by Richard Hill
Over time, a remarkable feature of these two new tests became apparent: both Family Finder and Relative Finder proved to be far better than the old sibling tests for confirming close relationships.
The sibling tests only spot check a handful of markers and then calculate the probability of two people having a certain relationship. These new tests, on the other hand, compare huge regions on your chromosomes and actually measure the amount of DNA two people have in common.
For first cousins and closer, the tests are breathtakingly conclusive.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my story was about to take another dramatic turn.
44
NOT AGAIN
My own DNA was already in the Relative Finder and Family Finder databases. So I began to wonder…maybe I should retest some of my Richards relatives to corroborate the earlier finding that Doc was my birth father.
Unfortunately, these new tests were still priced at a few hundred dollars each. While both labs were well aware of my web site, neither one was sending me any free test kits. I would have to pay retail, just like everyone else.
In my mind, I couldn’t justify the expense when I still believed that my case was settled. The 87 percent probability of Doug being my half brother was a more positive result than what I was hearing from others who wrote to me about their sibling tests.
Most people in the Family Finder and Relative Finder databases are not trying to confirm a relationship with a close relative. Nearly everyone in Family Finder and a fraction of those in Relative Finder are genealogists.
They are using these tests to find distant, previously unknown relatives in their family trees. People who share segments above a certain size almost certainly descend from a common ancestor. If you compare family trees with the people you match, you may be able to discover who that common ancestor was and then expand or at least confirm that branch of your family tree.
Over time, as serious genealogists continued to explore Family Finder and Relative Finder, it became clear that there was a genealogical advantage to testing multiple family members.
For example, if you and a relative on your paternal side both take one of these tests, the people who match both of you are more likely to be connected through your father’s family. By focusing your efforts on that side of your tree, you may be able to determine the common ancestor more quickly.
Family Finder even provides a filter to let you quickly see which of your matches are “in common with” any particular match. On Relative Finder, finding common matches is a manual process, but it’s still doable if you have access to both people’s data.
By the fall of 2011, I decided that I could no longer ignore this development and be faithful to my web site readers. If I was going to tell people how to take advantage of multiple relative testing, I had to explore the process myself.
I decided to bite the bullet and order another test kit from each lab. Then I had to choose one relative to take each test.
Since my cousin Vern’s wife had done the early genealogy work on the Richards family, I figured they would enjoy working with me on our family tree. I asked Vern to take the 23andMe test and he agreed.
For the Family Finder kit, I decided to ask my sister, Elaine. I had sensed that she felt left out when I was testing Doug on the sibling test. So I called and explained what I wanted. She was pleased to be asked and agreed to take the new test.
Vern sent in his sample immediately after receiving the test kit. Elaine happened to be in the process of moving when her kit arrived. She slipped it into a packing box where it lay hidden for weeks.
This meant that Vern’s results came in well ahead of Elaine’s. After receiving a notification by e-mail that his results were ready, I logged into to my 23andMe account to check my Relative Finder matches.
I could see my relationship to each matching person based on the number of segments we shared and the total amount of shared DNA. My closest prior match had been with the previously mentioned third cousin. She and I shared three segments and had less than 1 percent of our DNA in common.
The amount of DNA that people share on this test depends on their relationship. A parent and child or two full siblings will share about 50 percent.
At the next step down, there are three relationships that share about 25 percent:
• grandparent and grandchild
• aunt/uncle and nephew/niece
• half siblings
First cousins, the next closely related group, will share around 12.5 percent. That’s where I assumed Vern and I would be. But when I looked at Vern’s data, I could not believe my eyes. Vern and I shared 32 segments and 22 percent of our DNA!
At 22 percent, we were clearly in the 25 percent ballpark…and the only relationship that fit the facts of our situation was half siblings.
The startling new conclusion was inescapable. Since we had different mothers, Vern and I must have shared the same father.
Vern had always been recognized as Vernie’s son. So that implied that my father was Vernie instead of Doc!
I was dumbfounded.
The earlier sibling test had calculated an 87 percent probability that Doc was my father and only a 60 percent probability that Vernie was my father. I had based my original conclusion on the larger index number and the higher probability. Knowing that Doc had been my mother’s employer had also supported that conclusion.
Yet the sibling test results were still only estimates from a tiny number of markers—just fifteen to be exact. What looked like the more probable conclusion in 2007 now had been proven wrong by an actual measurement of 700,000 markers.
Clearly, the idea of Vernie being my father did make sense. Vernie fit my longstanding image of a tall, dark-haired father. People said I looked more like Vernie than Doc. And Vernie’s brown eyes were a more understandable match for me than Doc’s problematic blue eyes.
Nevertheless, I realized there was one other possibility. Perhaps Doc had a secret relationship with Vern’s mother and was the father to four of us: Doug, Elaine, Vern, and me.
