DNA Testing Is Changing Families

the power to completely shatter your identity? As the consumer DNA testing industry has boomed, thousands of people have found out that these tests reveal much more than say, a Scottish or Chinese heritage. They also have the power to unravel decades of closely kept family secrets. Welcome back to Prognosis. I'm your host, Michelle fay Cortes. I am so excited for this season, where will explore how data is transforming healthcare.

Often the explosion of information is really helpful. It can also feel pretty invasive, and sometimes it could create an existential crisis. This week, we're taking a close look at what happens when a half a teaspoon of spit sets off a chain reaction, forcing you to reevaluate your identity where you belong. In this world. Here's Bloomberg Health reporter Kristen V. Brown with the story of one woman who took a DNA test that changed her life and what

that means for the rest of us. It's a cold, sunny day in enham Claw, Washington, a city of twelve thousand that rests on a plateau at the foot of Mount Rainier formed by a volcanic eruption five thousand years ago. The wind is howling, as it usually does here. There is fresh snow on the mountaintop. I'm here to meet Caroline Bernard. Caroline raises sheep on a farm in nim Claw. The sheep, she'd warn me, don't exactly clean up after themselves. Okay,

I think she said. She's in lifted back Caroline. Oh hi, Wow, there's a lot of pop. Hi Hi, I did and I Oh my godly, guys, I guess I got the water in your Caroline took a DNA test last fall that sent her whole world spinning. I was visiting her because I wanted to understand what it was like to have a piece of data change everything about who you

thought you were. When I first started covering DNA testing a few years ago, Occasionally I would hear stories of people who found an unexpected parent re sibling through a DNA test. Recently, it's felt like once a week ever reading somebody's story of how d they brought them a new family member. Then in December, I wrote a story about how customer service people at three and Me we're having to do the jobs of therapists consoling people who

took a test and uncovered a surprise. The day the story ran, I got twenty emails from people with DNA surprised stories of their own. The next day I got a few dozen more, and the emails kept coming. I was starting to feel like these individual stories were part of something much bigger. It felt like DNA testing was reshaping the very notion of family. Caroline was one of the people who emailed me. She had an especially intriguing story.

I was also pretty excited about the sheep. Caroline had asked me to bring cheetahs, apparently a favored sheep's neck. This is from last year. Hi, Oh my god, they get so big. And that is Garth Brooks. Cards God Brooks does he have a great boy. He has a very deep voice, but he is kind of a chunky unit so he's just as handsome as can be. And then this is a when teaswater, and then this is William and you can see Caroline had taken a d n A test from Ancestry and found out that the

father who raised her wasn't actually her biological dad. I was talking to my friend and I really wanted to find out about our heritage and about you know, where we came from and the ethnicities, and just find other people that were related to right. And I've always known that something wasn't right. And I explained that to my mom, and of course she was just like, no way, But

I've always known that something wasn't right. And um, so sent away for this DNA kit and I let us sit on my on my dresser for like six months, and my daughter finally comes over and she says, Mom, just take the stinking thing. Just do it. And so I did it and she stuck it in the mail. When Caroline got her results back a few weeks later, she was having dinner with a friend and an old greasy spoon diner after a long day helping her friend.

She or Sheep, and Ancestry, for whatever reason, texted me on a Friday night in the evening and said, your DNA results are in. And I looked at my friend and this was the friend who had had been talking about DNA with and she goes, well, look at him. And so I opened it up and I'm expecting to see Swedish and there wasn't a drop of Swedish anywhere in there. And I was a little perplexed and how

something's not right? And then I um clicked on the matches and then I saw that the man who I grew up with as my father was not my father. It was another man. His name was Gary, and he said right on the top, he is your biological father. There is such a disconnect between the type of information that these tests were designed to deliver and what people

actually wind up finding out. If you get a medical test at your doctor's office and the results are troubling, the doctor calls you in to explain what everything means. But ancestry DNA test is only designed to tell you such seemingly benign information, like how Sweedish you are, So you can just be sitting at dinner and get this casual text revealing that your father isn't your father. There is something really callous about that. I didn't expect that.

