DNA detective story calls into question the meaning of family and fatherhood

A few years ago, Joel Gottfried began researching his family tree. He was in for a shock.

He had started with his father’s parents – Jews who fled hardship and persecution in Europe – and over time he managed to document, in minute detail, their arrival at the famous immigrant arrival point of Ellis Island in New York.

When Gottfried’s 69th birthday rolled around in March, 2018, his sister, Debbie Heller, ordered both of them an at-home genetic test from 23AndMe, so they could explore their genetic history together.

She thought it would be a fun gift. But instead, it revealed their lifelong belief that they shared biological parents was wrong. The DNA results instead showed they shared a mother, but they had different fathers.

“So who’s your daddy?” Gottfried asked his sister, stunned. To which she instantly replied: “Who’s your daddy?”

Their parents, George and Tina Gottfried – had died years before, as had other older relatives. At first, both Gottfried and Heller presumed the other sibling was born of the mystery father. But soon, Gottfried admits, he began to believe the mystery father was probably his.

How staggering advances in DNA testing help our lifestyle choices

For one thing, in the siblings’ entire extended family, no one is close to 1.85 metres (6ft) tall. Yet Gottfried is 1.88 metres.

Secondly, Gottfried was “an academic whizz kid” when he was young, a boy who excelled at science and maths and for whom school came easily. No one else in his family, he says, had his technical bent (now living in the US state of Pennsylvania, he’s a university-educated software developer).

He began doggedly pursuing a scientific trail of DNA connections, which he has now chronicled in a self-published book called Who’s My Daddy?

Gottfried and Heller asked a first cousin, Roy – the son of their father’s brother – to have a genetic test. The results showed that Roy was related to Heller but not related to Gottfried. The results were confirmation for Gottfried that his biological father was not the big-hearted, hard-working, and boisterous Bronx salesman who had loved and raised him.

Eager for more data, Gottfried submitted his DNA to three more companies: Ancestry, Family Tree, and My Heritage. Subsequent results genetically linked him to other people, to differing degrees, some of whom Gottfried tracked down. Some of them were helpful; others were not.

Along the way, he heard an episode of This American Life, a US radio programme and podcast on PBS, which told the story of a Jewish man also raised by parents from the Bronx in New York, who learned late in life that his father wasn’t his biological father.

What one Hong Kong writer found out when she had her genes sequenced

The man had used DNA testing to uncover his genetic history. While his biological father turned out to be his uncle, he mentioned that he had once had suspicions about his mother’s obstetrician/gynaecologist – an esteemed specialist in Manhattan.

“Then I realised: Wait a minute. That’s the same story as my mom,” says Gottfried, who knew that after marrying his father, his mother had been unable to conceive for five years. She finally became pregnant with Gottfried after consulting a top-flight New York doctor.

He wondered how the gynaecologist fitted into his own story?

Then he found a man named David Levine, whom tests indicated was Gottfried’s second cousin. When they connected, Levine had interesting information: the doctor who had treated Gottfried’s mother was Levine’s father’s first cousin.

The second person to help was a woman from California named Maimoona Ahmed, who agreed to take a DNA test to help Gottfried uncover his genetic identity. She turned out to be Gottfried’s biological first cousin. Her father and the doctor had been brothers.

At long last, Gottfried says, he knew who his biological father was. Yet he cannot imagine, he says, there was infidelity on his mother’s part. The doctor had been an early fertility practitioner, and his mother turned to him after five years of being unable to conceive.

Gottfried then tried to learn more about the doctor, a respected man whom Ahmed, his niece, remembers with great affection.

“The whole family always put him on a pedestal. We adored him,” says Ahmed, 77, of the doctor, who died in 2001. “He was so handsome, so charming.”

Gottfried says he contacted the doctor’s now-adult children but they didn’t respond to his request to connect. Still, Gottfried has come to know four of his newly discovered second cousins and two first cousins, especially Ahmed, with whom he spent a day in California a couple of years ago.

“It was like a whole lifetime to catch up on,” he says.

DNA testing: forget about your past, what’s in your future?

In his heart, George Gottfried – the father who raised him to respect the working man, who passed on his zany sense of humour, who made him feel protected and loved – is still very much his father.

“His sperm was not used to create me, but he was my father in every sense of the word,” Gottfried says.

He’s happy about the revelations of the past few years, he adds. They’ve made him more appreciative of his unique life.

“Because you know what? As bizarre as this was, I do cherish who I am, and I’m happy with who I am,” he says. “I have my mother. I have my father who raised me. I have the father whose sperm started me off. It all came together, and I am happy with who I am.”