The DNA Bombshell That Changed Everything

When Dani Shapiro took a DNA test, she discovered the man she called Dad wasn’t her father, and began a fact-finding mission

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I woke up one morning and life was as I had always known it to be. By the time I went to bed that night, though, my entire history – the life I had lived – had crumpled beneath me. A DNA test had revealed that my half-sister Susie and I were four and a half generations away from a mostrecent common ancestor. We were not half-sisters at all – which meant that my father was not my father. That he was Susie’s father was without question: she had his eyes, the shape of his face. I, on the other hand, was pale-skinned and blonde. All my life I’d had comments about not looking Jewish, but I’d had no reason to question my biological connection to my dad. He was my dad.

I realised my mother had let slip a small but salient fact about the circumstances of my birth on the second anniversary of my father’s death from a car crash, when I was 23 and Susie 38. ‘Your father and I were having trouble conceiving,’ she’d said. ‘He had slow sperm, I’d had several miscarriages and was in my late 30s. So I’d go to Philadelphia, where they would monitor my cycle, and when it was the right time, your father would rush down for the procedure – artificial insemination.’

When my husband Michael and I had used an ancestry website to research our family histories, it’d been just a whim. Now we needed to know more and used the site’s DNA-matching tools, eventually finding a match with the most likely sperm donor, a Dr Benjamin Walden*, a medical graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. He had a website. It took three clicks to get there. The photo showed an old man with white hair and blue eyes, standing at a lectern.