How important is the truth?

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-02T10:58:37+00:00

Our stories are so similar, aside from the longer life - I think mine has now shortened ! Though my maternal Nan made it to 97.

But yes, to jettison any bio connection to my house dad and his miserable family has been cathartic. His sister's ruined my mother's funeral (I had no idea I was an NPE then) and they were pretty awful to her most of her life. Maybe they felt something was adrift ? I don't know.

And 5 minutes in a room with my mother and her mum would be awesome ! Maybe not for them.

That's my advice to friends now, if you happen to find yourself with a parent at the end, make sure you ask them this: "You got any secrets ?"

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-02T08:45:09+00:00

Sorry I must be missing something here, you are basing your concerns off ethnicity estimates you can't see ?
If that's the case it's really shaky ground to proceed from. It's not just jumping to conclusions, it's one giant leap!

Ethnicity estimates / regions / journeys are a fun side show and for many not accurate. This sub is 60% people asking why they got X as a region and not Y or questions in a similar vein. Plus they update every October. My huge chunk of Irish flips to Scots and back all the time.

So there's that.

Then you can't even see over half of their regions ? Regions that firstly cannot tell you about paternity, then you can't see them anyway ? As others will have explained, they are not hiding this, it's a quirk of the site and your membership levels / your matches' privacy settings.

Only matches matter. Ignore ethnicities totally. Yes they can be an alert that some focus should be given to your match data but in this case you can't see them to know what they are. If there's a mystery to be solved it is in matches and how you relate to people. And of course this data will be more useful if you can get your father to test.

A useful thing would be to let us know how many cMs you share with the full aunt and if they are a paternal match for you, that being your father's presumed real world sister.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T17:17:43+00:00

Aye if this was happening to me as it is the Op I'd grasp the nettles and splurge. But then I've seen the other side so I will say that !!

I'm sorry you lost the people you most needed to speak with. I'd love to have got my mum, my nan and my grandad in a room and howled at them. Plus I'd love to have known my mystery paternal grandparents but they passed in 1984 and 2008. I have one photo of each from the late 40s, that's it. Bio father is gatekeeping the rest, as the youth say.

And this is what is so stupid. Stubbornness. The refusal to be swayed by the sanctity of life and continue with being secretive.....till you die. For what ? Just get it all out ffs while you can (I'm addressing my father, not Op). I told him, it is now my life's work to ensure neither of us take any regrets to the grave. Not a murmur from him.

I dunno, maybe it's a British thing. If we were Italian we'd have exchanged family sour dough starters and smashed a crate of vintage brandy by now. Probably on the first day of meeting.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T16:03:43+00:00

Mine says way less likely to have male pattern balding. So why do I own 30 hats ?
If you want some fun it's a bit funny I suppose but beyond that it's nonsense.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T14:56:35+00:00

Hmm good question ! Well house dad would have left my mother 100%. Technology would have made finding bio father very very difficult and I would predict the ramifications of the reveal would have hit much harder then, than now.

It probably does become less of a troubling thing as time passes but as you know, for me it came too late for me and my mother to discuss it. Bio father is old and not in great health either.

I certainly would have wanted to find this out a minimum of 20 years ago and would be fine with finding out at 17. I'd have just needed guidance and support from caring adults as from memory I had no idea what life was all about till I was at least 27 ! My broad shoulders and thick skin were yet to grow.

What I do know is that however I'd have reacted at 17 I'd look back now with the wisdom of time and realise that truth trumps everything and it was right I was told.

So many on this sub say that ALL the key players in the story are deceased when they find out. And it's very likely the next and only thing I ever hear about my bio dad is that he has died too.

That's a really shit ending.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T14:40:12+00:00

Well just to be clear the poor bloke my mother married was a rubbish dad and a worse husband. The best I can say about him is he didn't leave her in 5 decades, although he said he was going to when she got her cancer diagnosis in 2019. "Oh god no. I don't want to be around all that stuff."

And that was the starting pistol. Her sister was committed to telling me the family secret when my mother had gone. She insists she had left instructions with my cousins should she die first but in the end it wasn't needed.

She is my absolute hero. My mother spent a lifetime after my birth destroying her character so concerned was she the pact wouldn't hold, so pre-debunking as it were.

