Strangers No More: A Sequel to The Stranger in My Genes

By Bill Griffeth

In his 2016 best-seller, The Stranger in My Genes: A Memoir, Bill Griffeth told of learning that the father who raised him was not, in fact, his biological father. In this sequel, Bill continues his journey to learn about his newly discovered biological family and shares some of the dramatic stories strangers and friends told him about their own shocking DNA discoveries. In the process, Bill stumbles on some closely guarded family secrets. This "moving portrait of coming to terms with the past" is at once witty and sensitive and provides "a clear-sighted and compassionate roadmap for us all." 

Warning: It's another page-turner that may keep you up all night!

• Language: English
• Publisher: New England Historic Genealogical Society
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780880824132

Book preview

Introduction

In the summer of 2012, I took a mail-in DNA test that changed my life. The results told me that the father who raised me—and who had died years earlier—wasn’t my biological father. I wrote a book about that devastating experience called The Stranger in My Genes, published by NEHGS in 2016. This book continues my journey where Stranger left off. Much has happened. I have been in contact with members of my biological family, and I experienced what I consider to be an even more significant revelation thanks to another DNA test.

My previous book exposed the emotions I initially experienced. They were raw and unruly. I was angry. Depressed. Unstable. I felt alone. But I’m in a better place now. The wound has healed. I have had time to process my feelings and gain new perspectives. I’m able to embrace my new normal.

I initially believed that my DNA test had changed my identity. I’m not who I thought I was! I bemoaned. I’m not a Griffeth. But I have come to realize that my friends who tried to convince me otherwise were right. My identity didn’t change. What changed were relationships. The relationships that define me.

First, there were all of the ancestors and relatives in my Griffeth family tree. The tree my wife Cindy and I spent years assembling. Each of my antecedents had come alive for me when we found their names in long-faded courthouse records or on headstones in forgotten graveyards. These were the people who made me who I am today. Or so I thought.

There was my earliest known paternal ancestor, my 8th great-grandfather William Griffith (the original spelling of our surname), a rebellious early Quaker who lived on Cape Cod in the 17th century and was persecuted by the colony’s puritan leaders. And there was Judah Griffeth, my 3rd great-grandfather, another rebel and early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 19th-century Ohio who also suffered severe persecution as a result. And the most tragic figure in my family’s history, my 6th great-grandmother, Mary Towne Esty, a pious mother of nine children who was unjustly hanged during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Before her execution, Mary scribbled a petition to the local authorities pleading for an end to the madness. I went to the library in Salem where that document is stored, held it in my hands, and slowly and carefully read each word she had written. I swear I felt her presence in those moments.

I was proud to be descended from these people. Proud of their determination to hold fast to their beliefs in spite of life-threatening peril. But the DNA test effectively severed my connection to them. And it brought my genealogical research to a screeching halt. I literally abandoned it overnight, leaving notebooks and documents and computer files just where I left them the day I got my DNA test result. And while I still carry the memory of these former ancestors in my heart and fondly recall the excitement of the hunt, my relationship with them is just not the same because I am not related to them by blood, and that matters. It really does.

And there are my fathers. Both of them. For a long time, I struggled to figure out what I was supposed to call them. When I said Dad, who was I talking about? And what should I call the other one? The answer came to me in the spring of 2019 when I sat on a panel with two college professors in Santa Clara, California. We were there to talk about the ethics and morality of DNA testing. (More about that later in chapter seven.) One of them, a woman named Margaret McLean, Professor of Bioethics at Santa Clara University, said to me that after my DNA test, I now had two families: my biological family, the strangers I was related to by blood, and my biographical family, the people I grew up with. That is the shorthand I now use to make the distinction.

Then there are my four siblings. My DNA test gave them a new label: half-siblings. Referring to them that way feels like a demotion. It’s less intimate. So impersonal. And since my biological father had three children, I have more half-siblings. On a genealogy chart, my relationship to these three people I have never met is equal to the four I grew up with. That’s just weird.

Clearly, the relationship that changed the most was with my mother. And not for the better. She refused to answer my many questions about my biological father, which affected how we interacted with each other. Our conversations became superficial. We stuck to safe topics. Lots of talk about friends and relatives, but not about each other. No more shared intimacies. There were also plenty of awkward moments of silence. I could often sense the discomfort she was feeling because I was feeling it, too. She was in constant fear that I was going to bring up what we euphemistically referred to as my DNA issue. More than once, I said to her, This changes nothing between us, but I don’t think she ever believed it. Sadly, I think she was right.

This book is in four parts.

Part 1: My Biographical Family. This was the most difficult part of the book for me to write. The troubling question my DNA test posed was why my mother cheated on my father. I had to reconsider my immediate family’s history, which forced me to revisit some pretty painful moments from the past. I have come to understand that I was born during a turbulent time for my mother and three sisters. The decisions they all made and the crises they experienced as a result, in a way, are connected to my birth. So, to provide the context necessary to understand how I came to be born, I have decided to tell their stories, which include some long-buried secrets. Everyone involved in these episodes had died, except one person. I have changed his name to protect his privacy.

Part 2: Telling My Story. Since my previous book was released, I have had numerous speaking engagements that allowed me to tell my story. I highlight two of them: my appearance on the Today show and a trip to Houston for a speech I delivered to an international DNA conference (which also included a side trip to the laboratory that processed my DNA test and determined my father wasn’t my father).

Part 3: My DNA Club. Since my last book was released, I learned that my story was not all that unusual. Much to my surprise, I have met so many people whose own DNA tests revealed equally unsettling news. I call them my DNA Club. Many have become my close friends. We have supported each other through pretty trying times. With their permission I have included some of their stories. My hope is that anyone in the same situation will find comfort and guidance from the varied experiences detailed in those chapters.

