‘DNA Doesn’t Lie. People Lie.’

February 13, 2022 2:21 AM

After discovering six adopted brothers and sisters, these siblings believe their story is more than a sprawling family secret The last infant came and went when Bob was 9, and soon his memories of the transient babies faded. It wasn’t until decades later, when he sent a tube of spit to Ancestry, that he would be confronted with undeniable truths about his upbringing and his family. Not pay-wall version. Content warning: Child trafficking

Bob, now 73 and living in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, remembers rotating the volume dial on a small black-and-white TV in hopes of drowning out his mother’s recognizable shrieks of pain emanating from the bedroom. “My mother was like clockwork,” Bob tells me, emphasizing the routineness by snapping his fingers. “Every year, year and a half, she was having a baby.”

But even as his mother gave birth annually for almost a decade, he remained the middle child of the five being raised by Anne. Bob says the newborn children were always gone after only a few days or weeks. No one explained what happened to them.

posted by Toddles (30 comments total)

Interesting read, thanks for sharing. Sobering to think that the children who got the worse deal were the ones who were not sold off.

These two sentences struck me

Neither Canada nor the United States had federal laws barring the sale of babies. In 1955 there was only one Canadian province that banned the act

and this, right when the world was fighting a war against a regime who persecuted Jews

The middle-class Jewish couple living in Brooklyn had also tried adopting, but the endeavor proved futile in 1940s New York because of a segregated system in which Jewish families could only adopt babies of the same religion

It all feels like it should be a long time ago, but it wasn't, really
posted by fritzthecat at 5:01 AM on February 13, 2022 [12 favorites]

But with most of the population being Catholic, the church had a powerful cultural hold over the province and many people turned to religious resources for social services. Because of the church’s influence, the majority of Quebec followed the religion’s moralistic rules: Premarital sex was a sin, abortion was illegal and unwed child rearing was discouraged. But if a single, poor pregnant woman wanted to avoid going to the church for help, the most feasible option was a disreputable, underground and often unsanitary maternity home, where she would give birth and then the sale was facilitated through a network of brokers, doctors, lawyers and clergy.

The sale of babies was facilitated by the Catholic Church's clergy.
This is one of the results of making abortion illegal, and trying to control personal sexual and reproductive choices.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 5:34 AM on February 13, 2022 [57 favorites]

I did Ancestry.com a few years ago. To my surprised delight, I found a brother, 2 years older than me. We are alike in so many ways, it gets funny. He had better adopted parents, who gave him our original last name as his first name. We were adopted at the same time. He remembers older siblings, but had no expectation of a younger one. There was abuse and/or neglect happening in the household. But I was an infant, possibly was never in the home.
posted by Goofyy at 5:50 AM on February 13, 2022 [26 favorites]

A sad and interesting article. I thought the comparisons between young Jewish and young Christian women’s access to birth control and sex education, and the differing levels of stigma of being an unwed mother, we’re especially interesting. (Though I have to quibble with this sentence: “Bob described her as a loving and sometimes jovial woman who didn’t work and occupied her time cooking, baking, cleaning and sewing her children’s clothes.” Clearly just playing house….not working!)
posted by acantha at 6:29 AM on February 13, 2022 [19 favorites]

I have used 23andMe's service to better understand my ethnic background and potential for disease (my mother died of cancer). But I haven't opted into the ancestry part and I don't think I ever will. Not because of any issues with unknown siblings but because I don't want to be located by my mother's family. They objected to my father remarrying because they thought it was too soon and because she wasn't Polish. I have no desire to be (re)connected to anyone who thinks like that.
posted by tommasz at 6:33 AM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

Oddly similar to my father's story, except his mother kept the girls and gave away the boys (although usually to foster care). Seems like babies and kids could just be shuffled around back then, no one seemed to keep track of them - even across the US/Canada border. It all came to light when my dad registered for 23 and Me. We discovered some old secrets about other family members, too. Be wary when you sign up for these services, you may not like what you find.
posted by Stoof at 6:47 AM on February 13, 2022 [10 favorites]

Anyone who thinks people are not being bought and sold in the modern-day $14 billion American adoption industry is fooling themselves.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:57 AM on February 13, 2022 [27 favorites]

Both my sister and I are adopted, although separate adoptions so we are not genetically related. My father asked me a couple of years ago if I wanted to do a DNA test thing, that my sister had done it and found birth relatives, etc. Personally, that's a can of worms I simply do not want to open. I've known three adoptees who have tracked down birth families, not through DNA but through research etc, and for two of them the experience was truly bad, and for the third, it was great for the person who was adopted, but it tore apart the adopted family, even all as adults, when contact was made with the birth family.