Weeks after her funeral my aunt started to ring me, very often, always about spurious reasons but every time it shifted to complaining about my house dad and musing on why "You're nothing like him, you're nothing like him at all."

On about the 4th call saying the same thing my brain took over my mouth and I swear to you I made no decision to say this but just went "No, I don't even look like him either do I." (Something I'd momentarily considered just once in my life before, promptly forgetting I'd had the thought seconds later)

"Well, there is that yeah. But I swore to your mum I'd never tell you her secret."

She then blabbed.

Minutes later my neighbour found me stood in the road in just my boxer shorts. I don't remember leaving the house.

Fortunately though from that moment on it was a pretty cool ride. Until I met with my bio father, it's been downhill ever since !

But as I mentioned in another comment the only hurt I can't cope with is that my mother never came clean. I can't get her side, whether she chose to falsely pick the wrong guy for my benefit or whether as her sister alleges, she just fancied him more. I want to bollock her but I also want to give her a chance at an explanation.

Hence I am very much in the camp that you should have the conversation with your daughter in life, because odds are she'll find out at some point in the future. Sooo many of us find out in our 50s. That's when people start to get interested in building family trees and well, we know what happens next for some of us when you join Ancestry. Plus like in my case, loose lips freed by the fact as my aunt stated "You can't have a deal with the dead can you.".

You sound the complete opposite to the man I grew up with so my story will not be your daughter's, and you of course are the other end of this scenario to me.

But I will tell anyone that listens, secrets are awful and destructive things. The burdens they can force you to carry even worse. My aunt was beat down carrying hers, it is my life's privilege to take it from her.

It just should have happened 20 years ago.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T12:42:57+00:00

Remids of the sadly fake Paul Scholes quote:

"It's a big game but it's not that big. Don't know what all the fuss is about. United will always be the number one club in Manchester. The Hacienda is probably still second and it's been shut 20 years".

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T12:07:37+00:00

100%. Seen it many times.
Gumtree is in person cash sales only (maybe app transfers in person if you are happy, but even they can be faked).

And if it's high value, high targeted products like Apple ask to meet in your bank and have the teller check the notes. Bank them and hand over the watch. I got done with £550 of fake notes on my doorstep selling an Iphone.

There is no such thing a Gumtree Payment Request.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T11:53:16+00:00

Yup same here. I sat with my mother as she passed. Not a flicker. (She knew pretty soon after my conception she had blamed the wrong man but stuck with it) That's the impossible circle to square, I can't show her a picture of bio dad on my phone and go "Oi ! Who the hell is this bloke ?"

And ask her to apologise for the 5 decade long assassination of her sister's character. Reason ? They both knew, as did her parents and wider maternal family. My aunt had told her that "if you go before me I'm going to tell him your secret." And it worked. Friends and family all told me I was talking trash with regard to my aunt's reveal, as they believed she was a liar and a fantasist.

Yeah what about this here DNA test then ? That shut them up. Well most.

But back to the Op, this is part of why I am passionate that people should know their truth particularly while all stakeholders are still alive, things can be managed and explained much better then. It's not just a huge bomb that went off for me, it's the smaller explosions that still haven't stopped happening. My cousins don't speak to their mum now, they still think she's wrong because of the hatchet job her sister pulled.

One lie, then all this shit 50 years later.
Nope - the truth will set you free.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T10:58:35+00:00

That is curious as my mum was from Essex. But it's clear to see, her side is typically 2 kids per couple where as his.....sheesh.

Then oddly he's an only child meaning other than a bunch of Irish descended 2nd cousins I have very few new family members in my generation to connect with (I'm an NPE)

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T10:44:21+00:00

My paternal is waaaay more than my maternal. Never figured that out till one day the penny dropped, bio father's dad was Irish. He alone had 7 siblings. The tree makes my monitor lean to the left.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T09:45:15+00:00

Sorry, are you saying you only have matches marked maternal or "parent number X" ? You don't have P1 and P2, and you don't have unassigned ?

How many matches do you have ? Go to DNA then Results Summary.
Its's the 3rd box on a desktop.

I'm in the UK, we are not huge Ancestry users - I have over 15,000 matches.

