Two Siblings Each Give Up a Child for Adoption
With the advent of widespread DNA testing, family secrets
about children’s parentage are getting revealed. I have been contacted by
adoptees or descendants of adoptees who can tell we are related through DNA
results on Ancestry who hope that I have information about their birth
families. Two of those contacts ended up being a big surprise for me. I
realized that they were more closely related to each other than I’d suspected.
Each one had the same grandparents, meaning that one each of their parents were
siblings. These siblings had each given up a baby for adoption years apart and
may have never known the other sibling made the same choice.
Since relatives of these siblings are still alive, I won’t
be including any names, locations or years. So yes, this will be a short post.
So how did I determine these siblings were the parents in
question? I used the Shared Matches function on Ancestry, that allowed me to
see how the adoptees/adoptee descendants were related to me and to my various
cousins. When I found the adoptees matched one step closer to a particular set
of cousins than expected, I knew the parent was a member of that family.
Once I had that family targeted, I was able to figure out
which sibling in the family was the likely parent. In one instance I received verbal
confirmation from a family member who knew a little bit about one of the
unplanned pregnancies, and a birth certificate obtained by the adoptee
confirmed the other.
I don’t know for certain, but I believe that one of the two
siblings never told any family members about their child, while the other
sibling only told their parents, who kept the secret as long as they lived. I
doubt either sibling ever knew they had a shared secret in common, or that they
had both made the same difficult decision to give up their child.
I made the decision to keep the secret as well. The adoptees
got their answers, and I left it to them to decide what they want to do with
the information they have uncovered. As for my Ancestry tree, these adoptee
cousins are connected to my tree, with explanations in the private “Notes”
function. All the important parties are shown as “living” on my public tree,
whether they really are or not, so no one else can see the names and
relationships. I wrote up what I learned for my own personal genealogy research
records. But that is where this information will remain. Those two parents
wanted the information to remain a secret, and I feel it is not my place to
reveal it to our extended family.
Sources:
DNA double helix horizontal by Jerome Walker. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DNA_double_helix_horizontal.png
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