Part 4: My Biological Family. You will meet members of my new family. A major question people in my position ask themselves is: Should I reach out to these strangers I am related to? After years of hesitation, I finally did, and I’m glad I did. I also include a chapter about the extensive research Cindy and I did into the family’s history going back to the 1700s, which included one deeply troubling discovery about my heritage.

Finally, the epilogue tells the story of what I consider to be an even more momentous discovery as a result of another DNA test I took. But don’t peek!

In this book, you will find that my opinions about DNA testing have evolved. They are now more nuanced. The novelty has worn off. I no longer view submitting a cheek swab as a mere 21st-century parlor game. The DNA testing industry’s reach has gone well beyond helping people connect with distant relatives and discover their ethnic heritage. DNA testing has also facilitated major advancements in medical research and law enforcement investigations. But there are also important privacy issues to weigh against those benefits. That conversation has only just begun.

Ultimately, this book is about identity and family and how DNA testing has forced us to rethink the meaning of those words. I have come to realize that family is a choice, and so is identity. My DNA test may have taken something away from me, but it has given me a lot as well, including new friendships and new family. I’m thankful that we are strangers no more.

Note: Many names in this book have been changed. I left the names of my biographical relatives alone, with one exception, but I changed the names of all of the people whose DNA stories are included here, and I used fictitious names for two of my biological relatives, all to protect their privacy.

Prologue

Have you reached out to your biological family? There it was. The question I had been waiting for. The one I knew someone would ask. Someone always asks.

I was speaking to a dinnertime gathering in a private dining room of the Pacific Union Club, the ultra-exclusive social club in San Francisco that dates back to the mid-19th century. The club’s home is an ornate neoclassical mansion built at the top of Nob Hill in 1886 by a wealthy silver magnate. Because it was made of brownstone instead of wood, as all other area mansions were at that time, this was one of the few buildings to survive the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Today, the completely restored and expanded facility is a magnificent reminder of the fabled Gilded Age, the post-Civil War era that gave rise to wealthy industrialists like the Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers. American royalty, both revered and reviled. The history buff in me has always found that period fascinating, and the opportunity to see the inside of this legendary home was too good to pass up.

I had been invited to speak by friends who are club members. The date we set was Tuesday, September 26, 2017, almost exactly one year after The Stranger in My Genes was published. By that time, I had my speech down cold. I talked about how I had taken a DNA test in August of 2012 at the behest of a cousin who—like me—was an avid amateur genealogist. My cousin planned to compare the differences in our results to learn more about our family’s history and identify new living relatives.

Instead, we got results that we did not expect at all. The DNA test suggested that my father was not my father. Chaos ensued. I had to confront my 95-year-old mother, a painfully awkward conversation that produced few substantive details about who my real father was because she was so reluctant to talk about the mistake she said she made. It was left to my wife and me to discover the truth about my past, using my journalistic experience and her genealogical research skills.

At the time the book was published, I had yet to reach out to any members of my biological family. So, when I spoke to groups, inevitably the question came up. Have you…? My answer was always, No. And there were times when audience members told me how disappointed they were about that. Go for it! some said. How can you not.

But for a long time, I simply wasn’t ready. I wasn’t an adopted person who may have felt a gnawing emptiness for years and years. I felt no emptiness. And the father who raised me, who gave me his love, was still my father as far as I was concerned. Besides, I was unsure—make that terrified—of how I might be received by my newly discovered biological relatives.

But the night I spoke to the members of the Pacific Union Club, when I fully expected to be asked the question yet again, I was ready with a different answer.

A woman raised her hand.

Have you reached out to your biological family? she asked. I smiled.

I’m glad you asked, I said. Yes, I have.

I pointed to the table where members of my family were seated.

In fact, there is someone here I would like you to meet.

PART 1

My Biographical Family

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows

—Robert Frost

CHAPTER ONE

Mom

January 31, 2018

The last time I saw my mother alive was on the day she turned 100 years old. Around 10 a.m., we pulled into the parking lot of her assisted living facility and parked. It was a lovely day. Cloudless and cool. Very unlike the day she was born a century earlier during an unforgiving blizzard on a farm in Kansas.

Mom’s maternal grandmother, my Great-grandma Bertha, was a midwife. She was just a tiny, little lady, not even five feet tall. Born in Germany, she spoke broken English, as my mother used to say. And she had had twelve kids of her own. She may have been small, but she was tough.

When she learned that her daughter had gone into labor, Great-grandma Bertha set out on a horse with one of her sons, and they slowly and carefully made the 2-mile trek through the blowing snow from one family farm to the other to oversee the birth of her first grandchild.

My mother was born into an interesting household. Her father, my Grandpa Dave, was 59 years old, and her mother, Grandma Marie, was 26. Dave had been married before and already had five grown children. In 1910, eight years before Mom was born, Marie was a 19-year-old schoolteacher who boarded with Dave’s family because theirs was the closest farm to the one-room schoolhouse where she was hired to teach. Dave’s first wife died of stomach cancer in June of 1913. And then, after one year of mourning for his wife of thirty years, Dave drove Marie north across the border to Fairbury, Nebraska, where they were married by a justice of the peace.

Talk about an awkward situation. Three of Dave’s children were older than Marie, and the other two had been her students in the little schoolhouse. Now she was suddenly their stepmother. All of them left the area in disgust. Things weren’t much better with Marie’s family. Dave was older than his new mother-in-law. Great-grandma Bertha was appalled about the whole thing. She called her son-in-law an old fool. And to add insult to injury, Dave and Marie were married on Bertha’s birthday.

Mom, 1918.

Mom was named Frances in memory of her father’s brother Francis who tragically died as a child in a shooting accident. A sad legacy for Dave and Marie’s only child.

My mother had no idea her father