I did not expect to see Gary Tackett as your father. That was the last thing I expected to see. And then I saw all of these siblings that were underneath there. And my friend Kelly is she's very familiar with DNA, and she says, Oh, that's a sibling. That's a sibling. That's a sibling because of the amount of um match what is that called the the sent of forms or something sent to Morgan, the amount of sin of Morgan.

She said that that's a sibling, and um, it was not anything that I could have predicted or comprehended at the moment time. It was very um surreal. Caroline has had, by her own account, a tough life. She got into sheep farming to help her cope with post traumatic stress disorder after serving as a military nurse. Even though she's a farmer, she keeps nocturnal hours, arriving at the farm in the afternoon and working until midnight, habit she developed

while in an abusive relationship. She isn't close with her family and always felt she didn't quite fit in, but never did she expect her dad wasn't the man she grew up with. But more than anything, I was just confused. I was confused, I was overwhelmed, I was surprised, and UM, and I think pissed, you know, kind of like being blindsided. And then I had a two hour drive home, so I was able to digest pretty much all of it. And then I called my daughter on the drive home

and talked to her about it, and UM. Then she decided that she was going to call my mom. And she called my mom and called me back and said, Mom wants to talk to you at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Will you call her? And at that point in time, I knew that there was something I hadn't been told. Her biological father's name was Gary Tackett, or at least that was the name he had been born with at

different times, he has gone by many different names. Caroline googled him and began to piece together a portrait of his life from news clippings, public records, and YouTube. Gary parlayed a career as a crop duster in Arkansas into a gig smuggling marijuana and cocaine from Central America into the United States. By all accounts, Scary was charming and an excellent pilot, able to fly in and out of tight spaces with ease thanks to his crop testing experience

and to evade government surveillance. Skill he picked up as a pilot in Vietnam in the nineteen eighties, he secretly flew weapons to Nicaraguan rebels for the CIA, flying back to the US with planeloads of drugs and a scandal that would later become known as the Iran Contra affair. Caroline watched footage of him testifying before Congress about the scandal. In by then he was going by Gary Betsner. It was the first time she'd heard her father speak. Here's

Gary talking to then Senator John Kerry Bell. Mr Batsner, what would you describe to us this first drug venture you went on. You've never flown down there before. How did you know where to go? Well, I'm a pilot, and um, I've had considerable navigation experience, so it was readily simple for me to do. I Caroline's mom was already divorced with a son when she met Gary. Around the same time, she was also dating the man who

Caroline grew up with knowing as her father. Her mom says she ended things with Gary after he pressed an old fashioned bottle opener up to her neck and threatened to kill her. Gary has denied this account to Caroline. Either way, when her mom realized she was pregnant, she told her future husband, the man that raised Caroline, thought the baby was his. If she had said anything, she would end up being a divorce woman and nwood mother,

and her life would have been destroyed. I mean, that's just the way it was back then, and um, she did what she did to protect her kids. Abortion wasn't an option. As a rural sheep farmer from a one stoplight town, it was hard for Caroline to imagine someone so infamous was her father. He had lived this adventurous life, making millions, smuggling drugs and romancing countless women in his travels. He was a evicted criminal. He was a hippie too, and at one point had followed an Indian guru once.

He even faked his own death and moved to Hawaii with his then wife and two of his children. One of his other daughters, Polly, told me, she only found out her dad was still alive when she read about his congressional testimony in the local paper. Caroline isn't interested in relationship with her new found father, though he has reached out to her several times under different aliases via Facebook. We also tried to reach out to Gary for an interview.

He never responded and told Caroline he would only talk to a reporter if she would speak to him. I watched that senate testimony and I'm he's a narcissist and there's nothing for him to offer my life and what he did to my mom and what he did all his other other women. I want nothing to do with him. But Caroline has connected with a few of her nine new siblings. The night she got her ancestor results, Caroline also received a message from Carla, an actress. HI looks

like we're close relatives. Are you adopted? Um? My mom's name was Caroline from Bellingham, Washington. She died a cancer in eight d and I never met her. You're only eight year months older than me. What is your mom's maiden name? I live in Kingston. I ferry your away from you. We could meet and talk, she wrote back. I tried to call you, it said your number is not in service. I stayed up late. I'm on Pacific standard time. I would love to talk to you before.

