24 Shocking, Dark, And Wild DNA Test Stories From Things Like 23andMe
Recently, Reddit user zachoutloud123 posed the question, "What is your craziest DNA matches story?" to the good people of AskReddit. The results were so wild that it inspired me to ask a similar question of our BuzzFeed Community. Here are all the jaw-dropping responses from both:
1."My Dad is an identical twin. So, all three of my uncle's children should be my half-siblings genetically. They did 23andMe a few years after my siblings and I did. One cousin showed up as a half-sibling, one showed up as a first-second-degree cousin, and the last didn’t show up at all."
"We found out some time ago that my aunt was chronically cheating on my uncle, but we always thought all of his children were biologically his. Well, according to this, only the oldest is… and someone on that side of the family cheated on him with his WIFE (hence the first-second-degree cousin). And then the last kid was some random guy. Wild. I feel bad my cousins had to find out this way, I had no idea that was a possibility."
2."My wife and I are the poster children for DNA testing. I found out my father, who raised me, wasn't my bio dad; my bio father was my mom's college boyfriend. Found out I have a sister on that side, too. My mom, who died from Toxic Shock Syndrome in 1980, was adopted in 1954, and it turns out her mom is still alive! Also, I have an aunt, and there was a child born previously to my mom who was adopted by my uncle. I had gone to boarding school in his town in the early '90s, and we had attended church together unknowingly. An internet friend from the early 2000s Livejournal era tested, and she is a cousin on my father's side. Which kinda makes it awkward that I have nudes of her. Meanwhile, my wife had never known her father, and her mom wasn't too sure. We found him through Ancestry because his mom and brother had already tested. She's got many aunts and uncles now. And also a grandma who is still alive."
3."Not me, but a guy I worked with. I spent every day shoulder to shoulder with this dude for years and couldn't find a nicer guy. He has a wife, kids, a white picket fence, is super active in his church, all that. Then, one day, an army of cops in full SWAT gear showed up at our work and dragged him away in handcuffs. That year, someone got his parents 23andMe for their anniversary. Turns out my nice guy co-worker had execution-style murdered the owner of a check cashing place and made off with $200,000. After he got arrested, he skipped his half-million dollar bail and fled to Mexico, but Texas Rangers tracked him down, and now he's doing 60-to-life. I guess it's not a horror story for the victim's family, but it's still a crazy thing to come from a $50 DNA test kit. Just google 'Martin Tellez Murder.'"
—Anonymous
4."I wouldn't say it's a horror story, but I'm adopted, so I took the test on both 23andMe and Ancestry.com. Both tests basically confirmed what I already knew: I'm half Irish and half Italian with a splash of Polish. I love family history and know so much of my adopted family history, and thanks to limited adoption records, I know some of the names of my biological family. I was excited to see if I could piece together my biological history. But I wasn't quite prepared for a few people sending me messages wanting to connect because I showed up in their list of close relatives."
"I did message with a very nice cousin for a little bit. It just got really awkward because they clearly didn't realize my mom had a child and gave me up for adoption. I know that I came from a very Irish Catholic and Italian Catholic (both sides) family, and I'm aware of what her getting pregnant without being married might have done to her family and my bio dad's family. I felt like I was blowing up her spot.
This cousin promised to be discreet about it, and I believed them. But after that, I started to only respond to messages saying that I was adopted, and I really didn't feel comfortable sharing any other details. If they aren't aware one of their relatives gave a child up for adoption, I don't want to be the one who upsets a family I've never met.
I think it's really important to know your family heritage, especially for somebody like me who is adopted. It really did help me feel more complete, in a way. However, I just kind of wanted it to stop there. I'm more than happy with my life and my parents, who adopted me. They've given me way better opportunities than I would've had, and I admire the choice my bio mom made. I'm sure it was a very hard decision, and I hope wherever she is, she knows I'm grateful for it."
