Dad Genes: When DNA tells you that you aren’t who you think

Dad Genes

By Michael Kiefer

I learned a lot about my family in 2019.

After a couple years of brooding, I finally started writing a novel about my mother’s Uncle Jake Brown and his French lover during World War I. The research took me to France in May, where I discovered a little town on the Wine Road in Alsace, where all the vineyards bear my family name, which led me to believe this was from where my father’s ancestors had emigrated 300 years ago. My oldest daughter and I were treated like family there. It felt like home.

Then, in September, I was contacted by a woman in Georgia who had struck a match with me on a DNA ancestry application. When a few more of her family submitted DNA tests, I suddenly went from having one brother and one sister to having four half-sisters and four half-brothers.

Evidently, the man I called my father was not, in fact, my father. And at age 67, I suddenly didn’t know exactly who I was or where I came from.

It started with the DNA test that my younger daughter gave me as a Christmas gift in 2008. Some of my defense-attorney friends said, “Don’t do it, don’t make a record of your DNA.” But I had no criminal past to hide and no love children to avoid. I wasn’t so much interested in seeing if any famous people were hanging from my family tree or whether I was likely to come down with a crippling disease. I wouldn’t even have signed up for it on my own if it hadn’t been a gift. But I thought it might be interesting to verify my ethnic ancestry, so I swabbed the inside of my mouth, put it in the little vial and mailed it in.

There were no surprises: A few weeks later, my DNA came back as German and English-Irish-Scottish, much what you would expect of a person whose family has been in America since the 1700s.

I knew this much: My grandfather had changed his name from Kieffer to Kiefer, probably with the mistaken notion that it would seem less German during the First World War. One of my cousins on my father’s side had traced the family tree back to one François Kieffer, who came to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. A professor in graduate school told me that Kieffer was an Alsatian name — in fact it means “Cooper,” or barrel-maker, in Alsatian German.

My mother’s maiden name was Brown, and though her mother was English, her father’s ancestors, who spelled the name “Braun,” came from Germany and Switzerland, also in the 1700s, also to Pennsylvania. So basically, I was Pennsylvania Dutch — a Dutchie, in the pejorative — on both sides.

The DNA test pretty much confirmed what I already knew.

So then, at about the same time I took the test, my cousin Dave Brown, whom I had not seen in 40 years, came to Phoenix, and we met for dinner. We traded stories about our parents and our cousins and aunts and uncles, and then we focused on Uncle Jake, the black sheep of the family, who had been a favorite to both of us.

Jake was garrulous and portly. He stuttered and told dirty jokes. Our parents told us to stay away from him, because he had been a drunk for many years, and they could never forgive him the things he did during that time. But he was always kind and amusing to his grand-nieces and -nephews, always had candy and something funny to say. Another of my cousins wanted to name his own son after Jake, but knew his mother would not allow it, so he named the child Jacob and smoked it by her.

Cousin Dave told me he had to clean out Jake’s apartment when he died, and he found a cache of love letters from a French woman Jake had wooed in 1918 and 1919 while in the U.S. Army Air Service in France. I was immediately intrigued, and I asked him to send them to me.

The letters were heart-breaking. The woman begged Jake to come back to France and marry her. She even threatened to come to Pennsylvania to be with him. How could I resist that story?

It took a couple years before I had the time to start the book. Cousin Dave had already amassed a lot of family history tracing the Browns and Brauns back to Germany and France and Switzerland. I found draft cards for Jake and both of my grandfathers and newspaper articles about car accidents they’d been in, parties they attended, how they got married, when and where they dropped dead. I also found a history of Jake’s unit while it was in France. I knew he spent his last months in Bordeaux, so I went there.

Before I did, I googled the name “Kiefer” and “Alsace.” Up popped Hotel Kieffer in Ittersviller, France. I emailed the hotel and found they had their own vineyard and had been making wine since the 1700s, about when François Kieffer showed up in Pennsylvania. I told my daughter, who is a sommelier, that we would be making a detour to Ittersviller.

