Ted Wood, a lawyer from California, enrolled in a company dedicated to finding relatives of his clients through an ancestry DNA test, hoping to find his father.
Wood had known his biological mother in the 1990s, a woman who gave him up for adoption after becoming pregnant in high school. But his biological father had apparently disappeared.
Wood did not know that a growing number of people used commercial DNA testing kits to establish a different type of connection: people conceived with donated sperm who wanted to know who their donors are.
Wood had donated sperm when he was a university student. It was a quick way to earn $ 100 in an afternoon, and the clinic promised donor anonymity. When he enrolled in Ancestry, almost three decades later, in search of his biological father, he had completely forgotten about that moment.
He found some distant relatives on the site over the years, and when Ancestry notified him in April 2018 of a new connection in the database, he thought it was another distant cousin.
But this time, the message was different, the test indicated that he had a daughter who did not even know he existed.
The daughter
Meanwhile, in Arlington, Texas, Melissa Daniels, 27, was getting nervous.
Daniels had discovered when he was a teenager that his mother conceived it using a sperm donor. After wondering for many years about his identity Daniels joined Ancestry last spring. A month later, she received a notification that Wood was almost certainly his biological father.
The father who raised Daniels died when he was 7 years old. His mother told him that he had not been his biological father. “It was heartbreaking,” said Daniels.
“I just needed answers, confirmation that I was conceived by the donor,” the woman said.
After she approached Wood, days went by what seemed like weeks.
Finally, after an incredulous Wood told his wife about the messages, he reflowed more calmly, reread Daniels’ messages and answered him.
Initially, Wood and Daniels shared only basic biographical details: he doubted and she was nervous. But their exchanges soon advanced, as they discovered shared opinions on everything from politics to Monty Python. They started talking about meeting in person, but life did not give them time and they lived far away.
Daniels with his stepsisters, Wood’s daughters Daniels with his stepsisters, Wood’s daughter’s Credit:
Video clip
Meeting was one of the hundreds that have taken place across the country in recent years between both, as DNA tests expose connections between people who hoped to remain anonymous. In the lobbies of the hotels, in the cafes or in the homes of each, the sperm donors are meeting face to face with their biological children. These meetings can be difficult or natural, or, perhaps, more often, a combination of both.
On the other hand Wood could never find his father, on the contrary, he found out about his darker side. After making Wood’s biological mother pregnant, Gray went to college and then married a different woman, from whom she later divorced. Then he started dating a man. The two moved together in Houston, and one night in 1982, they got into a heated fight where Gray, who was 33, shot the man and then committed suicide.