5."My great-grandma told my grandma and her sisters that she gave up a half-Italian baby boy whom she conceived with a soldier during 'the war.' Her story made no sense because she was from Iowa and had never been in the military. It just got written off as late-life senility (her mind had been slipping.) Took my DNA test, and BOOM. A half-Portuguese great uncle that none of us knew. I guess she either assumed he was Italian or lied for unknown reasons. They (the siblings) have since connected. He looks exactly like my great-grandma. He even sits like her; it’s very weird, LOL. We still don’t know how my great-grandma and his father met, but he was born during WWII. Not sure how a midwestern American girl would have crossed paths with a Portuguese soldier, though."
—None
6."Took a DNA test for fun and found a grandmother, despite all my grandparents having died, as far as I knew. Turns out I was donor conceived, and then I found my donor and two half-sisters on another DNA site."
7."My paternal grandmother passed away 10 years ago. Born in Newfoundland, Canada, in late 1941, she was adopted through a Catholic orphanage in Nova Scotia when she was just a couple of months old. Sadly, she was never able to find out much about her birth family before her passing. Fast forward nine years, I finally decided to get my DNA results, despite being fully confident that I knew my family history."
"Having been asked many times throughout my twenties and now thirties if I am (Russian/Ukrainian/Estonian/Lithuanian/etc.) and always being fully confident that I am simply Scottish and Irish, the results revealed that I am 1/8th Eastern European Jewish. I called my dad immediately to share this news, but he was in denial, and he was certain our family was of Scottish and Irish descent. After telling his siblings, one of them also opted to get their own DNA results. They discovered they were 25% Eastern European Jewish, a significantly higher percentage than their previously assumed Scottish ancestry.
Based on my ongoing research, it appears that my grandmother's birth mother conceived her out of wedlock in her late teens. My grandmother's biological father, fleeing Eastern Europe in the late 1930s, settled in Newfoundland along with many other Jewish people seeking safety. At the time, interfaith relationships were frowned upon. So, when their baby was born, she was taken from one island to another by ferry in the dead of winter, all to protect this secret. I've been trying to connect with matches on Ancestry to find out more details, but to no avail... yet."
8."I found a pair of sisters, my first cousins once removed, who shared a husband. One of them was legally married to him; the other lived in the house next door. They each had seven children with him during the same 20-year span (a few times they were pregnant simultaneously). Oh, and one of their brothers married his sister, too. Sorting out the DNA in their children's generation is...tricky. And before you ask, not Utah. They lived outside Albany in a (seemingly) typical upstate New York small town."
9."My dad found out his paternal grandfather had an entirely different family in addition to his side. He met a whole family branch he didn't know existed."
10."Grew up my whole life with a dead dad. My mom was sick, I didn't see her much. She died when I was 12. Never asked her questions. My grandmother raised me from six months old. My mother gave me to her. No one had a good idea what/who my mother was up to before she reappeared. If my grandmother knew anything, I was too naive to ask. She died when I was 20. Mom kept being irresponsible after my birth. I had two younger half-siblings who went to their foster, then adoptive mom. We were told they were with their dad's mom for a brief time. Lost them for about 15 years. Sister finds my MySpace blog about the cemetery. The two of them and I become close. For my birthday, my sister gets us 23andMe."
"I match a first 'cousin' and send her messages every two weeks. 'Hey. Hey, we might be cousins. Hey, looks like we're cousins. I'm trying to find info on my dad...' She wasn't using the app. Her uncle asks her about 23andMe because he's interested. She sees the messages. Her uncle is not my dad. He's four years older than me. She's my niece. Her grandfather is my dad. He's alive. Four of my five older siblings are able to attend my wedding. So does my dad. My family went from tiny to huge. TL;DR: Found my dead dad, alive."