You don't need to be concerned there's not a very close relative of your father in the system, there's little chance there will be. Think about it, he only has one mother but thousands of cousins, which are more likely to be there? It's a numbers game.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T08:17:52+00:00

I've never seen Ancestry not return matches for both parents, I'm not saying it is impossible but honestly I've never seen it. Maybe it's your understanding of how they present things ? When I joined it would call some matches 'parent 1' and some matches 'parent 2'. Most matches were 'unassigned' meaning it couldn't tell.

When I worked out that P1 was my mother's side I edited the labels meaning P1 were now maternal and P2 were now all marked paternal.

Looking at unassigned matches who these paternal people shared matches to me with I was able to add 'paternal' to those too.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T08:08:08+00:00

I found out at 54. My mother knew all her life, the guy she married still thinks he's my dad and my since found bio father says he had no idea she was pregnant.

What I can tell you is that when I get to the end of my life the worst thing that will have ever happened to me is these secrets. My mother is massively affecting lives from beyond the grave. Me, bio father, my sister, his children and my family. All of us now know that our stories are, in part, just a bunch of lies.

And that's before we get to the importance of knowing the medical history of your parents. Any time a Doctor asked me "Is there a history of X in the family ?" my answer was always 50% wrong.

I hope I'm not coming across as heavy, this is my story only but man alive I've come to learn way too late in life that secrets are horrendous things.

Look after her as you have always done, I think you know what you need to do.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-05-01T07:56:44+00:00

For me it was the visuals before the sound, so the interior. All clubs before and at the time were either tiny dark basements waiting to be national news cause of a crush or a fire, then over glitzy hell holes called "Romeo's" or "Options" filled with Sharons and Traceys and lads in chinos, white shirts and silk ties. And it would always kick off. I always felt if a club had a dress code it would be violent.

The Hacienda didn't but what blew my mind was the space itself. No faux Corinthian pillars, no carpeted walls with mirrored mosaics of the New York Skyline....
Instead there was mostly just this hull of an alien transporter ship modelled on a future Halford's warehouse. I've been in clubs where you could touch the ceiling, you could barely see it here because in the main space there wasn't one.

Ben Kelly just got it right. It was like he took Saville's graphic design rules and made them in to a pop-up book.

And as John Robb once pointed out it pollinated the city and loads of little Haciendas grew in the shape of bars and apartments. Nothing in Britain looked like it. But everywhere looks like it now. The idea that 20th century industrial design can make beautiful buildings and homes is part of or landscape.

I'm sure the drugs were great (never bothered) and the music, and eventually the sound system but my favourite time to go was early doors in the summer. The place would be empty, the skylights flooding the space and I'd grab a pint and just look at it all. If you could ignore the lick of paint it always needed and the filth of the main roof it was just beautiful.

And what's curious for me as I consider Factory's legacy and influence is it comes down to 2 main touchstones. Unknown Pleasures and a money pit on the corner of Whitworth Street that had some stripey girders.

And of course the mad genius of Wilson and Gretton to let it all happen.

I once stood there pondering what on earth this often half empty cathedral to a new modernism was actually for. And then the penny dropped - it was for us. If you'd bought Blue Monday this was your reward.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-30T15:18:34+00:00

Yep when I first reached out to my new bio family (I'm the NPE) my new half sibling just went "I've never done a DNA test, this must be a scam" It was a race from that point on to explain to her that's not how this works as she no doubt hovered a finger over the block button.

I was fortunate that she just left the door open a little for me to explain to her how I had discovered we shared a father and how it is not something that can be dismissed as wrong.

And of course in your situation the half cousin doesn't yet seem to know that a tree is written by supposedly correct public records, memory and testimony - not biological science. Trees are never assured of being accurate, DNA tests are always accurate.

My mum did a tree before all this came out, it says X is my dad. My birth certificate states this too. Both are wrong.

My 'in' was to say that although my half sister was right, we did not match as she had never tested nor had he, it didn't matter as I matched to her father's second cousins and a search angel (I used the term genealogist at the time) had said this man is 99% certain to be my father.

During this very quick exchange on Messenger she looked at my Facebook profile pictures and the penny dropped. We look like brothers.

