The Non-Paternity Event – Denial and Reconciliation
Editor’s Note: Ancestry.com’s larger database gave Joe a broader range of DNA matches, and comparing them with his Family Tree DNA results revealed something unexpected: a “non-paternity event” in his mother’s father’s line, three generations back, where the father’s surname was not passed on — through adoption, an affair or some other cause. Joe describes years of denial, hoping that testing more cousins would rescue the paper trail he had spent so long building, before the sheer weight of autosomal evidence forced him to admit it. I asked how he came to terms with it; his answer was to accept that he simply has two families in that line rather than one.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
WJB: So the upshot was that the Ancestry was more comprehensive, is that what you’re saying?
JH: Just because they have a bigger database —
WJB: Okay. Yeah.
JH: — they have a broader range of matches. And some of these matches were significant when I compared them with matches that I had at Family Tree DNA. It actually pointed out that I have a non-paternity event in my mother’s side. And a non-paternity event is basically defined as when the surname of the father is not passed on to a son or his children. That happens for a number of reasons. One is adoption, one is illicit affair, sexual affairs. And so, it turns out that I’ve got one of these incidents in my mother’s father’s line. I haven’t identified for sure what it is, whether it’s an adoption or some other kind of event, but it was the autosomal DNA that strongly suggested that that’s exactly what it is. So that’s just been quite interesting to come to grips with and to understand and —
WJB: Yes. Well, I —
JH: — come to the understanding that in that particular family line, I’ve got two families. I’d been researching the paper trail in that family line for years. Turned out that no cousins in that line that tested for DNA were matches with me. So for a number of years, I was in denial thinking, “Well, I need to test more cousins.” But that wasn’t going to help, because what I was finding with my autosomal DNA results was, here’s a biological branch from the genes going this other direction, and it was very strong. And then I didn’t really admit that until I got the Ancestry results and just had another overload of DNA information that said you can’t be in denial forever. You’ve got to admit that this is so strong that it’s legitimate to —
WJB: Yeah. And how far back in generations was that event, and can these events be discerned?
JH: My event is back to great-grandparents. So that’s three generations.
WJB: Yeah. So if an anomaly of that sort is three generations back, help me understand why you were struggling for a while with a denial issue — as opposed to, “Well . . .”
JH: Well, I think that I was just stuck in a rut. I wasn’t very open-minded about the evidence because I’d invested so much time in researching this branch that I was unwilling to just say, “Okay, dump all that.” And I didn’t dump all that —
WJB: Yeah.
JH: — once I admitted that I’ve got a biological branch that is different from my established branch, or whatever you want to call it. And I think you deal with that by saying, “Okay, I’ve got two families here.”
WJB: Yeah.
JH: Instead of one family, I’ve got two. And I think once you kind of look at it that way, you can deal with each branch as its own entity in a way, and not say, “Okay, this is the correct one.”
WJB: Right. Yeah. Okay. I’m beginning to understand.
JH: “And this is wrong.”