11."Okay, so I'm adopted, and not only did I find out who my biological father is (never listed on my birth certificate), but my bio dad and my adoptive father used to work out of the same contracting business in the '80s and '90s and knew each other!!! My parents knew my bio grandma and my bio dad — I had no idea that they were my bio family until my cousin and I discovered the correlation in 2022. 🤯 I also found a half-sister who is so incredibly like me in looks, voice, mannerisms, and mindset. It's uncanny that we're so similar despite being 10 years apart and not even meeting until 35 years after she was born!!! All this was discovered because I spit in a tube. It's crazy!"
12."I was married years ago but divorced my ex when my children were 3 years old and 6 months old. I was so fed up that I put his stuff in the front yard after having him served with divorce papers and changed the locks. Strangely enough, although the marriage was horrible, we were both relieved to be getting a divorce and handed out our own agreement, and went back to being friends and co-parents. However, the day I threw him out, somebody in his office set him up for a blind date. They kept dating and eventually married. Our daughters are grown now, and one of them is really into family history. So she urged us all to get a DNA test so my ex did, but I did not. Took us a while to figure it all out but learned that the woman he went on to marry and I share a great-grandfather. I am descended from my great-grandfather's illegitimate family, and she is descended from his legitimate family. While checking everything out, we realized that we were both related to my ex!"
13."My wife’s cousin just found out that her dad isn’t her dad; he 'knew' the whole time but never admitted it to himself. She met her biological dad, who only lives five miles away from her; she has three other siblings she didn’t know about from her mom, who was absent and gave the others up for adoption, and also two other siblings from her bio dad. This all started because my wife took a DNA test, and it turns out she has a first cousin who no one knows about. She reached out to her but hasn’t gotten a response yet. It’s a very interesting situation, but it turns out my wife and her cousin, who grew up in the same household, are not related by blood."
14."My DNA test indicated that my grandfather WASN'T my dad’s father — imagine the call l had to make to my dad to tell him that all the village rumors had been true, my nan had a relationship with an Italian prisoner of war (who was held in the U.K.)! His DNA test confirmed that he was half Italian and that his biological father was from Southern Italy — but we have no further information (due to the lack of Europeans not taking the tests, we have only found third cousins). Unfortunately, both my grandparents passed ages ago, but other in-family tests now show that possibly only one out of my dad’s three siblings was my grandfather’s."
—Anonymous
15."Grandpa is not dad’s father. I’ve only told my mom (they’ve been divorced for 30 years). I’ve been dodging that detail when my brother asks me about my results. I just don’t think he will believe me until he sees his results firsthand. So, I ordered three tests for mom, dad, and my brother. Gave my dad and brother their tests on Father’s Day. To my surprise, Dad is all excited about the test. He was carrying around that test tube and spitting in it until he got to the fill line, then gave it to me to send. I sent his test in two weeks ago. He’s not good with online stuff, so I said I’d manage his ancestry account. I’m really not looking forward to explaining his results, but I’m also excited."
16."I was curious about my ethnicity, but instead found out that my grandmother had an affair and my mom’s dad wasn’t her biological dad. My cousin then did a DNA test, and I found out that my grandmother had a second affair and my aunt also had a different father. My mom has five other siblings; the rest of them don’t want to test because they wouldn't be surprised at this point if they all had a different father because my grandma was a sex worker and a criminal LOL, and they don’t want to know."
17."I found out that my grandmother's dad was not actually her dad; her mother had an affair while he was in prison. Also, my grandfather's dad had a whole secret family on the side, so my grandfather had multiple half-siblings that he had no idea about. One of those siblings died of a disease, another died by suicide, and the other fell from a second-story window and died. The mother ran away to Australia consumed with grief of all her children…so there’s that."
18."I was organizing my paternal matches, and most of them had trees with no shared ancestors. I realized I had no matches to my father's maternal grandfather but matches to my father's maternal grandmother. Realized my grandmother, the youngest of five, was not my great grandfather's bio daughter. I have worked out the family of her biological father, but they had 10 sons. Sometime later, I found my great-grandmother's death record, and my grandmother was not listed as a child of the marriage. I looked at all my great-grandmother's sisters and found that my grandmother's biological mother was her youngest aunt. Born out of wedlock and raised by her aunt and uncle. My father and his sisters had no idea."
