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I was in Iceland a year ago, traveled all over, met a lot of people there. I will never forget one 70 yr old woman telling me cheerfully, when we were discussing the Iceland geneaology website/app that helps people avoid incestuous liasons, "Oh, yes, that was exciting when that came out! We all got new relatives!"
Guess what. Forbears who now are old or dead were sexual people too, just like us, just like our kids. They had relations with people that they never told us about, and some of those relations led to children. They were human, like us. I don't know why anyone would just pull their head into their shell like a turtle and deny these newfound relatives. Life is short. Meet them. Share memories with them. Share medical information with them. You have a lot in common with them.
The question I have is: Can people who register with Ancestry and have done their DNA communicate via Ancestry? Can send messages through ancestry to communicate with your matches? It's really my brothers business for f he wishes to communicate with her.
Yes, people who have Ancestry accounts can send messages to other Ancestry account holders.
There's an etiquette to this, though. It can be very hurtful to just blurt out information about the biological parentage of a person you don't know. Even if you've figured it out, it doesn't mean the recipient of the message has, or even that they'd want to.
Best to send some kind of open-ended message like, "Hey, looks like we're related. If you're interested in talking about it, I'd like that too."
Thank you PNW. That's my thought. Only if she asks my brother for information. My Uncle has long since passed. His daughters all live in different parts of the country. Just don't want to drop some bomb shell. She may not have even know she was another man's daughter. But I would guess she does now if she understands what her DNA results are.
Thank you PNW. That's my thought. Only if she asks my brother for information. My Uncle has long since passed. His daughters all live in different parts of the country. Just don't want to drop some bomb shell. She may not have even know she was another man's daughter. But I would guess she does now if she understands what her DNA results are.
When my results turned up two half-sibs I didn't know about, one of them immediately wrote me when the match popped up letting me know in some terse terms that I was "certainly not her first cousin" and that I was mistaken in claiming that. First, I hadn't made any claim at all, in fact she saw the DNA match on Ancestry before I even knew my results were posted! Second, the results themselves did not say I was a first cousin, instead I was matched with her as "close family." I was a little offended, I admit, that she took me to task for some claim I never made.
I think she didn't know what she was looking at and thought, erroneously, that I had made a family tree on Ancestry and listed her as a cousin. I didn't make any family tree at all. All I had was some DNA match results showing up.
It took me, too, some reading on the website and some thinking to understand what I was looking at. She is the biological child of my father. She had many forum posts on Ancestry (general ones, not directed to me) about her parents (or at least who she had always assumed to be her parents) and was one of those people obviously deep into family trees and whatnot. She grew up thinking (and still thinks, as far as I know) that her father was the grandson of some US Steel magnate.
When I figured it all out on my own, I responded to her first message (the one chastising me for a claim I never made) by saying I had done some reading and understood more now about the science that connected us and asked in an open ended sort of way if she had any early roots in southern CA. This is where the conception happened, where my father (both my parents, in fact) were living at the time. After that message she never responded, and in fact has never even logged into Ancestry since that date, almost a year ago... which is weird because she was VERY active on it prior to that. It's like she got some glimpse of some completely discombobulating news and just shut.it.down. Didn't want to go there, didn't want to look, didn't even want to think it.
This is just my story... someone it turns out I am closely related to and she clearly does not want her sense of who she is and where she came from to be altered. It's probably scary for her, I think. I'm not sure though since she is basically gone from Ancestry. Her account is still there, but she's gone.
Last edited by PNW to NEPA; 03-23-2019 at 10:04 PM..
Thanks for the insight PMW. Hopefully my brother threads carefully, wouldn't want him to blow up some person's life for no good reason. But if she already knows or suspects it would be nice to have a mystery solved for her to some extent. Of course we don't know details of relationship, it died with my uncle, only some vague idea of how it may have come about.
My mom looked on Facebook to see if she was in there. Possibly, but no picture and private account. She was curious. Last name unusual and different spelling of a common first name so was probably her, maybe. I'm hoping she does contact my brother but he is not planning on reaching out to "surprise cousin" and will only reply if asked. Hopefully uses some tact, he is not known to be tactful.
Last edited by Izzie1213; 03-23-2019 at 11:05 PM..
Maybe you should do your own ancestry DNA so you can contact her yourself
See the //www.city-data.com/forum/genea...l#post54410538 thread, it should be going on sale again Mother's Day. Last year it was $59. The post I'm linking to also shows you how to use cash back sites.
