People Who Had Their Lives Changed By DNA Tests

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mattstaff
Oct 23, 2019 5:00 PM EDT

Someone on AskReddit asked for people to share how their lives were changed by DNA tests. The resulting stories are filled to the brim with the kind of shocking realizations that can completely change a family. Got to be ready for those DNA tests, man. Sh*t can get very wild. 

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  • 01
    Text - Leucippus1 21h I have one full blooded native American ancestor. This did not change my life, what did was that through this I was able to find parts of my birth family and they had family lore that they were significantly native American and sort of looked the part. I ended up telling them that they did have one ancestor but one ancestor 5 generations back means basically nothing. Furthermore, my grandmother was forced into a marriage at 14 or 15 in some hick town in Idaho by her parents
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  • 02
    Text - bastardusmarkus 20h She wasn't my daughter. Had to drop my attempt at getting her away from her psycho mom. I didn't care that she cheated on me because we had broken up. At least I never married her.
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  • 03
    Text - schmooby 20h I ordered one of the earlier versions of 23andMe back in 2013. Looked through some fun generic traits and ancestral history, then forgot about it for a few years. Until one day in 2017 when I received an email that a close relative was discovered. The connection listed them as a first cousin, which was weird because I thought that I had no immediate cousins and no one in my family recognized the name. A few months later, another one was added and finally a third a couple of m
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  • 04
    Text - Karma_Cookie 19h Growing up I had 2 half brothers and 3 half sisters from my parents previous marriages. I was told that my fathers wife had cheated on him with another woman and he caught her and that was the end of that, and my Mom toId me that he had caught her husband with another woman and so they divorced. They got married and had me, hence I was the only child they had together. The sister closest to me in age, she is 6 years older than me, got a DNA test done and lo and behold, sh
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  • 05
    Text - OtheDreamer 22h Apparently I have no Native American like I was told growing up, I'm 98% British Irish, and there's .1% of Ashkenazi Jew. The biggest life change came from the realization that I had extra Neanderthal DNA, which gives me the superhuman ability to sneeze less after eating dark chocolate. EDIT: I can't believe this sparked so much discussion. I revisited my 23and Me to see how my Neanderthal DNA ranks compared to some others. I have 280 variants, which is more than 58% of ot
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  • 06
    Text - MilesyART 16h Didn't do DNA, but just the regular Ancestry family tree. My family is very Norwegian, and tends to be very proud of this. Nobody had ever really done a comprehensive family tree before, since patronymics make that difficult. But I spent months matching records and going back as far as I could, before losing the trail some time in the early 1700s. When Grandpa asked how my project was going at Thanksgiving, I asked him if he'd known his great grand father was Swedish. He was
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  • 07
    Text - SeniorDiggusBickus 22h Not me but my mom's friend, whose kids I grew up with. Her husband was convicted on a rape/ homicide from 30+ years ago after his mom took a DNA test. He seemed like a straight up family man. Nobody would've ever known. Edit for missing 'h' in his
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  • 08
    Text - goodnightrose 21h My dad and his 2 siblings found out they all have different fathers. One other brother has already passed so we'll never know if there was a 4th baby daddy or not. My dad is a junior and named his son the third after a man who it turns out is no relation. Our last name is an Irish name and we're 0% Irish as his bio father was likely 100% German. My grandmother was a quiet, devout Catholic woman as far as I always knew, so it's been wild finding out she had some major sec
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  • 09
    Text - SubjectAcorn 22h My mom recently found her birth mom from doing a DNA test, so now we know a little bit about our medical history, we have an entire family that we don't know obviously, and my mom knows why she was given up for adoption as a baby Edit: also just to add a random tidbit, I said the "now we know medical history" because both my of parents were adopted. My dad has met his birth mom, but we (my dad and siblings and I) are not super close so I don't think we ever found out or a
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  • 10
    Text - ExtinctFauna 15h Imagine yourself as a woman, almost 40, and you've submitted your sample of DNA to 23&Me. You hope to see some genetic information about yourself in health-related matters. Instead, you find two previously-thought unrelated strangers matched to you as half-siblings. Further investigation reveals that your father is not your genetic father. Folks, that was my (newly-discovered) half- sister's experience with 23&Me, and we've met in person, she's met with her genetic father
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  • 11