19."Still unfolding, and I'm a not-so-fun surprise for one entire side, but a slightly weird one on the happier side. My half-brother was adopted before my birth, but in the span of a conversation, we figured out that we went to the same kids' club in the same timespan and very likely ran across one another in passing. I'm pretty sure we were at the same party at one point — I am sure I saw him when we were kids, and I'm sure it was there, but I can't prove a gut feeling. We didn't live in the same place; the kids' club was 30 to 45 minutes from my house and not very convenient, but it's where I had a sports practice, so we went several times a week for eight years. It's insane to think we were in the same building at the same time over and over again and had no idea."
20."We were always told that my father’s father was an Italian man who was married with a family. My ancestry test linked me directly to a great big Italian family with nine great aunts and uncles fresh off the boat from Calabria, one of them being my paternal grandfather. My new aunt and uncle were not thrilled to learn about this. After bringing it up, my cousin was receptive. My aunt and uncle were appalled that their dad had secret families with three sons from two different women — my father, uncle, and another man who reached out to me a few weeks later having done his own ancestry test, linking us as niece and uncle, and whose own mother would never tell him the name of his real father. I managed to get some photos of him, and sleazy grandpa, my dad, and I look so alike."
21."For 55 years, I didn't know who my parents were, and that left a terrible hole in my psyche, so my prayers seemed answerable with 23andMe. A couple of years after submitting my saliva, the news I had wished for came true, as the names of my half-brother and sister matched what I had been told at 16 years old. Over the moon, with over half a century of anticipation, prayers, and desire, I FOUND MY DAD! My excitement was matched with their shock and disdain. I asked questions I could not answer: Where did my mother and their dad meet? And other great probes that, as a kid, I dared not ask."
"My newfound family sent pics upon request, but all black and white. I had to specifically ask, 'What color were his eyes?,' as he had already passed. Fortunately, their mother had also passed and had no knowledge of her husband's indiscretion. My half-brother and his wife came from the East Coast to me in California on other business, stayed maybe a half hour, and pretty much over the past three years, that was it. I have a friend who found her lost family through 23andMe, and it was all sunshine and light. Not for me. In all fairness, my prayers were to find my dad, if for no other reason than to get a medical history, which the new family was extremely vague about. Be careful what you pray for."
—Anonymous
22."I found out about a 'secret' great aunt who no one in the family ever mentioned. Turns out she is my 3/4 aunt. My great-great-grandfather got his underage sister-in-law pregnant. The child was sent away and never mentioned by any of her 10 siblings. I've been trying to find out who my paternal grandfather is. DNA shows that the story my grandmother told is not accurate. So far, none of the matches has responded."
23."Not a total horror story, but my dad gave me a 23andMe kit for Christmas one year, and I was so excited to see what I was from my mom's side. I knew he had done one (a test) and already knew I came from a big Irish family. Well, I got my results, and he’s not coming up as my father (no one was). I panicked and confronted my mom because my sister always joked that I was adopted or I was the mailman’s kid. She looked at me and said, 'He is 100% your father. You look just like him.' (Which is true.) So I called my dad and told him what was going on, and the goofball told me that he did an Ancestry test and not 23andMe! Needless to say, he bought me an Ancestry test, and he is indeed my father. 🤦🏻♀️"
24.Finally, "Okay, so buckle up. My conception and the beginning of my life was an honest-to-god soap opera. I wouldn't have believed it if everyone involved hadn't corroborated the events. My mother's side of the family is wealthy. Like, 'mom once sat on the lap of Ronald Reagan at a dinner party when she was a child' wealthy. And naturally, her family was close to another wealthy family. In this case, my great-grandmother was childhood friends with the matriarch of this second family, and while it TECHNICALLY wasn't an arranged marriage between my mom and this lady's grandson, there was a heavy expectation for the two of them to get married when they grew up."
