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June 16, 2008 My brother tells me that he went to a workshop to get in touch with his feminine side. "I discovered that I’m a real bitch," he dead panned. He’s always making jokes and lightening the mood. After decades of knowing him, and following the pictures of him from early infancy into mid-life, it’s easy to see the evolution of his face, and his resemblance to other family members. There is no mistaking him for someone else, cleverly posing as him. But being from a family of mixed nuts, (literally), a mongrel mix of ethnic origins, several of us look like one ethnicity, and I, curiously look like the other whole side of the family, who only crop up at funerals. For some of us getting together with long absent family is not unlike the experience of Marilyn, the decidedly vanilla daughter in the ghoulish Munster family in that great 60s sitcom The Munsters. How could we possibly be related? -we are driven to ask. You know what kind of thoughts run through your mind. Could that streak of family insanity be coursing through my veins too? Good Grief, it's too horrible to imagine! But wait! There's always the faint hope of some kind of reprieve. Could I have been switched at birth? This was the kind of fantasy that made my childhood entertaining, and sometimes more bearable, not to mention lending added meaning to jokes about the milkman or friendly appliance repairman. But what if you bear a fairly close resemblance to other family members, from a physical standpoint, but don’t think or act at all like them? What then? What if your family hails from a distinctive ethnic group that originated in a region where families are drawn from a tightly woven clan system. What then? Don’t they all bear a pretty close resemblance, in much the same way as one poodle resembles another, even if they don’t have common parentage? Maybe my family are descended from the human equivalent of Brittany Spaniels while hubbie’s are drawn from the People’s Democratic breed of Shi Tzu. In that case, how can we know that he wasn’t switched at birth? Consider this: in New Zealand, on Christmas Eve back in 1946, a pair of boys were switched at birth. One was of Lebanese descent, the other was a fair-haired Anglo Saxon. Almost six decades passed before the switch was discovered, even though both boys grew up feeling like square pegs in round holes. DNA tests finally confirmed that Jim Churchman and Fred George had been switched. Strangely, the boys had known each other all their childhoods because one boy had befriended the other one’s older brother. They often remarked on the uncanny resemblance in looks, speech and mannerisms between Jim’s supposed older brother Owen and his friend, Fred, not knowing that they were biological siblings. With their presumed families, however, the differences were stark. "Jim really had the George temperament," said Fred George, who was raised in the Lebanese home, "Temperamentally, I've always been more conservative, more like a Churchman, even before that was a consideration." They often met at each other's houses, one a lively extended Lebanese family, the other a buttoned-down middle-class Irish Presbyterian household. "No matter who brings us up, our genes will follow us until we die," added Fred. So where does it leave the rest of us, who feel like fish out of water even in our own ponds? How can we discover the truth of our parentage, decades after the swap? How do these discoveries come about? In the case of Jim and Fred, knowing they shared a birth date, and the eventual hearth disease that ran through one of the families, caused them to finally ask the question that had certainly been on the father’s mind ever since he looked at the baby boy six decades before and wondered if it was his kid. A DNA test confirmed the answer. Sometimes, the tests come almost too late. The case of Shirley Morgan and Debra DeLay, is a good example. As soon as she was brought home, Shirley's own father, Jim Morgan, developed suspicions about the origins of the baby girl in the bassinet. He never could accept the family explanation that the small dark child was a throwback to a French Canadian grandmother, but he managed to keep his suspicions to himself. On the other hand, swapped baby Debra DeLay, who turned out tall and blonde, had a hard time fitting into the Latino neighborhood where she was brought home to grow up. Meanwhile, Shirley grew up the youngest child in a large, tight-knit Irish family. Following a health crisis, 80-year-old Jim Morgan finally blurted out his suspicion that Shirley had never been his child. The sister, seeking to reassure him, had DNA testing performed and discovered that not only was Shirley not his, she wasn’t the child of Jim’s wife either, dispelling the milkman accusation. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as blood type that gives it away. This was the case of Kimberly Mays and Arlena Twigg who were born within days of each other in 1978. Eight years would pass before a blood test confirmed that Arlena couldn’t be their daughter. By that time, however, Arlena’s birth mother had been dead for some years and Arlena herself was ill with a heart defect that would soon claim her life. After she died, the people who raised her sought out their biological child. A nasty court battle ensued when they petitioned for visitation rights. Eventually, even though Kimberly fought to stay with the man who raised her, she later ran away and moved in with her biological parents. That just goes to show how strong a bond the biological connection can be. What if that sense of being connected just isn’t there? Could getting answers to nagging questions about your own place in the universe be as easy as stuffing a hair sample in an envelope? That seems to be the approach taken by George Michael Bluth of Arrested Development fame when he is seeking to determine if he really is related to his cousin, for whom he feels possibly taboo desires. A quick survey of the internet reveals that paternity tests can be had for a wide range of fees, anything from approximately $90 to several hundred. But there are some characteristic facial traits that are said to be dead give-aways. Here are some of the most significant, as outlined in a Wikipedia posting: "Although not constituting completely reliable evidence, several congenital traits such as attached earlobes, the widow's peak, or the cleft chin, may serve as tentative indicators of (non-)parenthood as they are readily observable and inherited via autosomal-dominant genes." Sadly, however, if your widow’s peak and cleft chin are in common, but you’re still riddled with doubt and hoping for a disconnection, you’re going to have to fork over a C-note at least to get to the bottom of the ties that bind. DNA testing has a failure rate of 1 in every 100,000 paternity/maternity tests. Keep your fingers crossed. ------------ About the author Trudy Fong: Visit TrudyFong.com or her blog at myfamilyisnuts.net. Email: trudyfong@ns.sympatico.ca Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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