marvel over their similar taste in books and Disney World vacations.
“I know this could have gone a thousand different ways, but it went thisway,” King said. “Theway it went— it’s just perfect.”