I picked up the phone and called Vern.
After explaining the test results, I asked for his reaction. Vern was fine with the idea of us being siblings. Although he had been told that Vernie was his father, he could not rule out the possibility that his mother may also have slept with Doc.
Since she was now deceased, it was too late to ask her. And that was not a conversation Vern would have liked to have anyway.
I told Vern that Elaine would also be taking one of these new tests. We both realized that her results would either confirm or eliminate Doc as our biological father.
There was no doubt that Elaine enjoyed having me as another brother. So I knew she would be disappointed if I had to revise that conclusion. But with Vern now confirmed as my half sibling, Elaine could not be my sister unless Doc had fathered all of us.
Yet if that were the case, Gerry would lose Vern as her brother.
Weeks passed and the whole issue hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. All along, I had two simple goals. I wanted to know the truth about my birth and I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
Now I found myself caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Somebody would be hurt no matter what the truth turned out to be.
A few days before Christmas in 2011, I received an e-mail from Family Tree DNA that Elaine’s results were ready. Anxiously, I logged in and checked my Family Finder Matches.
There was Elaine’s name. I held my breath and looked at the data. Family Finder does not report the number of shared segments or the percent of shared DNA like Relative Finder does. Instead, this test reports the total length of all the blocks we share and the length of the longest block.
Elaine and I were right in the heart of the first-cousin range.
Confirming Elaine as a first cousin eliminated her father, Doc from being my father too. Now it looked like I finally knew the real truth. Somehow, Doc’s older brother Vernie, owner o
f the Joy Bar, had been intimate with my birth mother, Jackie.
While I was glad to know the truth, I did not yet feel like celebrating.
My family and I had lived with the false conclusion that Doc was my father for more than four years. And prior to that, there was the tentative conclusion that Dale’s father, Wayne, had been my father.
I had to retract that first conclusion and now I was facing a more shocking retraction.
All of the branches of my family plus countless friends and genealogy contacts had heard my story. Plus, thousands of strangers had read about it on my web site, The Wall Street Journal, and the Grand Rapids Press.
Now I knew the ending of that story was flat-out wrong. Doc was not my birth father. I had unknowingly misled myself and everyone else.
Naturally, I shared this news and my feelings with Pat. She tried to reassure me that I had taken the best DNA test available in 2007 and had drawn the most logical conclusion. I had not tried to mislead anybody.
When this didn’t cheer me, she suggested a plan of action that had not occurred to me: “Maybe you should just keep your mouth shut.”
45
ONE FINAL DECISION
Pat’s reasoning was simple. My goal of knowing the truth was complete. Vernie was my birth father. I could accomplish my second goal of not hurting anyone simply by keeping quiet about these new findings.
“You often say that there is not much practical difference between a half sibling and a first cousin,” Pat argued. “You could just let everyone else go on believing that Doc was your father. Then nothing changes and no one gets hurt.”
Pat explained that she was especially concerned about Doc’s daughter, Elaine, who she felt would be hurt by losing the new brother she had been so pleased to discover.
We did not have long to talk this out. On the following day, Pat’s sister and her family flew in from California to spend the Christmas holidays with us.
After everyone left, I realized that Vern already knew about his test results and knew that Elaine was being tested. There was no way I could keep him in the dark.
I called Vern and filled him in. He was relieved that Gerry was still his sister. From his point of view, he had added a new brother without making any waves that could hurt anyone.
Vern had discussed the new DNA tests with his wife but had not told anyone else. I explained Pat’s idea of not sharing this with others and asked him to continue keeping it quiet unless he heard differently from me. He agreed.
“I understand your situation,” Vern said. “I’m just glad you have to make that decision and not me.”
New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday and several bowl games were on TV the next day. I lost myself in football for awhile, especially an exciting Outback Bowl where my Michigan State Spartans beat the Georgia Bulldogs in triple-overtime.
As the glow of victory drained away, my DNA problem quickly returned to the forefront of my brain. I kept weighing the imagined consequences of telling everyone versus the idea of burying these new results forever.
Pat and I agonized over this for a few more days. Then on the following weekend, we reached a decision.
We simply could not go on, year after year, interacting with my newest family and letting them think that Doc was my father. It would be a lie. And we would know it was a lie even if others did not.
Furthermore, I had spent decades getting around lies and cover-ups, being repeatedly shocked at the family secrets parents hid from their children. I could not engage in a cover-up of my own.
I had to tell everyone and let the chips fall where they might.
First on my list was Elaine, since it was her DNA test that eliminated Doc as my father. I tried to reach her a couple times by phone, but she did not answer.
Anxious to get started before I chickened out, I decided to call her brother, Doug. I reached him on the first try and carefully explained the powerful new DNA tests and my surprising results from testing Vern and Elaine.
