Was a long week. I had a great road companion and things worked out okay. You do what you got to do these days. Have some stories but am not quite ready to share, pictures will have to do for now.
But I did have one of those freaky wake up calls this morning.
As many of you know, I have had a pretty comprehensive DNA analysis over the last five years, MTDna for the mom side (U8 or K), Y Dna for the male side of the chromosome E - M-34, which I trace back over 22k years to old Uncle Ebeneezer swinging on a vine in the jungle, a comprehensive Big Y sequencing, assorted snps, and an autosomal test that matched me to about 4000+ new cousins to five generations.
Every few weeks I get new cousins and I like to look at the names and faces and assess the degree of cousinship. Today I got this at the head of the class:
Now this is very scary. I had never had an autosomal match over 150cm in shared dna, and Ms. Andrea Schmook was over 3000. In plain english she was either my mother or my daughter. Now my mind started racing. Absent a complicated baby switching scene with young Robbie at the hospital it only could mean one thing. I had fathered a daughter I had no knowledge of.
Now I was your normal promiscuous child of the 70's, when penicillin would cure near anything and I went through a period in which I tried to tap anything that wasn't quite nailed down. It was certainly possible that some brief drunken fling had sent some lass running to the cloister, if not the mental hospital, vowing never to let her precious offspring know about her true demented father.
So I googled my new found daughter's name. I'm not going to go deep into it, you are free to do it yourself. I congratulate anybody who surmounts their issues. Good for her. But how did this involve me exactly?
I called Tracy and Ron, frantic. How was I going to explain this to my wife, that there might be another mouth to feed, a spectre from my long distant past? Ron had expressed some concern over just such an event when he tested, little did I know...
I wrote Andrea an email letter, introduced myself and frankly let her know that I needed to know who she was. No answer. Talked to my wife, she said not to worry, the time for child support was long over.
Just for the hell of it, I logged out of the DNA site and tried to log in using a few of my pal's kit numbers, to see if we were all related, find more info on Ms. Schmook. And lo and behold, they all showed her as a parent or child too. So there was a software glitch that hit us all system wide. Data error or something. I'm not a daddy and my mom was really my mom.
Hot diggity.
A couple of friends found a grandson that nobody knew was around last year, including their son, so this stuff does happen every now and then. I feel like I dodged a bullet. Not that it would be so bad to have someone take care of us in our dotage, but you never know what you are going to get and the child missed out on a lot of what would have undoubtably have been my superlative parenting.
Shook me up pretty good.
3 comments:
Congratulations...?
I found your blog by looking for Andrea Schmook because the very same thing happened to the account of a cousin who I manage the account for. I was in a panic thinking she had a child when she was young or something, afraid to tell anyone because this cousin is now deceased. I didn't have the good sense to take a screen shot. Thanks for doing that. By the time I called me sister and huddled with family about what to do, I went back to the account and the name was gone. I thought the person had gone PRIVATE with the account and have been waiting for her to email me. Thanks so much for posting this!
Cindy
Thanks Cindy, I am sure it terrified many of us. Thanks for writing.
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