Did anyone mention your SIL father may not be Polish?
There was a lot of movement in WWII. Forged papers, bribery, corruption.
SIL father may be living a lie…it’s just not the one she thinks it is.
Of course in the magical land of cheese I would think a large portion of the population would be Scandinavian.
I’ve seen various discussions and articles suggesting there’s between 2% to 10% incidence of such "pedigree errors " .
I would double check this by having her DNA compared to her siblings’ DNA. Do they know about this? If so, they may want to be checked as well.’
Also, find out what the difference is between a “Polish” and “Scandinavian” DNA profile is. If you look on a map of Europe, they are very close. Is the test really that accurate?
You’re all asking some pretty good questions. Unfortunately I can’t ask her this stuff (yet) as I am not dealing with her, I’m dealing with her husband (my brother).
He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. It seems what is bothering her is that her mother did this. I don’t believe she has any intention of telling her pop. Her mothers old friends apparently can’t stand him and have no contact with him. So I’m thinking he wouldn’t find out from them. I’ve only met the guy a couple of times. I never thought he was a “bastard” but I did agree with my brother that he was kind of weird and anal about stuff.
Also she had seen documents years ago, and he insisted on taking the family to Ellis Island on a vacation to show everyone where he came in. I can totally relate as my own father in law (also a post WW2 immigrant but from Italy) did the same thing to my wifes family when she was a kid.
As I said, she should start with friends’ husbands… or is there someone back then, with a husband, who stopped being her friend. Any of those husband work shift work, live nearby? Did she work? (Coworkers?) Did she stop working when she became pregnant, right away for some odd reason or when she hit 8 months? Any neighborhood men who were friendly with her?
Plenty of avenues to explore. I guess getting answers is going to be hard.
Presumably mama had this sudden “oops” and it made her settle down afterwards…
That presuming Mama dearest even knew or suspected that she was carrying another man’s child. Might have done the Math and thought “naaa, is hubby’s”, but have been wrong.
That’s my guess as well. Dad most likely knows, and he and mom, decided to keep it their secret.
Continuing to keep the family secrets hidden isn’t really useful to anyone. Besides, Mom is already gone.
Were there 3 boyfriends, one for each of her mothers close friends.
“John dear, would you take Maria home ! ? I need to go to sleep to get up for work tommorrow so can you take her please, and I’ll see tommorrow afternoon ?”
C’mon! You guys are supposed to be some of the hippest and coolest people on the planet and nobody has mentioned the “Summer of Love”?
Seriously, though, during that time, popular media was all abuzz with women needing to “find themselves”. Perhaps, instead of asking her dad who her father was, she can ask him was it was like to be a young adult in the 1960’s. I am sure he has stories that could shed some light.
I tend to think the opposite.
The woman having all this angst would have been avoided if the family secret had remained unknown. At this late date all they’ve “gained” is anguish.
Any evidence they might gather is way stale, real incomplete, and of low reliability. Said another way, any “closure” she may achieve on this issue is probably just as false as were her beliefs of last year before the story broke.
In the ideal case, 1) people wouldn’t keep secrets from their kids. And 2) other people wouldn’t tongue-cluck leading people to try to protect their kids from mean-spirited gossip.
But since 2) is going to keep happening, so will 1). Which leaves us with result 0): for peace of mind we all should let sleeping dogs lie.
Since she’s a female, her bio-dad’s ethnicity wouldn’t show up in a DNA test, right, since it’s only her MtDNAbeing tested?
Yes, exactly. I read the OP and thought the same thing. It just does not seem sensible to draw such enormous, far-reaching conclusions from an ancestry website. I don’t know what the “error rate” for something like this is, but I bet it’s neither zero nor especially close. Errors in reading results, errors in reporting results… If anyone really wanted to pursue this, seems like using a lab that actually compares DNA (rather than messing around with “nationalities”) would be the first step.
