Grace O'Malley
10-23-2022, 06:39 AM
Finding out your father is not who you thought he was is relatively common especially now with the advent of accessible dna testing.
Scrolling down through the results page of her daughter’s genetic DNA test, Carol Simpson remembers squinting at the list of Irish surnames.
“At that time, we thought we had a German background,” said the Texan.
It was at the beginning of the pandemic, and her daughter, Morgan, had taken the ancestry.com test to look into their family tree. But when Carol examined the results on the phone screen, she was baffled to see a line of Sullivans.
“Nobody of my maiden name of Roberts was listed,” she remembers, referring to her father, John Roberts, “My daughter said, ‘What does this mean?’ I said, ‘It means I’m getting a DNA test’.”
The ubiquitous German ancestry in the US. :) Roberts is not a German surname. Anyway I digress. She did the test (it was Ancestry) and found all these Irish surnames specifically O'Sullivan and Sullivan.
Next to a green dot on the sheet, it stated that 60 per cent of the genetic ethnicity was in Munster, Ireland.
When she asked her mother she initially didn't want to talk about it.
Anyway she uploaded her results to MyHeritage and she came back as a 25% match to a man called John Sullivan.
After being contacted by MyHeritage, Dublin-based John Sullivan, now known to her as her Uncle Jack, agreed to be contacted. It was the start of a long correspondence.
“He said, ‘My brother, Tim, that sounds just like him’.”
A few days later she had a second conversation much closer to home with her mother.
“I said I had discovered my Irish heritage and she said, ‘Why do you think you are so pale?’ I asked, ‘Who is my dad?’ and she said, ‘His name is Timothy Sullivan and I don’t know how to get hold of him’.
“I just felt like my heart had stopped. I said, ‘Well, Mom, he passed away in 1986. But I have made contact with his brother who lives in Ireland, and I know that I have siblings out there’. So immediately, she was very apologetic. Then I learnt the story from her side.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/texan-womans-home-dna-test-led-to-shock-discovery-of-irish-father-0z9kfmjl7
https://i.imgur.com/jgPeO7P.png
https://i.imgur.com/qDfDQpE.png
https://i.imgur.com/43320zt.png
She had used autosomal DNA which covered the genetic material from both parents. It was rolled out in at-home kits on ancestry.com’s American website in 2009, before they introduced it to Ireland in 2015.
“That’s when the Irish component of the worldwide database started growing”, said leading Irish genetic genealogist Dr Maurice Gleeson.
“There are 43 million tests taken by 25 million people,” says Dr Gleeson.
Gleeson said that Irish people’s searches were aided by the vast amount of family ties to millions of Americans, and vice versa.
“You’re not relying so much on Irish people doing the DNA test, you’re relying on the huge numbers of Irish diaspora within America where they’ve been using these tests since 2009.”
If you can't access The Times article here is a more condensed article.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/reunion-woman-discovers-irish-dna-test
The mother of two said: 'Morgan, my daughter, and I were having a conversation about our German heritage.
'We always believed we were of German descent because my mother's family, a few generations ago, emigrated to Pennsylvania and New York a few generations back where many Germans settled. It was a wide assumption.
'To my surprise she had no German ethnicity whatsoever, and instead there was a lot of Irish.
https://extra.ie/2021/08/10/news/american-woman-irish-family-online-search-lost
Scrolling down through the results page of her daughter’s genetic DNA test, Carol Simpson remembers squinting at the list of Irish surnames.
“At that time, we thought we had a German background,” said the Texan.
It was at the beginning of the pandemic, and her daughter, Morgan, had taken the ancestry.com test to look into their family tree. But when Carol examined the results on the phone screen, she was baffled to see a line of Sullivans.
“Nobody of my maiden name of Roberts was listed,” she remembers, referring to her father, John Roberts, “My daughter said, ‘What does this mean?’ I said, ‘It means I’m getting a DNA test’.”
The ubiquitous German ancestry in the US. :) Roberts is not a German surname. Anyway I digress. She did the test (it was Ancestry) and found all these Irish surnames specifically O'Sullivan and Sullivan.
Next to a green dot on the sheet, it stated that 60 per cent of the genetic ethnicity was in Munster, Ireland.
When she asked her mother she initially didn't want to talk about it.
Anyway she uploaded her results to MyHeritage and she came back as a 25% match to a man called John Sullivan.
After being contacted by MyHeritage, Dublin-based John Sullivan, now known to her as her Uncle Jack, agreed to be contacted. It was the start of a long correspondence.
“He said, ‘My brother, Tim, that sounds just like him’.”
A few days later she had a second conversation much closer to home with her mother.
“I said I had discovered my Irish heritage and she said, ‘Why do you think you are so pale?’ I asked, ‘Who is my dad?’ and she said, ‘His name is Timothy Sullivan and I don’t know how to get hold of him’.
“I just felt like my heart had stopped. I said, ‘Well, Mom, he passed away in 1986. But I have made contact with his brother who lives in Ireland, and I know that I have siblings out there’. So immediately, she was very apologetic. Then I learnt the story from her side.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/texan-womans-home-dna-test-led-to-shock-discovery-of-irish-father-0z9kfmjl7
https://i.imgur.com/jgPeO7P.png
https://i.imgur.com/qDfDQpE.png
https://i.imgur.com/43320zt.png
She had used autosomal DNA which covered the genetic material from both parents. It was rolled out in at-home kits on ancestry.com’s American website in 2009, before they introduced it to Ireland in 2015.
“That’s when the Irish component of the worldwide database started growing”, said leading Irish genetic genealogist Dr Maurice Gleeson.
“There are 43 million tests taken by 25 million people,” says Dr Gleeson.
Gleeson said that Irish people’s searches were aided by the vast amount of family ties to millions of Americans, and vice versa.
“You’re not relying so much on Irish people doing the DNA test, you’re relying on the huge numbers of Irish diaspora within America where they’ve been using these tests since 2009.”
If you can't access The Times article here is a more condensed article.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/reunion-woman-discovers-irish-dna-test
The mother of two said: 'Morgan, my daughter, and I were having a conversation about our German heritage.
'We always believed we were of German descent because my mother's family, a few generations ago, emigrated to Pennsylvania and New York a few generations back where many Germans settled. It was a wide assumption.
'To my surprise she had no German ethnicity whatsoever, and instead there was a lot of Irish.
https://extra.ie/2021/08/10/news/american-woman-irish-family-online-search-lost