Man Discovers He Has Age 40 Daughter He Never Knew After Taking At-Home DNA Test
When home ancestry tests made their way onto the market, I don’t think anyone expected them to make such a societal splash. They seemed like a quirky treat for genealogy buffs and nothing more.
But they’ve become something far more impactful. As databases have grown, individuals and experts have managed to string together surprising connections.
Police forces have managed to solve murder cases. And parents are finding children they never knew existed.
CBS News reported that’s exactly what happened to New Jersey resident John Gonsalves. The 59-year-old received an AncestryDNA kit from his daughter Robin.
She gave it to him as a birthday gift, knowing that he was interested in learning more about his ancestors. Yet he wasn’t the only one interested in learning about blood relatives.
According to WCBS, Jeanie Siciliano was looking for her biological father. Adopted when just a baby, she’d discovered her mother after she started looking at age 19.
“I did some searching, but I didn’t come up with any solid information. So I kind of put that all to the side,” she said.
“My birth mother is Italian and Irish, and she’s very fair. So I was curious where my physicality came from, and so I wanted to know what my heritage was.”
She also took an AncestryDNA test and was shocked at what she learned. She had a dad — and his name was on the report in bold print.
Siciliano said, “When I first opened my AncestryDNA.com results and John’s name came up and underneath it, it said ‘father,’ and I was, like, ‘Holy cannoli, this guy is my biological father. Oh my gosh.’”
Gonsalves’ reaction was more shocked. Siciliano sent him a letter, and he thought he’d fallen victim to some sort of fraud.
“I literally felt the world stop and the second thought was, ‘This is a scam. There’s no way that I could have a child 40 years old,’” he recalled.
But he had. Gonsalves had been involved in a high-school romance, and unbeknownst to him, she had become pregnant.
Soon enough, though, he reconciled himself to the reality of having a second daughter. “After I accepted the science of it, I did get really emotional,” he said.
“I said, ‘Wow, this is real,’ and then I started to cry. I felt joy,” Gonsalves added.
“I was like, ‘This is such a great gift at a perfect time in my life and Robin’s life.’” Indeed, it was a gift, because Gonsalves’ wife had passed away several years ago.
Robin sees it much the same way. “I think that when I lost my mom, the thing that I was most concerned about was, like, ‘How am I going to navigate my dating life, like, without my mom?’” she said.
“I don’t have too many women figures in my life, but losing my mom was really hard. … So having someone like Jeanie is really nice.”
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
