Last night's Claire Byrne Live featured a segment on DNA testing, with one guest revealing an incredible story about a family secret uncovered through DNA.
One guest stunned the studio audience when she spoke about finding out the woman that raised her was not in fact her biological mother.
Dolores made the discovery just six weeks after the woman that raised her passed away.
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Explaining her unique experience on RTE, Dolores said: “When I was 49 - about five years ago - my mother died, and about six weeks after her death, I discovered that she wasn’t my mother. She had taken the secret to the grave.
“I had been adopted into this family but I was unaware and the second shock was when I discovered that there was no adoption agency.
“A priest and a doctor had deliberately falsified my record without my birth mother’s knowledge, so I had nothing, I know who I am because of DNA. I have an identity purely down to DNA.”
Speaking about her journey, she said: “I started off with a fourth cousin in the States so that’s why it took so long, and then I was getting closer matches.
“For two years I sat with a laptop in bed because it becomes so addictive and it would be midnight and I would give up.
“You’re writing to people you match with, so total strangers - some shut it down or you’re left waiting for a response and it doesn’t come but you meet some amazing people.”
After meeting her biological mother, she says: “It has changed my life, and enhanced my life.
“Only on Saturday just gone I was in my mother’s house with my brother, her sister, and brother who I’m so fond of now and they had American visitors over and they were genealogists.
“So we looked at a file that went back to the 17th century on all my ancestors and to me, it meant so much.”
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