“Sad update from my post #12: D’s friend’s adoptive parents have now cut off contact from her due to her finding and connecting with her birth parents. Sadly, D’s friend also went through a divorce early in 2018 and is now a single mom to 2 young boys, and now without family support. I know her adoptive parents, and this totally stunned me. I feel so badly for her as she works to put a new life together for her and her boys.”
As a parent who adopted I cannot imagine cutting off my son for any reason.
Wow, I’d sure be re-evaluating my assessment of these “wonderful” people, if they truly have cut off contact with the young woman simply because she reconnected with her birth parents.
I wonder if the D discussed her search with her adoptive parents before making contact with the birth parents. If I were an adoptive parent who had opted for a closed adoption, which apparently this one was, and my child searched for their birth parents without at least telling me they were doing so, I would be very hurt. I would never disown my child or grandchildren, but I would be very hurt.
It’s interesting how decades old cold cases are being solved through searching dna connections of relatives. It’s how the Golden State Killer was caught. Zero clue how this works, but it’s fascinating. .
With so many surprise relatives out there, make sure to keep your wills and trust documents up to date. You never know who comes out of the woodwork if you die intestate. Just kidding.
That’s actually a good point. In most states, unacknowledged, illegitimate children can’t inherit, but it never hurts to be careful. For instance, if your will says something like “all of my natural children,” instead of “the children of my marriage” or children specifically identified by name, it could be possible that a non-marital, potentially unknown child could try to claim. In general, adoption cuts off inheritance rights from the birth parents, but if you have something like an affair scenario, where the birth mother kept the baby, that child could theoretically try to inherit.
And, I agree with you, that hearing “I found my real parents” would be devastating.
@BunsenBurner , I don’t remember all the details but my late mother got some unexpected money (about $3000) from a cousin’s estate. She was contacted out of the blue about it. Her mother died when she was a toddler . This was an unmarried male cousin, no children , if I recall correctly She had minimal contact with the maternal side of the family after her mother’s death but still somehow got tracked down and got a smal!, unexpected windfall.
it’s a vestige of my law school training from almost 40 years ago. Since I don’t practice T & E, I have never really mentally updated and, to me, out-of-wedlock just seems so awkward. In addition, my first two children were born before I married and I always referred to them as illegitimate until my marriage to their father legitimized them. To me, it’s a legal expression with no negative connotation, just a descriptor of the parents’ marital status. It’s not like saying a child in that situation is a “b” word.
You get very used to it, mostly from strangers. Real parents, natural parents, step parents, guardian. It really doesn’t bother me at all and I just correct people. Like my mother who could never get it right.
I have never heard either of my kids describe the other as anything other than ‘my sister’ yet I’ve heard a lot of kids describe their siblings as ‘half’ or ‘step’. That’s more important to me.
To be fair to the adopted child, the parents have no rights to grant or withhold permission. The adopted person was not a party to any agreements the parents made.
From what I’ve read, not only is the language of “illegitimacy” changing, but so is the law. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it’s a violation of the Equal Protection clause for state law to discriminate against children born outside of marriage. State law has changed faster and more thoroughly in some states than in others, but in many states an unacknowledged child born outside the marriage now has inheritance rights equal to those of children born within the marriage, provided that child can prove paternity. Some states require paternity to be proved while the father is still living, but others now allow claims after death based on, e.g, DNA evidence. My guess is that will pretty quickly become the norm.
Of course, you can always cut any heir at law out of their inheritance with a properly drafted will, except a surviving spouse to some extent.
I agree with all the comments to my post #320. It is a surprising and sad situation, but there are two sides to every story and I have only heard one side. And that was through my D. As far as helping D’s friend, I’m taking my cues from my D, so I’m not involved at this point.
@57special Not at all. First, the DNA samples are exactly that, “samples”. We assume that a sample is a good representation of the population from which it is sampled (in our case, the DNA in all of a person’s cells), but not identical. Second, despite what you may have learned, the DNA on your cells is not identical. All sorts of errors occur in replication. That’s one of the sources of cancer. So your saliva is full of white blood cells which are are not all the same.
Then there is the algorithm that analyzes the DNA. It could be an issue. The main way in which these companies determine where you are from is by which genetic markers are the most common for people who self report that they are from a certain area. If the algorithm is comparing your DNA to that of a sample of a group of people from that area, than a comparison to a different sample could result in a different match, etc. There are many ways in which the same algorithm can produce different results using the same sample.
That being said, there is a world of difference between attempting to figure out your origins and comparing to DNA samples. the former is still being developed, and, in many cases, has a way to go (they’ve becomes really good at determining whether a person is an Ashkenazi Jew, though, because of the enormous size of their database). However, there has been an enormous amount of work on comparison of the similarity between two DNA samples, and figuring out how closely related to people are. Even in the article, everybody acknowledges that the twin’s DNA sample demonstrated that they were identical twins.
So you can be pretty sure that, when a DNA test shows that somebody is your parent or sibling, it’s pretty good evidence that they are.
I don’t think that the poster meant DNA analysis for forensic or medical purposes, it is the “ancestry” part that’s being put in question. Yes, completely agree with that.
Just kidding.