I always knew I was adopted. My parents told me I came from a family that already had several children and that I was a surprise they couldn\u2019t keep. They lived a few towns away, and that was all I ever knew.<\/p>\n
Three years ago, my wife decided to take a DNA test, and I thought, why not do one too?<\/p>\n
When the results came back, I saw a first cousin match<\/strong> with a public email address. Curious, I reached out. We started comparing details, and suddenly everything I thought I knew about my origins changed.<\/p>\n First, I wasn\u2019t born into a big, traditional family like I\u2019d been told. My biological mother had actually been single<\/strong>. Second, I wasn\u2019t a \u201clate addition\u201d to a large family \u2014 I had four sisters and one brother<\/strong>, and I was the youngest, but only by a couple of years.<\/p>\n Even more shocking, most of them lived nearby<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And the biggest surprise? None of them knew I existed.<\/strong><\/p>\n My biological mother had kept the pregnancy completely secret. Before she passed away, she told only one of my sisters that she had given a baby up for adoption years earlier. No one else believed her.<\/p>\n So when I finally contacted them, my sister said, \u201cSee? I told you all these years \u2014 we have a baby brother!\u201d<\/p>\n All because of a simple DNA test.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I always knew I was adopted. My parents told me I came from a family that already had several children and that I was a surprise they couldn\u2019t keep. They lived a few towns away, and that was all I ever knew. Three years ago, my wife decided to take a DNA test, and I …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4893,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891\/revisions\/4893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}