Last year, I did a couple of posts where BuzzFeed Community members shared the truly unexpected things they learned after taking a DNA test. And, yup, they really did learn some wild things.
The threads had all sorts of responses, from stories about grandfathers who had secret families to people discovering that a family member had actually survived the Holocaust. Below are the top and best comments:
1. "My aunt discovered that her mother cheated on her father with another man and she was a product of that affair — meaning she was actually only half-siblings with her four other siblings. The rub was that my aunt’s husband was married to another woman before he married her. The woman he was married to is the daughter of the man her mom had an affair with (her real father). So no one knew this, but my uncle got divorced and then married her (his ex-wife’s half-sister). I guess he has a type."
2. "I have an uncle that was put up for adoption. He contacted my grandma and she thought he was going to extort her (my grandparents are well-off). Turns out he’s a multi, multi-millionaire on his own. They still have limited contact, though my dad has reached out and formed a relationship. Apparently, they look exactly alike and have the same personality (which sounds kind of stupid now that I’m writing it out, but they’re only half-siblings)."
3. "My male cousin did one and found a female cousin we did not know about. He reached out to her and apparently our deceased uncle was good friends with her mother. Mom wanted a baby so uncle got her pregnant simply as a sperm donor. Our female cousin lived a few blocks away from my grandmother. She had met her a few times going around selling Girl Scout cookies or something. My grandmother had no idea that she was buying cookies from her granddaughter."
4. "My bio-dad left his family and two daughters in Washington and married my mom in Los Angeles, five weeks later. I found his first marriage certificate but nothing about a divorce. I'm pretty sure he was a bigamist."
5. "We got a call from a second cousin that she had been contacted by a man who was looking for my mom or relatives of my mom. This guy and my cousin matched as cousins and he had a name from his birth certificate. He had been adopted at birth. Turns out my mom was married before she was married to our dad. Her first husband was an abusive a-hole and they had separated. She got pregnant and went to another state and had this baby and put him up for adoption."
"None of us (my generation) ever heard about this, the big family secret. This was in 1948 when being an unwed mother was not a thing you did. So my half-brother is 10 years older than me and we both have the same first name. We are both veterans. He in Nam, me a Cold War-era vet. We