Love the story in #1 above, btw. I was hoping you’d say the dog turned out to be English, Irish, and Scandinavian.
No.
It’s an ancestry website, why would they only check the stuff passed on by the mother?
They’re checking the 23 pairs of chromosomes.
If it were a paternity test for a boy, they might put an emphasis on the Y matching. But basically, she gets half the 46 from her mother and half from her father. (In her case, one X from each). Near relatives have one or more of those chromosomes that match, or if some shuffling happened, some significant segments that match. They test the full complement to get the rough ethnic distribution.
Yes, it’s possible they screwed up the results. Take a second test, or through a different lab. Oh, wait, that’s what she did. But if that’s her father, they would have about half their chromosomes in common.
Having a friend who went through a similar situation, with similar angst, you and your brother have my deepest sympathy.
That friend ended up discovering they were conceived by rape, the father knew and chose to accept them anyway. This knowledge did not enhance their life but did cause trouble within the family that never fully healed.
Please do advise everyone to tread carefully and thoughtfully.
Age will really change your perspective on things like this. If I found out today one of my kids was not mine it would make zero difference how I felt about the kids and zero difference how I felt about the mother. Young people do dumb stuff and the nature of relationships change over the years. I hope she can get past this because it really should not change anything.
Except her mother wouldn’t have been that young when she did this. My sister in law has 3 older siblings and 2 younger ones.
Also, how she feels about it is between her, my brother, and the therapist she is now seeing. She doesn’t even know I know. So advice on how she should deal with it mentally is irrelevant on this thread. She does seem bent on finding out who her bio dad is, I wouldn’t try to talk her out of that even if she knew I knew about this situation.
Your SIL should test on all three services, along with one female and one male sibling and also load up her results to GedMatch. All siblings would be even better. 10% of your third cousins and 55% of your 4th cousins won’t show up through DNA. The more people she has to exclude matches from her mothers side from her DNA results, the better.
I am on all 3 services and I get e-mails on a regular basis. The best one for me was a 3rd cousin match who had been adopted and her birth mother was from a very specific place in the Ozarks region. I didn’t know which one of my relatives was her birth mother, but I knew exactly which one of my grandmothers sisters had moved from NY to the Ozarks, and her kids and their kid and their kids and gave her the e-mail address of one of my relatives who would help her out. My point is, while a lot of people may not help, there are people out there who will. Sooner or later, she will find one of them.
DNA tests won’t help, except as a fluke. She needs real info from people who were there at the time, including her dad and her mom’s friends. This is a social engineering problem, at this point. Get them lubricated on alcohol, together or alone, or both, get them talking about 1967, and roll a tape recorder. Then sift through the tapes later for clues.
Also, remember, even if Dad is definitely not her biological father, that doesn’t mean Mom cheated. She could have been raped. Not sure if that would make her feel better or worse. Or she could have made a secret trip to the sperm bank or something, for whatever reason. Though I do agree cheating is most likely.
(Mom’s definitely dead, right? I wasn’t 100% clear on that from the OP but other posters have taken it as given. And talking to Mom’s friends and reading her diaries sure makes it sound like Mom isn’t available. But the only way to get any kind of final answer here would be to confront her mother. Playing sleuth is fun for us on the internet, but there won’t be any real closure coming from that direction, in my opinion.)
Hm. So in the off chance that dad is a chimera, I wonder how best for her to request a sperm sample without raising suspisions?
Not necessary, even if you were a chimera your biological father would show up as an uncle on any of the DNA testing sites, as the sperm generating part and the rest of the person are basically brothers.
Testing yourself and your siblings at Ancestry.com is probably the most likely to be fruitful as more people there have a public and fully filled out, so you can narrow down family lines that appear in common among relatives for you but not for your siblings. Also ancestry.com if you have a “guess” who the father might really be you can create a “provisional” tree essentially adding their ancestors and ancestry will give you “shaky leaf” hints on people who both match you on DNA and match those relatives.