    Text - Sully1102 20h My life wasn't changed, but I was contacted by someone on 23andMe wondering how we were connected since he thought he knew all his second cousins in the area. I recognized the surname as that of my biological grandfather. I answered this man's question by detailing how my grandfather had gotten my grandmother pregnant out of wedlock, then it turned out he was already married with a family, forcing my father to be put up for adoption. I guess the guy didn't like that story an
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  • 12
    Text - kaitnip 18h My brother and I did 23andMe tests and when we went to compare our results it said he was only half brother. We thought we were full blood my related our whole lives. Turns out, our biological mom (who has since abandoned us and passed away) cheated on my dad and made him believe the baby was his. My dad was 20 at the time and it changed the whole course of his life. He loves my brother as his own but damn
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  • 13
    Text - the70sdiscoking 19h My life wasn't changed, but it was made a little more complete. Found out, along with my dad, when I was a teenager that my grandpa wasn't my real grandpa. My grandma, who survived her husband back in early 90's, told us late in her life in the mid 2000's that her husband was sterile so she slept with this other guy, let's call him Tom Thompson. My dad had no idea, and was in his late 40's when this news came to us. For 5 years off and on I searched all public records
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  • 14
    Text - renseigner_enseigner 19h Both my partner and I tested positive as Cystic Fibrosis carriers. I don't know the exact chances of this, but its low-- none of our family members have CF. This was after we had our first child (who luckily does not have CF) but has really changed how we feel about any more children.
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  • 15
    Text - mnmacaro: 18h I had been searching for my biological father for 10 years. When I took my DNA test and got the results back, I found out A. My bio father was 14 when I was born B. My mom was 20 when I was born C. My father died when he was 24 D. He was murdered by his best friend E. That there was a lifetime original tv series with an episode dedicated to his murder F. That I had a half brother G. My half brother didn't know the person he called dad his whole life wasn't his dad Cue existe
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  • 16
    Text - BatsyyCrazyy 20h My entire life I was told I was heavily native american. So much so in fact, my granddad was a Cherokee chief and he gave all of his grand kids native american names. I have 0% native american and I'm mostly Irish and Scandinavian.
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  • 17
    Text - 1nonsenseusername 17h My husband has done 5 DNA test to trace his ancestry and all have come back that they were unable to get results. Aliens?
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  • 18
    Text - Lonely JewOnXmas 15h I'm from Ukraine but I never knew exactly what I was because Slavic are secretive assholes and anytime I asked I always got told "you're just Jewish" by my uncles. It turns out I'm about almost 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. I'm 99.7 Ashkenazi, 0.2 is broadly European, and 0.1 is North African. So basically I'm a super European jew. I also might have possibly found a 3rd cousin on 23andme. I just started talking to her and will be talking to my uncles/ others so hopefully I h
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  • 19
    Text - RevMen 22h My friend did a test to see what her ancestry is recently. She ended up discovering who her dad actually is and learning that her dad is still alive, not dead like her mother said. So that's something
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  • 20
    Text - MadMomma85 18h I was adopted, and received a connection to my birth mother's brother through ancestry.com. I was hesitant to reach out because of all the reunion horror stories I've heard throughout my life, but I ended up doing it anyway. My uncle asked me to call him right away, and now I have three siblings who want me in their life, aunts, uncles and gagillion cousins who threw a big welcome home party for me this summer. My birth mom's cousin told me she had been looking for me, but
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  • 21
    Text - C_D_199 16h A man contacted me out of the blue one day on ancestry saying it showed we were related and he was looking for his birth parents. He was adopted and had been searching for a while for his mom and dad. He sends a picture and looks just like my dad. My sisters and I end up kind of tricking our dad into into taking an ancestry test to make sure that they match and sure enough they do. He came from Houston to Knoxville to meet us and seems to be a great person. My dad apparently d
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  • 22
    Text - Noctudeit 21h Thad a very rare cancer as a child. I was always worried that any children I might have would suffer the same fate. When my wife and I got serious about parenthood, I learned that there was a genetic test for the type of cancer I had. I submitted a sample and it came back completely negative for any cancer markers meaning my kids would have essentially no chance of developing the same disease. This was a huge relief, but at the same time it meant that my cancer was completel
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surprising Awkward askreddit Genetics ridiculous family DNA
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