"Mom and this guy (let's call him James for the sake of anonymity) grew up close, but when they reached adulthood, they decided they just didn't see marriage working out for them. That said, it didn't stop them from hooking up every now and then. Around this time, mom was heavy into the party scene, wanting to ditch her whole high society life, and she kind of went through a 'rich girl off her leash' phase. She winds up drinking at her cousin's wedding and sleeping with a guy there (this would later be a guy I loathingly called my dad for the next 20 years, but he's an asshole, and we won't go into too much detail on that. We'll call him Shane.)
Now, of course, mom doesn't really settle down just yet; she parties some more, hooks up some more, and wham bam boom, she finds out she's pregnant with lil' ol' me! My mom gets disowned by her family, and in the meantime, she's trying to sus out my bio dad. She gets a test for a few guys, and eventually, the only options left are James and Shane. By this point, she can't afford to do any more tests, so after I am born, she takes a look at my features and determines that James must be my biological father.
By this point, mom and James had stopped fooling around because James is about to get married to someone else. Mom drops this bombshell on him the day before he's getting married, but also insists that she still doesn't want the two of them to get hitched; she just wants him to know he's got a kid out in the world.
She doesn't ask for child support or anything; figures she'll do the single mom thing and power through. I did end up meeting James at one point when I was 5, though no one told me he was my 'bio dad' per see.
Anyhow, my mom was pretty sure James was my bio dad, but she was never 100% positive and kinda figured she'd never know for sure, and just settled for letting me know about the weirdness of my birth situation when I was old enough to understand.
Fast forward to 2019, and I see Ancestry on sale. While I wasn't terribly curious about who my biological father was and was much more interested in getting to know my ancestry, I knew in the back of my mind that it was entirely possible I might link to one of these two potential dads. I go ahead and submit, and a few weeks go by, and I finally get the message that my DNA has been processed, and it is time to see my results.
And the bio dad is...Dave? (Again, not his real name.)
So I wind up screenshotting the results, and I immediately message my mom, 'Who the FUCK is DAVE?' A friend of mine was so invested in this new dramatic development that he ended up tracking down this guy's LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, and my god, do I look exactly like this man. In later discussions, my mother would joke that she may as well have not been a part of the equation, I look so much like him. But you may be asking, if such a resemblance, why did my mom not consider him?
Well, at first, my mom starts panicking. Even she asks herself, 'Who the fuck is Dave?' And at one point, remarked, 'Oh god, my mother was right, I'm a w*ore!' And SHE starts looking him up as well. After digging, she ends up finding out they have a mutual friend through Facebook, and they start messaging back and forth to figure this out when it finally clicks.
First off, the name threw my mom off because apparently, while 'Dave' was his first name, he always went by his middle name, 'Mike.' They met back in the day and were in the same friend group. They used to go to parties and Ren faire stuff together. Mom was going through some stuff, apparently, and he spotted her at a bus stop one day when he was out delivering a pizza. He offered my mom a ride, and according to him, 'One thing led to another, and eventually, I had to tell my boss I wouldn't be able to make it the rest of my shift.'
I meet my bio dad, we connect, he's absolutely awesome, and he tells me the final little tidbit to this story. After I was born, my dad and mom met up again at his job, and she just so happened to have me in the shopping cart with her. Shane was back in the car, and dad and mom stopped to chat for a second when he started doing the mental math. His eyebrows raised, he pointed at me, gave my mom a look, and my mom (panicked at the idea of another man in the equation, especially now that she was married to Shane) declared, 'She's not yours!' and proceeded to run out of the store, forcefully putting the thought out of her mind for the next 20+ years.
So yeah, that's me! My dad is super fucking cool and I love him to bits, so...happy ending, at least?"
Note: Some submissions and responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Phew. What a ride. What about you? Do you have a wild, shocking, or horrifying DNA test story? Tell us about it in the comments below or via this totally anonymous form and, who knows, maybe there'll be a part two!
