Y-DNA – Post 1: Why I started down this path.

By Don Taylor

I have always wondered who my natural father was. Being the illegitimate child of an illegitimate child has always made my perception of father figures somewhat misty. My mother did not know her father during her childhood. Her father child-napped her when she was three because he did not care for how his former girlfriend was raising his daughter. His former girlfriend (they were never married) sic’d the police on him. After he was arrested for child-napping and spent prison time for the offense, he did not try to have a relationship with his daughter any longer. It wasn’t until his daughter became an adult and pursued a relationship with him that she grew to know anything about him. They became close in a distant sort of way. Today, he has passed, and she would like to be interned [1] next to him and near his mother and father.

 I wasn’t so lucky. My mother has no memory of who my father was. I was the result of a date rape while she was visiting North Carolina & South Carolina from Michigan. [I subsequently learned she was incorrect in this story.] Certainly, there was too much alcohol and probably some other drug that night. In any event, she has no memory of who was there that evening. I never had a name, not a first or last name, just a pair of question marks. Of course, growing up is tough when you don’t know your father’s name. Even trickier is figuring out how to enter information in forms to get a security clearance.

About five or six years ago, I began seeing ads for Y-DNA. Was to find cousins or others that are close genetic matches. I thought, “Well, maybe the test could tell me some things and give me a starting point to figure out who my biological father might be. The tests started coming down in price, and I decided to go for it.

Being a member of Ancestry.Com, I received the most advertising from them. I compared them with other services available at the time and decided to order the Ancestry.Com Y-DNA test. [2] I recall that there wasn’t much of a price difference between the 33 and the 46-marker test, so I ordered the 46. (Today’s prices at Ancestry.com are $149 for the 33 marker and $179 for the 46 marker.) Therefore, back in the fall of 2008, I ordered the test and waited with anticipation about what this journey might bring.

 [This article had its Categories and Tags updated and was gently edited on 3 August 2022]

Endnotes:

[1] – Sylvia was interred next to her father after she passed in 2019.

[2] – Ancestry has subsequently gotten out of Y-DNA testing. Family Tree DNA is currently the only Y-DNA consumer testing company.