When Sue bought her mother and younger brother Ancestry kits for Christmas in 2018, she knew that they were never going to be fun gifts. A lingering doubt had always cast a shadow over their family, a question that had gnawed at them for decades. Sue hoped that, if she, Joan and Doug took DNA tests together, they might finally have the answer they craved.
Their results came in a few weeks later. Ancestry listed Sue and Doug as full siblings, with Joan as their mother. Their father, Tom, had died in 2016. Sue felt certain that William – her parents’ first child, the older brother she and Doug had grown up with, a man they hadn’t seen for years – had already taken a DNA test with Ancestry. But he didn’t appear anywhere on their genetic family tree.
