Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazee Cat Lady
Theoretically, if you submitted your DNA to a site like My Heritage and they find a really close match to you....first cousin once removed. So you contact this person, and to find the relationship....and suppose you get back a note from the person, that they don't know....The person's parents had problems conceiving, so they used a donor. And the only thing she knows about the Donor is that they were a student or Professor in Palo Alto.
Since most of your family live in another state, and you only think of two or three possibilities, that it could remotely be...and you aren't even sure of that....what would you do? Send you cousins a note and ask about it...or try to help the new found cousin...or stay out of the whole situation?
Just call me curious.
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If you don't know who the donor is, then you can't know for sure it's a 1st cousin once removed. That's only an estimate and on MyHeritage, they provide an estimated range, so it's possible this person is more distantly related than that. I have found they are overestimating relationships compared to other companies, so I'd be careful assuming they are as close as a 1st cousin once removed. That means the donor could be more distantly related from you as well.
Personally, I wouldn't ask any of my family members a question like that. Especially if you have a few options, and it's possible the donor is actually more distantly related to you than you think. That means getting at least 1 or 2 people you ask wrong, which means you've now revealed someone's private business to 1 or 2 other family members. I just don't think that's right. Maybe if you narrowed it down to one person and you're 90% sure it's them... but it sounds like there's still a lot of unknowns and variables and I don't think it would be right to go around asking multiple family members personal questions about one of them regarding something which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be confidential.
I would provide my tree for the match to make use of (living people privatized of course, as per genealogical standards)... if they manage to figure out who the donor was from that, great. I'm also not going to give this person contact info for family members - that's also something they'd have to track down on their own.
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