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A relative of mine got a report indicating an additional child in a family (this would be dating back to the 1920s) which seems completely unfeasible. A child who supposedly went on to marry and have children and grandchildren. This seems wildly unlikely.
Eventually they come full circle and accept them, but the keyword is eventually.
In things like matches with siblings and/or cousins (close or distant) there isn't much room for error.
23andme does make everyone sign a disclaimer prior to doing the test that says something along the lines of you are aware you might discover some unsettling things. Obviously, if you don't want to discover thwt, all you do is not take the 23andme test. Finding a sibling you didn't know existed is one of those things. The results are what they are, not always what anyone wanted them to be.
The case presented in this thread is akin to this.
I've done both 23 and Me and Ancestry.com. 23 and Me placed my mystery paternal grandfather as being German from the Rhineland area. Ancestry.com guessed he was half Scottish and half French.
Thanks to Ancestry.com, we've been able to find what is likely my father's unknown father's family (two brothers in the family, both were married with their own families and living in the town where my grandmother lived when my dad was born). His mother's family was 100% French Canadian, but no Scottish relatives that we can find on his father's side. They were all Colonial Americans in Vermont, NH, and Mass and the only folks we can find going back to Europe were in England.
And no German heritage to be found.
So yeah. Not perfect. But being totally wrong about a half sibling? Not likely.
People find out about unknown half siblings and other relatives all the time, so it's not surprising if this person found out that their grandparent or great-grandparent had a child in the 1920's who was unknown to the rest of the family. Look at locations, ages, relatives in common, and other clues that would fit the situation and you'll find your answer. 23andMe isn't making up the amount of shared DNA.
Never heard of any "totally wrong" results in spite of a lot of whining and complaining by people who don't like their results. If the results show you are related to someone, you probably are. They can be wrong on how close you are related but are always in the ballpark. Ancestors did not always abide by consanguinity rules, or the gene pool might have been so small in isolated places so there could be some slight confusion on relationships. Ancestors also were not confined 100% to their expected partners in the family tree. And then there are the sperm donors with dozens of kids they don't know about. There can be marriages that no one knew about.
Most of the complaints are related to locations -- Polish rather than German, Scottish vs Irish, etc. Those are sometimes caused by the maps and how regions are defined and historical migrations.
No, but there are people that go into denial about their results, mostly because they don't like what they see.
I found out about 2 half-siblings. They are both biological offspring of my father, but they have different mothers from each other and did not know about each other either. They believed they were only children. My newly discovered half-sister just adamantly argued there was NO POSSIBLE WAY and that there must be some flaw in the testing. It took about two years, but she's accepted it now --sort of. I mean, how can you argue with it? My (full) brother and I figured out where our father's path crossed her mother's. I saw a picture of her, she looks just like us.
The newly discovered half-brother is a medical guy and knows better than to be in denial, but he also has chosen to have no contact with us, his new surprise half-siblings. This is of course his right. He doesn't know us, may be worried we could be weirdos, but probably we're just not relevant to his life. There was a bare acknowledgment of the relationship but nothing further.
Well.. There was this one time when a guy had a native American make out with him before he spit into the tube so that he'd have native american DNA returned in his results.
My 23&Me results mapped me to my biological grandmother, not my mother. Had I not known very specific details about my biological mother (number of siblings, particularly), I would not have realized the error.
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