Woman learns about secret dad — and different ethnicity — from 23andMe DNA test
A woman who took an at-home DNA test by 23andMe experienced the surprise of her life when the results concluded that her father was not the man who raised her — and that she is a different ethnicity than what she’d identified as all her life.
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Katy Canning recently told CBS This Morning it was “crazy, so crazy” to learn five years ago that her biological dad was actually a touring guitarist named Baron Duncan and not the man she always knew to be her dad — a man who, it turns out, married her biological mother and raised her as his own.
Duncan was Jamaican to boot, which finally helped explain the fact that Canning never looked like either of her parents. “My mom would tell me when I was growing up, ‘Oh, you’re part Native American,” she told the outlet.
Canning grew up as the older of two siblings, but after 23andMe identified her biological father, she learned he had at least four other children, whom she’s since met and come to know. When asked whether she looks like her biological siblings, Canning told CBS News, “So much! Meeting my brother Stephen for the first time, it was like looking at my twin. I literally started crying as soon as I saw him.”
Unfortunately, Canning was not able to meet Duncan, as he passed away before her DNA test results came through. When she confronted her mother about the identity of her biological dad, her mother simply explained, “It was the ’80s,” according to CBS News.
But neither Canning nor the man who raised her care what 23andMe has to say about who her “official” father is.
“I’ve been his since the moment I was born,” she said. “Family isn’t just blood, but family is what you make it, and family is your heart, and my dad is my dad. He will walk me down the aisle one day.”
However, one dilemma Canning is faced with is how to reconcile her new ethnic identity. “So you’re now Jamaican-American?,” a CBS News reporter asked her. “That is the weird thing. Am I allowed to say that?” Canning responded. “I don’t know. Can a DNA test tell me what I am and what my identity is? I don’t know.”
Canning is hardly the first person to discover through a DNA test that she’s not who she thought she was — genetically speaking, that is. Others like her have discovered their biological dads, some found out they were adopted by parents who had been dealing with fertility problems and then there are those who have learned that the children they are raising are not biologically their own.
DNA test companies like 23andMe don’t provide genetic counseling for customers who receive news that rocks their world, but Emily Drabant Conley, vice president of business development at 23andMe, believes they’ll be just fine.
“People are smart enough and capable, they can make sense of it,” she told CBS. “People take a pregnancy test at home and if it’s positive, which is significant information, they then take the next step of talking to a doctor, and we think that DNA tests are very much in the same vein.”
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