RESILIENT. EMPATHETIC. CURIOUS.
Do you know who the favorite is in your family? If you don’t, NEWSFLASH—it’s likely you. As the sixth of seven children, I always believed I was my dad’s favorite. You couldn’t tell me otherwise. He never admitted it—what good dad would? But it was one of those unspoken truths I carried with me even after he passed away on my tenth birthday.
More than 30 years later, I joined Ancestry.com, back when DNA testing wasn’t the household trend it is today. While I loved exploring my ethnicity estimate—Benin, Togo, Cameroon—I didn’t pay much attention to my DNA matches. This was mostly because I didn’t recognize the names. Secondly, I didn’t have the bandwidth to unravel all those distant 4th and 5th cousins.
So I was basically using the platform to build my digital family tree. I spent years plugging in names, adding photos, and filling in gaps. It wasn’t until much later that everything I thought I knew about my identity would change.
A Message That Changed Everything
Fast forward to 2020. My niece—one I’d only recently learned existed—took a DNA test and sent me a message: “I think we’re a match. Add me to your tree.” I laughed at first. Of course, we’re a match; I’d already manually added her to my family tree. Duh. But when I tried to link her digitally through the system, something strange happened: she came up as my “half-niece.”
Half? That didn’t make sense. I’d never even heard terms like “half-niece” or “half-nephew.”
At first, I brushed it off as a system error. It must have been a glitch. But as an engineer, I couldn’t ignore the data. I spent days trying to decipher what this meant, and the unsettling realization crept in: one of my siblings must have a different father. That revelation rocked me because, for 45 years, I thought I knew who we were. But it turns out my family had been keeping a massive secret. The very foundation of my family tree, the one I’d painstakingly built, was about to be pulled up by the roots.
The Search for Answers
Being the problem-solver I am, I ordered sibling DNA tests for all of us. Let me tell you, getting my siblings to agree to this was like trying to herd cats. Their behavior wasn’t adding up. They were suspicious, guarded, and—I soon realized—evasive for a reason. Private chats without me? Side-eye glances at family gatherings? Something was off.
Four months later, I still didn’t have answers. My therapist, tired of listening to my weekly rants, suggested I join a DNA support group. That’s how I found DNAngels, a team of volunteers who help people navigate these kinds of discoveries. My angel listened patiently as I unloaded my tangled story. “People lie; DNA doesn’t,” she said. Within hours, she’d narrowed my biological father down to one of four brothers.
Soon I had a more definitive answer: a man living in a nursing home just minutes away.
Meeting My Birth Father
Walking into that nursing home felt surreal. For the first time, there was someone’s face who looked exactly like mine, and it wasn’t my own child! Genetic mirroring—seeing your face in someone else’s—was disorienting but grounding in a way that’s hard to explain.
“Sir, do you know my mom?” I asked. His response was a calm “Yes.”
“Are you my father?” He nodded. No emotion, no hesitation—just confirmation, like I’d asked if the sky was blue.
That meeting was a whirlwind of emotions. I heard one of the simplest stories ever. My parents split for a year, I was conceived during the break, and all of my parents decided I would be raised just as the others, hoping I’d never be any the wiser. For years, I had believed in one version of my life. Now, I was staring at a man who shared my face but none of my memories. I learned that everyone else—my mom, my dad, my siblings, even church members—had known the truth all along. Their silence, born out of apparent protection, reeked of betrayal.
The Right to Know
Knowing where you come from isn’t just about identity. It’s about connection, health, and the fundamental right to understand your own story. For decades, I unknowingly lacked access to half my medical history—information that could affect not just me but my only son. This isn’t just my story; it’s one shared by millions of people whose family secrets create gaps in their understanding of themselves.
Politeness may have motivated my family’s silence, but the omission hurt more than the truth ever could. It took time, therapy, and a lot of grace to make peace with my new reality. Slowly, I shifted my focus from what I had lost to what I had gained: a fuller picture of who I am, a new sense of belonging, and, quite frankly, a broken heart that made way for growth.
Empathy and Transformation
Before this experience, I approached life with an engineer’s mindset—logical, reasonable, data-driven. But this discovery forced me to confront emotions I hadn’t dealt with before. My heart had finally run into something my brain could not work me out of. The journey wasn’t just about finding new relatives; it was about uncovering a deeper understanding of myself and cultivating empathy in ways I struggled to access before.
Empathy became the bridge between what I thought I knew and what I needed to learn—not just about my family, but about myself. Eventually, it allowed me to grant my family some grace. While I believe I would have made a different choice, I understand their silence for what it was: an attempt to protect me. And it helped me to grieve my lost identity, forgive them, and piece together a new identity.
Today, I stand as someone transformed by this journey, ready to share not just the science of DNA but the emotional truths it can uncover.
If you’re here, it is likely your world has been torn apart by the truth of who you are. Be empathetic—to yourself, to your family, and to the truths you uncover. You never know what you might find—it might just light your path to becoming the person you were always meant to be.