• Home DNA tests can reveal that people’s identities are not what they’ve always believed.
  • Two of the women said they had been switched at birth, and another said their father was not their biological father.
  • A woman who thought she was biracial said she found out she was half Jewish, not half black.

Home DNA tests like 23andMe and Ancestry.com can help people learn more about their heritage, connect them with long-lost cousins, or reveal their chances of developing certain health conditions. can do.

But trials can also have unintended consequences, such as exposing family secrets and exposing people’s identities.

“Learning that your whole reality is not what you used to believe is hard to explain,” A The Dad Who Learned His Daughter Wasn’t His Biological Child said in a press release. “It’s like waking up in someone else’s life.”

Here’s why people got three times as many after taking a home DNA test.

A woman finds out that her father is not related to her

When Jessica Harvey Galloway and her husband asked for an Ancestry.com kit for Christmas 2020, she hoped the gift would connect them with Galloway’s Italian relatives before a trip to Europe.

But instead, the kit revealed that Galloway, 29, has no Italian blood and is not genetically related to her father, a new lawsuit claim, The suit alleges that Galloway’s biological father is a stranger whose sperm was wrongfully used instead of his father’s. during fertility treatment in 1991,

Harvey at Jessica's graduation day

Jessica Harvey Galloway with the parents who raised her.

Courtesy of Peiffer Wolf Carr Ken Conway & Wise



For nearly three decades, the family said they had no reason to believe Galloway was not biologically theirs. They trusted the hospital and their fertility doctor in Ohio. But after Ancestry.com received the results, Galloway’s identity shattered.

Galloway’s mother said at a press conference, “We can no longer share our little private Italian jokes or enjoy our little Italian get-togethers – it’s too painful for him.” “His legacy has literally been taken away from him.”

Two women say they learned they were switched at birth

Tina Ennis used an Ancestry.com test kit in 2019 in hopes of learning more about her maternal grandfather. But instead he learned that he had several relatives with the Brister surname, a foreign name for the family.

The strange result prompts the family to search for a woman named Jill Lopez, who was born on Ennis’ birthday and has dead parents with the last name Brister.

As it turned out, Ennis and Lopez were Switched at birth 57 years agohe said in a lawsuit against the hospital where he was born.

“I just had to recover my emotions for a while, because it’s a lot to get your mind around,” Lopez said. told the Daily Beast, “Like, you had a mother and I had a mother, and now I have a different mother.”

It was also difficult for Lopez’s biological mother, who felt guilty for missing Lopez’s milestone, but did not want to lose Ennis, whom she had raised. “I felt like I was losing my daughter and my grandchildren as well,” she told the Beast.

A woman who thought she was biracial found out she was white

Kara Rubinstein Dyrin grew up with a white mother and a black father, and believed she was biracial. But when she took an at-home DNA test at age 43, she learned she had 50% dna There were Ashkenazi Jews – and none of them African.

Kara Rubinstein Dearin, now 48, appears in a headshot for the website of her nonprofit, Right to Know

Kara Rubinstein Dyrin is CEO of the nonprofit Right to Know

Cara Rubinstein Dyrin



she was shocked. “At first, I thought my test had been mixed up with someone else’s; that there had been a mistake,” she said. Told , “I called my friend over and said, ‘What does this mean?’ He said, ‘I think you know what that means.’ She continued, ‘It means that the man you think is your father is not your father.'”

In fact, this was the case: after seeing the results, Dearin’s mother told her that she must have been conceived from a one-night stand with an older Jewish man, while estranged from Dearin’s presumed father.

Darin, 48, run right to know, is a non-profit organization that helps people struggling to come to terms with their identity after discovering that one or both of their parents are not genetically related to them. Dyrin said he is one of many who took extremely popular DNA test at home and it turns out they were wrong about their caste.

“There are more of us than you think,” Dyrin said.

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