DNA Family Secrets: Where was our birth father from?

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Triplets, David, Philip, and Peter were adopted when they were four years old and have never known the identity of their birth father. They're wondering if analysing their DNA can solve the mystery of their ethnicity?

So, you know a bit about your birth mother?

Yeah.

But nothing really about your father?

Yeah.

You don't even know what ethnicity your father was?

Yeah.

Why do you need to know?

I think it's to give you a sense of belonging. Everybody deserves, you know, to know who he created them.

Hello, you two, come on in.

Hello.

Come and have a seat.

So, when you first came and saw me you basically had one main question, your biological father's heritage and actually this is where DNA completely comes into its own because you had nothing to go on, you didn't have any information did you?

So, what we did, the first bit was, we looked at your Y chromosome because you can look at somebody's Y chromosome and you can say something about their ancestry on their biological father's side.

So, remind me where did you think your biological father came from?
I thought South American somewhere maybe, Italy maybe so….

Yeah.

We actually got a very clear result.

Right

Your biological father had mixed ancestry.

Yeah.

But very clear locations as to where that came from. So, the first of those is actually in West

Africa.

Right.

So, around Liberia, let's show you a map.

Oh.

So, you can have a look. We are getting hits around Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana and up into Mali. It seems to be centred around Liberia, obviously DNA doesn't follow political borders and we know that there's been huge amounts of migration and people trading and so you get a mixture of DNA here. So, is that a bit of a surprise?

That's amazing.

Right, so, the other half of your father's DNA, again very clear and it's from Northern Ireland.

Not too far away.

Okay I wasn't expecting that one.

So, it is in South Down and North Louth.

Right.

In this area here, so, where about you guys so live?

We grew up here and we now live, South Down is where we grew up.

So, basically where are you guys grew up?

Strange, I never once expected that.

We were surprised.

Wow.

The other thing that we were doing was that we were looking in the database and we're looking for people who share a high number of centimorgans with you. So centimorgans is basically a term that we use to describe how much DNA you're sharing in common with somebody else and we got a match.

So, I'm going to draw you a family tree.

Okay.

So, it seems to centre around two brothers, this one is a chap called James, over here this is Samuel. Now we are getting a match with a woman who we think is your first cousin, so James is her father. So, we think that Samuel would be your father, we think that's the most likely scenario. Now, really sadly from talking to the family we think that Samuel died about a decade ago.

Right, yeah.

Now, we have talked to the family, but they are really not forthcoming.

I can understand that, yeah.

Yeah.

They actually don't want to have any more contact, so obviously we're going to respect their wishes.

Yeah, we understand that.

Yeah.

Representation: https://www.josarsby.com/turi-king

Видео DNA Family Secrets: Where was our birth father from? канала Professor Turi King