I talked to my mother in the morning, and that was a phone call at ten. Now I know that they've been lying to me in my entire life. I'm flum mixed, and I feel like my entire life was a lie. Carla grew up in Puerto Rico and only found out she was adopted much later. As an adult. When DNA testing came around, she tried it out, searching for some sense of identity. The test linked her to a paternal niece and nephew, who led her to Gary.

Carla asked Gary to take a d A test. Eventually, ancestry would also identify Gary as the father of three other children who had no idea Gary was their father, including most recently Caroline, as well as six others who grew up knowing Gary as their dad. The first time Carline Caroline met at an olive garden and Washington, they talked for hours as if they were old friends. Another sister, Angela,

seemed to share her sense of humor. They now have near daily conversations, and a brother, Christopher, looked on cannily like her. For Caroline, a new family was beginning to form. We had one day we were sending each other pictures of our feet because we all have the same toes. We all had the same goofy toes where our big toe is the longest and then the rest of the

toes gets smaller as they go down. So we were taking pictures of our toes, and we were taking pictures of our hands, and we all the same pinkie and um, you know, we all have the same droopy eyelid. It's just and my daughter is the spitting image of Gary. Really yeah, sitting in her barn, sheltered from the wind, amidst the sheep, a llama, chickens, and cats. Caroline should be photos how much her two sons look like Carla's the goofy selfies she and Angela like to trade. For Caroline,

who had felt she never fit in. Here were people she had never met that seemed to look like her and laugh at the same kind of jokes. I wake up in the morning, it's like my reality so different than what it was. It used to be that the prototypical American family was a man and his wife, a couple of kids, maybe a dog. Then, as divorced became more common, half siblings, step siblings, and stepparents became part of the mix. Same sex marriage legalization, too, has diversified

what families look like. What does it mean for the family unit When thousands of people are logging into ancestry and twenty three and me to discover families they never knew they had, I tracked down Cecy Moore, a genetic genealogist. These days, CC is most famous for her work using genealogy to hunt serial killers, but Cec got to start pioneering away for adoptees to use DNA to find their

birth parents. So many people are finding these surprises. And often when someone says, oh, my gosh, I took a DNA test and I found a half sibling, the person they're telling will say, oh, well, guess what it happened to me too, Or it happened to my cousin, or it happened to someone I'm close to. So it's becoming so common that it's not out of the realm of most people's experience, like it happened to them or it

happened to someone they know very well. Cecy said she's seen cases or people have moved to be closer to their newfound genetic families. Or taken in DNA relatives that were homeless or in need of support. I think the concept of family already expanded greatly, and this is just one more step in that direction. Now we have quote unquote DNA cousins, DNA relatives, people that we have found strictly through DNA that haven't been part of our history or our life story that but perhaps may play an

important role in the future. Of course, people don't always embrace their new found families with open arms, but Czi thinks stories like Caroline's have made people more open to connecting or fussing up to long held secrets. She's heard from sperm donors who now want to connect with their donor children and mothers who abandoned babies and decades later decided to reach out to their kids. People are realizing they can't keep secrets anymore because of consumer DNA testing,

because of genetic genealogy techniques to uncover these secrets. So I do think it's going to have a very profound and wide effect across our society. More than fifteen million people have taken DNA to through just ancestry and twenty three and me alone, a number that has only grown since the last time each company publicly released statistics. So many people have had experiences like Caroline's that an array of support networks for people with so called non expected

parental events have cropped up on Facebook. The biggest among them, d NA and PE Friends, has grown to more than five thousand members. Four thousand of those people joined in just the last seven months. The group recently began the process to register as a nonprofit advocating for emotional support for the thousands of people who take DNA tests and find out their family isn't exactly the family they expected.