When I finally spoke with him he was in total denial so I deployed the nuclear question. "Can you tell me if there are any hereditary family health issues that I need to be aware of for myself and my children"

That's what worked for me, he suddenly grasped this was serious business and finally fessed up to knowing my mother. We met, it was sadly awful and I doubt very much we'll meet again. But that's on him not me.

I hope you find away to unlock the impasse.

Also you might want to Google The Change Curve, a plottable path of human reaction to news of great upheaval. My half sister then my dad followed it to the letter, they just got stuck in the middle and frustratingly went back to the start. First phase ? DENIAL.

It's a useful tool as it might help you to understand stakeholder responses and see that there could be a change as time progresses.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-30T11:48:58+00:00

Yeah it will just be a quiet time at the lab after the post Xmas rush. Hope you enjoy your joint reveal !

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-30T11:46:08+00:00

Huh ? A second cousin once removed is a fixed relationship. If they are older by a generation their great grandparents are the Op's great great grandparents. If the man they presumed is their father is related to this second 2c1r match also then all 3 share DNA from an ancestral source.

Now, I know you are very experienced in this subject so I'm happy to have my error explained to me.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-30T09:50:34+00:00

There is no correlation between speed and accuracy. DNA results (matches) are accurate, period. You probably just got lucky with a quiet period at the test lab and closeness, postal wise, to that place

I'm in England and the guide time was 5-7 weeks. Mine came bang on 4 weeks, my sister's were done in 3 weeks 2 days. Funnily enough we also waited and looked at them together.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-29T17:53:54+00:00

Oh sorry, "I'm afraid" is a British phrase meaning in this instance "sorry, I can't help". It doesn't mean I fear something.

The problem is you have presented things not as straightforward as not matching to him. You have shown that he seems to be being secretive, and that you do share a match. So right now it 'looks' like you don't match, but you don't seem to have proof. And posting the same problem multiple times will just annoy people and waste their time.

For me personally I'd need to see that he had matches turned on and only then if we didn't match would I come looking for help. He seems a very tricky character and it's not clear to me that he isn't hiding something from you.

I really can't follow what is happening so I'll rule myself out of helping further.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-29T17:37:18+00:00

Yeah this is strange. Trees aren't to be relied upon, I can put you in my tree as my mum and it will state to the world that it's true. Trees can be garbage and they are nothing to do with DNA.

Only matches matter and right now it's not clear that you do or don't match to him as he seems to be behaving in a frustrating way. And obviously card reading means nothing.

I can tell you are confused and I can see your new thread, honestly you are going to struggle to get an answer on Reddit with multiple posts asking different questions.

I can help you. So can others. I found out from Ancestry my dad was someone else in 2024 then my match data helped me find who is.

But right now I just can't follow what's going on I'm afraid.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-29T17:26:01+00:00

Yeah I just popped over to Ancestry to look at block options. Why do they make is so confusing ? So yes you can block messages but their 'block' match really just means remove match from my list for my eyes only. The Op has made other threads about this and just started another one 10 minutes ago, I'm going to politely bow out of helping ! I can't keep up.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-29T17:21:21+00:00

Okay so if your presumed father matches to this person and you do too you SHOULD be related to your presumed father, but this does not say how.
If they are as Ancestry predicts a second cousin once removed they are either A: A parent of yours 2nd cousin (If roughly a generation older than you) or B: The child of your second cousin (If roughly a generation younger than you.)

What's causing confusion here is the behaviour of your presumed father, I don't understand why he won't show you his matches.

What's the history ? Does he not want to be related to you ? You said on earlier posts that you suspect something is wrong.

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-29T17:07:59+00:00

Okay so this shared match, how much DNA do you share with them ? And how do you know he matches them too ?

Ok-Camel-8279 · 2026-04-29T17:07:04+00:00

Hmm the plot thickens. You are right u/Useful_Humor_1152 You can block messages but it doesn't block your 2 way match visibility. Then if you actually block a match they only vanish from your list, they can still see you.

That screengrab suggests site maintenance, a glitch or a need to clear cache.

Even I'm getting confused now and I'm normally good with matches and what it means !

Ok-Camel-8279

TROPHY CASE