DNA Tests Often Give Up Family Secrets. Not Like This One

Mike Mitchell, who died in 1991, raised eight children with his wife. One of them, David, was born in Montreal on March 15, 1954. More than 60 years later, David learned a girl born in the same city on the very same day was also Mike Mitchell's child. In a lengthy piece for the Washington Post, Jaclyn Peiser delves into this "unusual version of a familiar story from our era, where DNA has brought to light numerous family secrets." It involves Mike Mitchell, a woman who was not his wife named Anne Bryntwick, and, decades later, the DNA testing and databases that have become ubiquitous. Bryntwick's son Bob grew up as one of five siblings, but recalled his mother giving birth, nearly annually, to a child who would soon disappear.

DNA testing would ultimately reveal that at least eight children were born to Anne and Mike—Bob said that Mike visited his mother for weekends here and there—between August 1949 and April 1957, and six of them ended up being sold to Jewish families. (So Anne had 11 known children total.) Bob says he recalls being told by his oldest brother that Mike got $10,000 per child, a practice that wasn't illegal in Quebec at the time. (Mike was Jewish, Anne wasn't, and Peiser digs into why the demand for Jewish children to adopt was high at the time.) Peiser details the sequence in which the siblings came to find each other, some secrets that still had to be revealed, and the lives the siblings experienced—some stable and loving, some unstable and abusive. (Read the full story here.)