Katherine st. Clair, the founder of DNA and PE Friends, told me even she was surprised by how quickly the group has grown. I thought that this situation was very unique and very unusual. I mean, I figured that there's probably thousands of people out there, but I means thousands per millions, not thousands per hundred thousands. Instead, she said, some recent estimates have suggested that people like herself and Caroline may account for as much as ten percent of

the population. I think that's too conservative. I think the conservative estimate is um but still, if you look at it as ten percent, even if it is just ten percent. Ten percent of the world is left handed, so that means this is just as common as being left handed. Like CC Katherine told me, she thinks DNA testing marks the beginning of a shift that will allow people to be more open and honest about the complexities of love and family. We put our parents upon this pedestal. We

grow up thinking our parents never made a mistake. We grew up thinking that they never did anything stupid, they never made bad decisions. Nobody wants to admit that to their children because they are afraid that their kids are going to go out and make bad decisions too. So when something like DNA shatters the image we have of our parents, it completely changes the way we see our families and ourselves. We are she said, heading toward a new norm. And I think that this needs to be emphasized.

If you're going to take a DNA tist, don't take it with the wondering. If you're going to have unexpected findings, take it expecting unexpected findings, because every single family in the world is going to either have an MPE or an unexpected half sibling, or an unexpected aunt or uncle, or an unexpected niece or nephew, it's there. But what does it really mean to find out that your family

isn't really who you thought they were? After all, that doesn't change who raised you or the experiences you've had. Here's Caroline again. I always thought I was more like my dad, and and I think, you know, there's the whole nurture versus nature kind of thing, and I don't know. And when you get blindsided like that and your whole foundation has taken out from underneath you, it's a little perplexing.

It's a little perplexing. Caroline thinks this has actually been hardest on the man she considers her dad, the dad that raised her. Caroline may have lost her genetic connection to him, but she also gained a whole new family. For her father, there was no new family to balance out the loss. I talked to a few of Caroline's new sisters and Gary's brother too. All of them seemed to embrace their new found family. Even for the siblings who grew up knowing Gary as their father, the expanded

family has changed their lives. There has been tension at times and jealousy as Gary has embraced some of his new children despite tattered relationships with some of his old ones. Early on, one of Caroline's new sisters joked to her that instead of the Brady Bunch, she had stumbled into the Jerry's Bring Our Show. But there have also been joyful reunions and family group text threads and new bonds

that seem as deep as any childhood once. Here's Gary's brother Larry, who the siblings called the funcle or the fun Uncle. I feel related to them. I'm very interested in their stories, in their lives. Um you know, I was raised by a stepfather, my parents divorced from a young I have a lot of compassion for a situation like that. Later this year, some of Caroline's new family is planning to visit her in Washington. She said, it's weird how easy it has been to get to know them.

It often feels like talking to an old friend, when the family she grew up with often feel like strangers. She is a little in common with, and it's actually helped her strained relationship with her parents, allowing them to talk more openly. She says she's glad to know the truth, to have learned something new about herself and where she came from. That our roots are not Swedish and Jewish but Southern that other people share her same weird toes. How has it changed my life? It's changed my life

or a positive. I have a family and um I didn't have that, you know, six months ago I had the family I grew up with, but it was dysfunctional and broken. And this is probably still dysfunctional and broken, but it's bigger. But she is also still a sheep farmer who keeps nocturnal hours and knows all of her eighties sheep by name, A woman who grew up with two parents and a half brother in the country on the Canadian border, and a divorce mom to three kids.

It doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't change who I am. And that's it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story about help here in the US or around the world. We want to hear from you. You can email me m Cortes at Bloomberg dot net or find me on Twitter at bay Cortes. If you were a fan of this episode, please take a moment to rate and review us. It helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Liz Smith. Our

story editor was rich Shine. Thanks also to help team leader Drew Armstrong and Francesco Levie, whose head of podcasts at Bloomberg. We'll see you in two weeks on April eleventh for our next episode,