PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — DNA testing kits that can reveal ancestry have been growing in popularity over the years. But what do people do when they find out life-changing information?
Lisa Swyer from Philadelphia lived most of her life not knowing she was anything but Caucasian.
"I sing, and if I got to the point where there was too much soul coming out, it scared me because I was like, ‘Where is that coming from?’ Like honestly, I mean, I was a white woman!" she said jokingly.
Swyer became interested in tracing her family tree in 2014. She wanted to present the results to her father for Christmas.
Her mother, however, became irritated that she was digging into her history, telling her, "You will never know where you came from and I'm not talking about this while he's still here, while he is still living." She was referring to whom Swyer thought was her paternal father.
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But with that, Swyer couldn’t let it go. She was in her early 40s when she took a DNA test, and when the results came back, the first word she saw was…
"Africa!” she said.
“I grew up with two white parents. My dad's telling me we're from Ireland. I knew I looked like my mom's side of the family; her entire family has curly hair so that wasn't anything unusual.”
She said for years, people always asked, “What are you?” People would ask her mother, “Is she yours?”
So there was a sense of relief when she finally learned the truth, and her mother admitted to her privately that she had an affair with a married man who was Black. Her darker skin tone finally made sense.
"I embraced it … I definitely identify myself as a person of color, biracial,” Swyer said.
“I've experienced racism in all kinds of ways. The most challenging part about it is that I spent my entire childhood and most of my adulthood defending who I am, and then I found out who I was," Swyer said.
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With the rise of inexpensive, in-home genetic testing, it’s estimated that more than 7 million Americans have taken a DNA test to trace their ancestry.
For some, it’s a fun and rewarding hobby. For others, it can lead to an existential dilemma.
"It was very much a shocking experience to the point that I had to back away from all social media. I couldn't do it anymore," said Donna Garey from Philadelphia, who would look in the mirror and at her siblings and parents who were African American, and realize something wasn't right,
"My father was dark-skinned so I felt like I had his smile, but everybody else looked alike,” she said. “Nobody looked like me, and I didn't look like them," she said.
Her mother refused to answer any questions. Garey took a DNA test and said many Hispanic names came up in her ancestry profile, and she was told one of her parents was Hispanic.
She was able to track her paternal family in Puerto Rico.
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"Unfortunately by the time that I found out who my biological father was, he was deceased. He had died a year before my mother,” said Garey. “I was able to trick a sibling into doing a DNA test, and that's how I confirmed who my father was."
Looking back, Garey said there were some things in her life that kind of pointed her in that direction, anyway.
"I’d get on the 23 trolley, come right all the way down to Germantown and Lehigh, get off the trolley, and walk down one side of Lehigh and up the other. The Puerto Ricans, they embraced me! I had friends,” said Garey. “I didn't know anybody down there, but I felt at home."
Both Garey and Swyer are now members of a group called Right to Know, which offers support for those who find out their true genetic identity is different than what they thought. Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, the group's co-founder, said that people often feel like something must be wrong with them.
"Often, it's because we don't have genetic mirroring,” said Deyerin. “Genetic mirroring is when you see yourself in the people around you right, and so you can see yourself in one side but not the other, and you think something's wrong with you.”
Co-founder Alecia Weiss said when people go through this, they have lots of emotions to work through.
"Anger, grief, shock, everything that these ladies have told you about on top of the ethnicity and cultural shift is absolutely … it's just … it's mind-blowing.”
The non-profit group holds educational classes on DNA surprises, and help is available online via this link.