Speaking of DNA and Ancestry.com, while my wife had a purpose in mind, finding out who her father really was, I thought I knew everything on my side of the ledger. Boy was I wrong.
Anyone getting their DNA done needs to be aware that you may learn more about your 'family' than you bargained for. About six month after we had our DNA run by Ancestry, and my wife had pretty much confirmed what she had been told about the missing side of her family, I get a note from a FIRST cousin that I had never heard of before. We communicated for a couple of weeks where he explained that, like my wife, he had been lied to about who his parents were and it wasn't until he was in his late 50's before he finally learned that he was adopted, but no one would tell him anything, not even his 'mother'. When Ancestry.com finally came around he decided to take matters into his own hand. While his 'father' had died years before his 'mother' was still alive but in a nursing home and so he took a sample from both her and himself and sent it in, which proved that they were not related (his 'mother' passed away before he could confront her with the test results).
That's' when his DNA crossed mine and we got these notices about being first cousins. I sent a note out to all my first cousins on my father's side (that's what the DNA showed, a fraternal match) and all but one claimed to have no knowledge of anything. However, the one cousin called me and said that I was to never speak of this again to anyone. When I mentioned this to her younger half-sister she suddenly realized that this might explain a few things. Now their mother and their respective fathers were already gone, so there was no one to ask (only one aunt, by marriage was still alive, and I wanted to avoid asking her about it as she was quite old). Anyway, the younger sister of the cousin who warned me to drop the subject, decided to do something on her own and had her DNA checked and sure enough, it confirmed that this mystery man was her half-brother. Well, looking at their respective ages and that of her older half-sister, my cousins, the one I had known all my life and the new one, figured out that the only explanation that made any sense was that he was born out of wedlock between my aunt's first and second marriage. I all fit because he was born in a hospital in Chicago (my aunt lived in Michigan) which was known for caring for unwed mothers. Also, my new cousin's mother' had been a nurse at that hospital. Once all the chess pieces were on the board, it became pretty obvious what had happened.
At this point I dropped out of the conversation and just let my cousin handle it as she was really interested in meeting him. Her new sibling was retired, living in Florida and she lived in Virginia, so she drove down there to meet him face to face and they became close. Unfortunately, he had some serious medical conditions and died before we all got a chance to meet. But my cousin said he looked like the rest of us and that he was very nice, just that he had been living a lie all his life and it had played on his mind once it became clear what had probably happened. Note that to this day, the older half-sister, who we're still close to, has never accepted what me and her sister learned, or at least she refuses to talk about it and I've never brought it up as I respect her too much and would not want to ruin our relationship.
But this does act as a tale that if one does have their DNA run, be prepared for what you might learn. It may not always conform with what you thought was the history of your family.
OCU