So, I'm glad this is working for others. But for me, personally, I'm content with the family I've always known.
posted by hippybear at 7:23 AM on February 13, 2022 [15 favorites]

I've got the Ancestry kit at home and will be sending it in this week; I don't expect anything as dramatic as the situation in this article--I have a biological great-grandfather whose identity is unknown; my great-grandmother came to the United States pregnant with my grandfather, who was later adopted--but who knows?
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:33 AM on February 13, 2022

So the real question to me is if Anne wasn't working outside the home, with five kids, was the adoption money her income? Or was there some kind of public relief? I am assuming the guy was taking at least a cut, her kids certainly recall terrible poverty so maybe a big one. Maybe giving her a pittance.

And yeah, this is the world Republicans want, where most women have to sell their bodies/reproductive ability to a man just to get by. Because all other avenues are closed.
posted by emjaybee at 7:34 AM on February 13, 2022 [20 favorites]

May the Lord open.
posted by DreamerFi at 8:14 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

That dude was amazingly fertile.
posted by Dashy at 9:39 AM on February 13, 2022

That dude was amazingly fertile.

That's really not the takeaway I'd get from this.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:00 AM on February 13, 2022 [32 favorites]

Seems like babies and kids could just be shuffled around back then, no one seemed to keep track of them -

My mother is one of five girls. But I have an uncle on her side. There was a boy in her family growing up that came from the larger family on the farm next door. The story is he started hanging out with my mother's family when he was about six or seven slowly spending more and more time there until he was essentially living with them full time. I doubt any money changed hands (my mom's family was dirt floor poor) and it's been hinted that maybe he was suffering some sort of abuse with his birth family.
posted by Mitheral at 10:30 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I am assuming the guy was taking at least a cut, her kids certainly recall terrible poverty so maybe a big one. Maybe giving her a pittance.

Looking at how well off his original family seems to have been, and how they shut off the reporter, and given that the adoption fees were equivalent to more than a year's, it feels very much like the guy was absolutely exploiting her financially as well as emotionally and physically.
posted by ambrosen at 10:34 AM on February 13, 2022 [16 favorites]

I did 23andMe years ago for the genetic background, and decided not to opt out of the ancestry part. I don't regret it, but now I have absolute confirmation that my biological father was a shit. (And I hat I have at least three half-siblings by two different women on that side, only one of which I will ever speak to - the one who doesn't talk to her father.)
posted by restless_nomad at 10:49 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ok, I'll elaborate. While the story focused on the offspring, for good reasons, I found it horrifying from the lens of Anna, who seemed to spend most of her adult life pregnant, then having babies taken from her, or participating in that. She seemed to exist at the whim of this dude Mike, by whom she had almost a dozen children. That's ... a lot of fertility right there.

But wait, there's more. Turns out dude Mike's children with Anna were a side gig from his "legitimate" family, where there was another half-dozen or so children. Seems the wife and those children had no idea. Are there more we don't know about?

I'm just horrified at this dude who spewed -how many?- kids without any seeming sense of responsibility to anyone else concerned, or consequences, or any sense of "maybe I shouldn't". Just -- the privilege of manhood and patriarchy.

It's really only by a stroke of capitalist luck that some of those kids had a chance at a good childhood.
posted by Dashy at 11:13 AM on February 13, 2022 [33 favorites]

This story is remarkably hard evidence of how treating women like human beings is good for society & treating them like cattle is bad for society.
posted by bleep at 11:20 AM on February 13, 2022 [27 favorites]

The story is he started hanging out with my mother's family when he was about six or seven slowly spending more and more time there until he was essentially living with them full time

I think this is more common than is talked about. One of my grandfather's sisters was dropped off as an infant for "a few days." Parents never came back, so she became one of the family. I honestly think the only reason her being adopted came up was when I asked my mom about family health history. Mom rattled off some things and then paused, "Wait, that's Aunt X...." Otherwise she was just family.
posted by ghost phoneme at 11:21 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

"Seems like babies and kids could just be shuffled around back then, no one seemed to keep track of them"

My grandmother had a sister who died before she turned 5 -- this would have been in the 1920s -- and there are zero records besides the family Bible. She was born at home, her baptismal record was lost in a fire, and the city authorities didn't really bother issuing death certificates for poor kids under 5 who died of routine childhood diseases at the time. They couldn't afford a gravestone.