When my results turned up two half-sibs I didn't know about, one of them immediately wrote me when the match popped up letting me know in some terse terms that I was "certainly not her first cousin" and that I was mistaken in claiming that. First, I hadn't made any claim at all, in fact she saw the DNA match on Ancestry before I even knew my results were posted! Second, the results themselves did not say I was a first cousin, instead I was matched with her as "close family." I was a little offended, I admit, that she took me to task for some claim I never made.
I think she didn't know what she was looking at and thought, erroneously, that I had made a family tree on Ancestry and listed her as a cousin. I didn't make any family tree at all. All I had was some DNA match results showing up.
It took me, too, some reading on the website and some thinking to understand what I was looking at. She is the biological child of my father. She had many forum posts on Ancestry (general ones, not directed to me) about her parents (or at least who she had always assumed to be her parents) and was one of those people obviously deep into family trees and whatnot. She grew up thinking (and still thinks, as far as I know) that her father was the grandson of some US Steel magnate.
When I figured it all out on my own, I responded to her first message (the one chastising me for a claim I never made) by saying I had done some reading and understood more now about the science that connected us and asked in an open ended sort of way if she had any early roots in southern CA. This is where the conception happened, where my father (both my parents, in fact) were living at the time. After that message she never responded, and in fact has never even logged into Ancestry since that date, almost a year ago... which is weird because she was VERY active on it prior to that. It's like she got some glimpse of some completely discombobulating news and just shut.it.down. Didn't want to go there, didn't want to look, didn't even want to think it.
This is just my story... someone it turns out I am closely related to and she clearly does not want her sense of who she is and where she came from to be altered. It's probably scary for her, I think. I'm not sure though since she is basically gone from Ancestry. Her account is still there, but she's gone.
WOW. That is some story, and some reaction. It's sad that you have a half sister out there, whom you'll never meet. It's also kind of odd - sounds as if her whole world was based upon her pride in who her biological forbears were - and when she found out that she had a different biological father than the one she thought she had, it just freaked her out.
When my results turned up two half-sibs I didn't know about, one of them immediately wrote me when the match popped up letting me know in some terse terms that I was "certainly not her first cousin" and that I was mistaken in claiming that. First, I hadn't made any claim at all, in fact she saw the DNA match on Ancestry before I even knew my results were posted! Second, the results themselves did not say I was a first cousin, instead I was matched with her as "close family." I was a little offended, I admit, that she took me to task for some claim I never made.
I think she didn't know what she was looking at and thought, erroneously, that I had made a family tree on Ancestry and listed her as a cousin. I didn't make any family tree at all. All I had was some DNA match results showing up.
It took me, too, some reading on the website and some thinking to understand what I was looking at. She is the biological child of my father. She had many forum posts on Ancestry (general ones, not directed to me) about her parents (or at least who she had always assumed to be her parents) and was one of those people obviously deep into family trees and whatnot. She grew up thinking (and still thinks, as far as I know) that her father was the grandson of some US Steel magnate.
When I figured it all out on my own, I responded to her first message (the one chastising me for a claim I never made) by saying I had done some reading and understood more now about the science that connected us and asked in an open ended sort of way if she had any early roots in southern CA. This is where the conception happened, where my father (both my parents, in fact) were living at the time. After that message she never responded, and in fact has never even logged into Ancestry since that date, almost a year ago... which is weird because she was VERY active on it prior to that. It's like she got some glimpse of some completely discombobulating news and just shut.it.down. Didn't want to go there, didn't want to look, didn't even want to think it.
This is just my story... someone it turns out I am closely related to and she clearly does not want her sense of who she is and where she came from to be altered. It's probably scary for her, I think. I'm not sure though since she is basically gone from Ancestry. Her account is still there, but she's gone.
I was thinking the same thing. I know we have eternal members here on C-D, but that's only if someone outside of C-D knew who they really were, be it a relative or friend and they request the user name to go black. On Ancestry, you might never know, especially if they don't log in anymore onto the website.
Having been on this site for almost 12 years, I still go back to old threads and see some prolific posters and click on their profile and see how all of a sudden after years of posting, it just stops, like out of the blue (like golfgal who had 20,793 posts and even won $5,000 and $500 here, and her last post was on 08-26-2014, then she stopped ) and wonder maybe they passed away, but their username isn't black obviously, or maybe they just decided to move on from C-D, we might never know!
Last edited by cjseliga; 03-24-2019 at 08:55 AM..
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) and wonder maybe they passed away, but their username isn't black obviously, or maybe they just decided to move on from C-D, we might never know!
