I Am Not My Own Grandpaw

It was right there under my nose, but I simply didn't see it.

I have been working on my mom's mom's family tree for 30 years. But only half of it, the reason being that there were some really dedicated genealogists working on my maternal grandfather's line. I figured that they had it handled.

So when DNA matching came about, I figured it was one more tool that could help tease apart the knots in the genealogy that were hard to unravel. But it also turns up some questions. I did not think that my family would be one of them, and here we are.

A woman contacted me years ago. Her own DNA test had proved that her dad wasn't her bio-dad. And she had two half-brothers who had the same bio-dad. They were related to relatives of mine, so she reached out. She thought my uncle was her dad. I told her that if we proved the relationship I was happy to tell her anything she wanted to know.

But she was a dna match of people that I expected to be related to. And I was not. It turned out that she was the daughter of a 2nd cousin of mine. But it seemed I was not related to him. 

There was another question. Also on my mom's side. A person showed up as a DNA match and I couldn't figure out how. I reached out to the person and he did not respond. I looked him up. He looks exactly like everybody on my grandmother's maternal line. Looks like my brother. Looks like my uncle, Mom's brother. We all have the same bulbous nose.

I hired an Ancestry.com genealogist to figure out the two mysteries. Who is this first cousin of mine, and where is the break in my mom's paternal line? I had so many theories. The truth blew me away.

The first cousin is, in fact, my uncle's son. Not a huge surprise. And the break in the family line? My grandfather is not my mom's bio-dad. More mystifying is that she and her brother have the same bio-dad. He just doesn't happen to be my grandfather. My siblings, who loved him deeply, would be horrified and I don't plan to tell them.

I sat with that non-grandpaternity information for a few days and hired Ancestry again. It's expensive, but I need to know. Unlike other parts of my family, where there was a bit of lore to go on, here I have nothing. Even with the Irish side of my family I had a (very common) surname. I just hammered at the research for a decade and found the answer. I have more money than time these days, so I hope to get some answers that will let me dig in to another family tree and do research on some new topics.

More as I know it.