I Found Out I Had An Uncle Through Ancestry DNA
I received an AncestryDNA kit for Christmas. Having an Omani father whose ancestors came from India and a Kuwaiti mother with an Iranian heritage I was excited to see the true results- little did I know, I was going to find out A LOT more.
Recently, there has been a surge of companies offering at home DNA tests. AncestryDNA is a company that offers these at home tests where they send you a kit with all the things you need. After simply filling the tube up with your spit, you ship your kit back to the company and after a few weeks your results are out! The results give you information about your ancestry as well as match you with relatives who have also taken the test.
When my results came out, I was not surprised to see that I had matched with my father, my two maternal uncles, and my maternal aunt who had also taken the test. A few months passed and I decided to access my results again as they had been updated (AncestryDNA updates your results as more people take the test which allows the results to be more precise). To my surprise, I had matched with another person- let’s call him Matt Thompson. This was very confusing as the results were saying that he was a potential first cousin but to my knowledge I had no relatives by that name.
Now let me give you some background information. My mother has three full siblings as well as a half sister who was the result of her father’s- my grandfather’s- previous marriage with a British woman. In 1985, my mother and her siblings lost contact with their half sister- Let’s call her Candace. My grandfather had also passed away a few years before that, when my mother was around seven years old.
Not only had I matched with Matt Thompson, but so did my uncles and my aunt. This excited us all as we believed that he might be the link to our long lost relative Candace. I sent him a message on the Ancestry website letting him know that we would like to find out more about our relation. A few weeks later I received a reply from Matt explaining that he did not know anything about a woman named Candace, but that he was born in England in 1963 and had a Kuwaiti father that he had never met. His mother had only told him his father’s name and shown him a couple of pictures and letters that they had exchanged. The name and the pictures were of my grandfather.
In our search for a long lost half aunt, I found a completely unexpected uncle. After a few more messages back and forth the puzzle pieces came together. Even before his marriage with Candace’s mother, my grandfather had a relationship with Matt’s mother while he was studying in England. He had left before he knew he had a son.
Once we figured this out, my mother and her siblings were ecstatic to have an older brother. We have since connected on social media and other platforms but have yet to properly speak and have a lengthy conversation. We have scheduled a Zoom call and are all looking forward to getting to know our new relative.
If not for the Ancestry DNA test, we would have probably never connected with Uncle Matt and would never have known of his existence. Our story is only one of many similar stories of people reconnecting or connecting for the first time with relatives. The development of this science lends itself to a lot more possibilities in the future. While some DNA tests already have this feature, we may be able to flag certain genetic health issues easily and more accurately. The DNA tests have also been used to solve crime cases in some countries.
Although there is an ongoing debate on the privacy concerns that come as a result of taking these tests, the possibilities and potential that they offer are hard to ignore. As more people take these tests, there will be a lot more realizations that we are all interconnected. This will hopefully increase tolerance and allow people to focus on their similarities. The fact that we found out that we share DNA with a person living across the world is mind blowing to me and I cannot wait to get to know him.