By now, I knew Doug to be the epitome of laid back. Nothing ever seemed to bother him. As I expected, he accepted this news gracefully.
Doug had heard enough about the family’s early days in the bar business to explain how Jackie and Vernie must have known each other. First of all, Doc and Vernie were frequently at each other’s bars. In addition, whenever a waitress at one bar was sick, a girl from the other bar would often be called in to take her shift.
That reminded me of a comment made by Jackie’s best friend, Cordie, who also worked at Doc’s bar. She said that everybody knew both brothers. Now I could clearly see why. And “everybody” certainly would have included Jackie.
While the conversation with Doug was an easy one, I suspected my talks with the female family members might not go nearly as well.
When I did reach Elaine, it was indeed a more difficult conversation. She had really enjoyed the thrill of discovering a new brother. Now she was disappointed to discover we were actually cousins. Once again, I found myself making the case that the precise relationship did not matter much at this stage of our lives.
My next call was to Gerry. She had been the first family member I found. Open to all possibilities, she had supported me throughout the process of recruiting family members to do the sibling test.
When those test results finally pointed to Doc as my father, she had expressed a little disappointment that it had not been her father, Vernie. So I was hoping she would accept this new finding as good news.
She did not.
First of all, Gerry challenged the results. She thought the sibling test had proved Doc was my father. How could this new test prove otherwise?
I tried to explain the difference. The sibling test just checked fifteen DNA markers from each son and then used some statistical formulas to calculate the probability that each man was my half sibling. Doug had the highest probability of 87 percent. But Vern had the second highest probability of 60 percent.
While Doug had been statistically more likely to be my half sibling, that conclusion was still a guess.
Never expecting a better DNA test to become available, I drew a conclusion based on the sibling tests and the circumstantial evidence that Doc was Jackie’s employer and, therefore, the two had the greatest opportunity of entering into an intimate relationship.
With all of us anxious for an answer, I had allowed “probable” to morph into “proof.” But I had been wrong.
I explained how the new Family Finder and Relative Finder tests compare two people on 700,000 markers. They look for long blocks of DNA that are identical in both of us. Those long blocks had to come from a common ancestor and the more long blocks we share, the closer the common ancestor must have been.
These new tests don’t guess. They measure.
Finally accepting my argument that the new tests were better than the old test, Gerry surprised me with her next comments.
“I have always had a hard time believing that your father was the short, blue-eyed Doc,” she exclaimed. “I thought you looked more like my dad and his brother, Joe.”
Sometime earlier, I had printed the initial draft of my book for family members to read. Fortunately, I had not yet published it with the erroneous conclusion. Yet something I wrote in that draft had caught Gerry’s eye.
“Do you remember the part in your book where you learned that your birth mother had named you Gerald? You never found any explanation for that.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“My full name is Geraldine and I was five years old when you were born. Do you suppose Jackie saw me sometime or at least heard about me from my dad and liked my name?”
“When she got pregnant, Jackie thought about Geraldine as a girl’s name…but when she had a boy, she named you Gerald.”
That remark hit me like a ton of bricks. Once again, I had not put two and two together. The Geraldine-to-Gerald idea made a lot of sense.
Did Jackie just like the name, I wondered, or did she choose it because she knew Vern
ie was my father?
Then Gerry surprised me again: “I think you should test me on the new DNA test.”
I explained that, logically, it wasn’t necessary. A comparison of Elaine and me showed we were first cousins. That eliminated Elaine’s father, Doc, as my father. A comparison of Vern and me showed we were half siblings. He and I must have had the same father and Vernie had publicly admitted being Vern’s father.
Admittedly, the high cost also made me reluctant to order yet another test. But I didn’t say anything about that.
“I don’t care about the logic,” Gerry pressed. “I will feel better if you test me and it proves we are half siblings.”
This reminded me of the time when I tried to omit Doug from the sibling test due to his father’s blue eyes and he insisted on being included.
Now it occurred to me that if Doug had been left out, Vern would have been my closest match and I would have stumbled into the correct answer four years ago.
“What if I split the cost of the test with you?” Gerry continued. I briefly protested, but she insisted on doing the test and paying for half of it.
That night I went online and ordered another Family Finder test for Gerry. In a couple days, her check arrived in the mail. She also enclosed copies of Vernie’s obituaries and some previously unshared photos of her father and his brother, Joe, who she still thought looked the most like me.
Over the next few weeks, we exchanged a flurry of e-mails.
I could tell this was stressing her out and I felt badly about that. In one message she wrote, “I sure thought this puzzle was completed, but it sounds like we are starting all over again.”
Gerry had long accepted the fact that her father had gotten Vern’s mother pregnant in 1951. Vernie had openly wanted a son and Gerry’s mother had refused to have any more children. Knowing that fact, the whole family had eventually given him a pass on that extramarital relationship.