Growing up I knew a woman who was one of 11, and she was named "Tina." I met her sister ... who was ALSO named "Tina." I innocently asked why they had the same name, and it turned out that my mom's friend Tina had been one of TWO children. Their mother was killed in a (fairly distressing) farm accident, and their father (who was kind-of a dickhead to start with) fell completely apart. The neighboring family, who had 9 children, including "Tina2," took in the two kids, and had raised them since they were 5 and 7 years old. The kids started using the new family's surname, the biological father at some point vanished, and it just kind-of ... never came up again? The school knew what had happened and just used the new surnames, they had their drivers' licenses issued in their new surname, and since they were both girls, nobody was ever bothered by their birth certificate having a different name than their adult identity documents. But there was never any legal involvement by anybody, and that was in the 60s, I think.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:31 AM on February 13, 2022 [8 favorites]

I mean, there are great swaths of Western history where children were one of a family's natural resources. At one end of the social scale, they were labor for the family farm or business, costing only room and board. At the other end, sent to the right schools (or, in the middle ages, fostered by the right families) and married into the right families, they strengthened the parents' social network. In an age when the nuclear family with 2.5 children was being heavily marketed as the correct way to live, I'm not really surprised that the children of poor women became another kind of commodity.

In my own family, there are countless stories of a childless couple raising the child of a relative who had more children than they could afford to take care of in a de facto adoption.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:42 AM on February 13, 2022 [8 favorites]

I am generally more surprised when family history is as expected. On the one hand, women having children for monetary/security/abusive reasons is certainly well documented. And on the other hand is the historical number children without caretakers for many reasons. Society generally does make some kind of an attempt to care for parentless/abandoned children though most efforts have flaws and are subject to corruption. Orphans trains, the mass adoptions/caretaking of orphans after war, teenage pregnancies leading to grandchildren being raised as children, abandoned pregnant women marrying as needed, rape to control a population, merging of families due to death in childbirth/workplace, corruption of the adoption system, unknown/lost intra-family adoptions, repeated use of the same sperm donor in IVF clinics...the list for unexpected happenings in a family tree is quite long with actual individual children, whether taken in or sent are, are typically poorly documented.
posted by beaning at 12:09 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am generally more surprised when family history is as expected.

Indeed. I mentioned a year ago in a MetaTalk about a recent, unconfirmed discovery that my grandfather's younger sister may have been one of twins but no one knows with certainty what the truth is. My aunt -- the niece of the seemingly disappeared twin, and herself the biological mother of a son* adopted away when she was a teenager -- is pretty sanguine about this stuff, and believes that the genteel fiction of nuclear parents and children born of these two and only these two has always been shaky and doesn't stand up to much examination.

*This biological cousin of mine, weirdly, was adopted by family that my aunt's elder sister married into a year later, and is now the older brother of a friend of mine.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:18 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

i worked with a dude who was 55. his daughter dropped her 2yo off for the *weekend*. and never came back. never heard from her again. (yes, police reports, etc, but...i am told she had been very troubled her whole life, who can say?)

he raised that kid as a single 'dad', and was amazing.

i don't know the legal story at all. dunno if there is one.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:42 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

My dad's mom had nine children and then she took in three more from the neighborhood. I never knew that until just a couple years ago and I'm 50.
posted by markbrendanawitzmissesus at 1:48 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

My grandparents Biscuit were foster parents to... eight? Ten? A dozen? kids in the fifties and sixties. The last of them they adopted, and he is now my uncle.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:53 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing this story. I was born in 1949 and adopted as an infant by a Jewish couple who told me they would only adopt a Jewish child. Now I wonder if my birth mother sold me to my adoptive parents, but I will likely never know.

Through 23andme and Ancestry DNA testing and help from a volunteer genealogist, my birth parents were identified. Also, there was no indication of Ashkenazi or Sephardic heritage in my ethnicity estimates. My birth father—single at the time of my conception and birth—was an Italian-American (his parents emigrated from Sicily) Catholic. My birth mother—apparently separated (later divorced) from her husband at the time—appears to have been Christian. I am fortunate to have been welcomed by my birth father's family and a wonderful younger sister. The family is certain he didn't know of my existence.
posted by Scout405 at 8:46 PM on February 13, 2022 [12 favorites]

My family tree is pretty well researched, my Dad was the youngest of 10 in an Irish Catholic family in southern Ontario and documented every relative in Canada he could find and a good part of my Mom's extended family as well. They even went to Ireland when he retired and found a couple of generations back there.

So we were all a bit curious if there was anything unexpected when my nieces convinced my oldest brother to do one of the DNA tests... and surprise... nothing unexpected. All the matches were on the tree and we're something like 98% Irish. Which given that both sides of the family came to Canada and the US around 1800 says something (good or bad about insular communities, dealers choice)
posted by cirhosis at 11:25 AM on February 14, 2022

Fascinating story, but both DNA and people lie.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:30 PM on February 14, 2022

A year ago, via 23andMe, my sister and I discovered we have a half-sister. Actually, it was my half-nephew who had used the service initially and so it took a few weeks to work out the relationship. His age, her age, the relatedness of him to my sister and myself compared to our two first cousins eliminated all other possibilities and was further confirmed when my half-sister's DNA was sequenced.