It was a picturesque little village. On a short walk down its single street, my daughter and I passed five different vintages named after various Kieffers. The mayor was named Kieffer, as were servers in restaurants. At the hotel, my hostesses showed me the family history with all the Kieffers going back to the 18th Century. Which François Kieffer is the one you are referring to? I was asked; there was a whole page of them. The hotelier’s daughter posed with my daughter, and there seemed to be a family resemblance. They looked like cousins, albeit 300 years removed.

Of course, even as I was writing a novel about my mother’s uncle in France, I took time to write about my father’s family roots in France for a travel blog. This was my identity. Or so I thought.

The Georgia woman sent a message through the DNA website in September. I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t see it for weeks. Would I call her?

A few things about my parents: They never talked about any courtship. They likely did not marry out of love. My siblings and I were already grownup when we did the math and figured out that my mother was pregnant when she and my father married, which is no stigma now, but was in 1950. Nonetheless, they stayed together for 65 years until death did them part. Their ashes are interred together in the National Cemetery on Cape Cod.

The Georgia woman — I’ll call her Joan — is two weeks older than my sister. She had a hereditary disease not shared by her siblings and she wondered if her dad was really her dad, so she had registered with the DNA site to find out. She matched to me, as if we were half-siblings.

I was initially stunned, and as we talked, we assumed my father was the link. But we couldn’t figure out where he and Joan’s mother would have met. My father was in northern Pennsylvania at the time Joan would have been conceived, Joan’s mother was in New Jersey, close enough now, but several hours apart at the time.

I called my brother and sister, and we assumed Dad had had a very good November 1949, impregnating two different women and marrying one of them. He was a good-looking jock, and a war hero. He might have had his pick of partners.

But then Joan’s two sisters registered for the DNA site as well, and not only did they match as full siblings with Joan, they were half siblings with me as well. And two of my cousins on my mother’s side, including cousin Dave, showed up as my matches but not hers.

So Poppa was not the rolling stone. Momma was.

Then came the clincher. I didn’t look like my dad. He was big and heavyset, with black curly hair, green eyes and a freckled complexion. I was slender and born blond (though the hair darkened as I grew older) with brown eyes. We assumed I looked like the Brown side of the family. My sister looks a lot like my dad; my younger brother is closer in appearance to me. Neither they nor my parents had/have brown eyes.

Joan sent me a photo of her father when he was a young man. I looked at his smirking smile, his dark eyes, the shape of his face. She told me his height and weight. It might as well have been me.

My mother had an infant when she conceived me. She lived in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Joan’s father lived down on the Jersey Shore. Neither Joan nor I nor my brother and sister could figure out when my mother and her father could have met and under what circumstances.

“Women of that generation would take a secret like that to the grave,” Joan said.

I still wonder who knew, if any of them. I always felt my father treated me more harshly than he treated my siblings. Was that because he knew I wasn’t his son? Did he just suspect it because I looked different from him? Maybe I would understand.

My brother and sister have so far declined taking the DNA test, which kind of leaves me hanging. I’d like to distrust the findings. But I spent a big part of my career as a newspaper reporter covering criminal courts and the worst-of-the-worst crimes, where DNA is pretty much irrefutable. What is my relation to them? Joan’s sisters have taken the test. Her brothers have not.

I guess they don’t want to think badly of Mom or Dad. My feelings are mixed. I’ve decided I cannot fault them for something I’ve done myself. My father only mellowed out in old age; my mother may have been seeking comfort. Joan tells me her father was a soft-spoken, caring man who died a decade ago. That said, if he knew about me and never contacted me — well, that leaves me cold.

A female friend quipped, “Don’t blame your mother. He was very handsome.”

But I no longer know my family medical history. I feel my last name is counterfeit. I wonder who I am. And there is no one left to ask. My parents are dead. Joan’s parents are dead. I have only two relatives left from that generation, my father’s sister and my brother’s sister-in-law, and I don’t know how to ask them directly: Am I a bastard? They might answer yes, given my temperament. But I doubt they know anything about my conception. Such things were not discussed in their day.

The secrets were indeed taken to the grave.

I suppose that if the coronavirus abates and we all survive, then I will make the trip to Georgia to meet my long-lost siblings.

And then I will have to redraw my family tree.