What was interesting about this process was how my half-nephew was, at first, a complete unknown who was "closely related". Not knowing his age, I first assumed he must be either a first cousin by one of my dad's brothers or possibly a half-uncle by my paternal grandfather. I hadn't contacted him yet, so I didn't know his age or the actual percent of shared DNA. At that point, it was of mild interest that there was some unknown person who would slot-in to my extended family on my father's side, but I only mentioned this to my mother and sister.

Once my half-nephew and I had communicated, it quickly became obvious what the relation was. His age, his mother's age, that she was adopted, my precise relatedness to him — and then, finally, the confirmatory information of my two first cousins' precise relatedness to him relative to mine (half as much) proved that the only and obvious possibility was that his mother was my father's child by an unknown mother. Born within months of me!

I was an unplanned pregnancy when my mom was 18 and a senior in high school and my dad was 21. I was conceived in April, my parents married in June, and I was born two months premature in November. My half-sister was born in May and placed for adoption.

Our father died in 2008, so there are no answers available from him. My half-sister's birth mother must have been someone he was with only a few months before he began dating my mother. Neither my mother or my dad's sister have any idea who this was. My half-sister has the info to begin a search to find her birth-mother, but she's not done so, as far as I know.

So, it has been very difficult to explain to almost everyone how we know what the relationship is. It's helped that my half-sister subsequently submitted her DNA, as did my mother and sister. The results make it definite. Even so, my mother (mid-seventies and possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer's) has just had a lot of trouble processing that her two kids have a half-sister. She says she's not bothered by the reveal about her ex-husband (my parents divorced in the 90s) but I'm not entirely convinced.

My dad's youngest brother died in 2020 of covid, and his older brother passed away in 2006. That leaves one brother, and I'm not sure what he thinks about this. My older aunt finds this to be mostly happy and interesting news, but my dad's younger sister, who idolized him, just absolutely freaked out and refuses to discuss it. It's interesting to me that, to my dad's family, my half-sister is no less biologically related to them than my sister and I are — I'm surprised they haven't collectively expressed more interest. I've always been the eldest of the eight grandchildren on my father's side — I'm oddly pleased that my half-sister is now the eldest.

My half-sister had never been particularly motivated to learn anything about her birth parents and this was all unexpected. But, to her surprise, she's been very happy with this. Her adoptive parents passed away almost twenty years ago, she's not especially close with her adoptive brother (also adopted), and there's no one else in her parents' families left alive. It's not what she expected to feel, but meeting her half-brother and half-sister has been joyful.

That was probably contingent upon how my sister and I reacted — but we both feel exactly the same way: we're delighted. We are positively thrilled to have discovered and come to know our half-sister — who is truly a delightful person — and we've embraced her wholeheartedly. I dearly love my sister, but nevertheless I've always been envious of people from larger families and so gaining a sister has just made me happy.

There is always the possibility of unpleasant revelations that could arise from the discovery of the birth-mother. Perhaps this is why my half-sister has not yet pursued the matter. Initially, she was sad to learn that her birth-father had died years ago and this created a sense of (unexpected) urgency about discovering her birth-mother — but perhaps because this has turned out so well up to this point, she's reluctant to push her luck.

I'm a bit surprised to find that the biological relationship matters very much to me because those aren't really my values. It's been extremely important to me to continually, in language usage with my half-sister, reaffirm the distinction between her parents and her birth-parents.

The whole thing has been fascinating and it's been interesting to read about people going through the same experience. It's an increasingly common story... it's getting some media coverage lately, but possibly becoming entirely mundane as time goes on.

Of great relevance here is the genetic illness in my dad's family that both my sister and I suffer from. My dad had the mutated gene and my sister and I both inherited it, though it's a 50% chance. Given our half-sister's health and age, it seems most likely that she didn't inherit the gene but it's possible that the disease could present so mildly that it's not apparent. My half-sister has two adult children and two grandchildren. I've encouraged her to see a genetic counselor to be certain she doesn't have the gene — I'm not sure if she has. She's been surprised at the severity of the disability my sister and I both live with and I worry that, on this basis, she's prematurely concluded she must not have inherited the gene (and thus didn't pass it on).

This is perhaps the most compelling reason for people with unknown birth-parentage to discover these relationships. Part of why I chose to enroll in 23andMe was the possibility of helping other people who may be out there who have this mutation but have had any consequent illness misdiagnosed, which would most likely be the case. My sister and I were actually two of the primary cases around which researchers first identified this mutation in the 90s. This is extremely rare, but there's no doubt there must be numerous misdiagnosed cases out there. It's not yet, as far as I know, part of any standard genetic screening. It might be, though — things have changed rapidly.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:38 PM on February 14, 2022 [7 favorites]