DNA test upends family story, adoption network emerges

A 2022 Ancestry.com DNA test led David McGrath to learn his father was almost certainly adopted, contradicting the family’s lifelong Irish identity and opening a painful, late-life reckoning with the missing piece of his father’s origins.

For David McGrath, the shock didn’t arrive with a dramatic phone call or a funeral revelation. It came in 2022, after a sister decided to try a DNA test—and the result landed with the force of a decade-long story cracking.

Her report showed “not a single trace of Irish blood” coursing through her veins. For a large Irish Catholic family that had spent half a century celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with green carnations and derby hats. the finding was so jarring it pushed the group through four of the five stages of grief: denial. anger. bargaining and depression.

But the narrative didn’t end with the initial test. In March. McGrath sent $99 and his own saliva sample to Ancestry.com hoping his own results would “come back blooming with shamrocks.” Instead. the DNA analysis returned a different picture—origins that were predominantly Polish and Greek. with “zero centimorgans (genetic unit of measurement) of Irish DNA.”.

The question that followed wasn’t just about heritage. It was about a father.

On the side of McGrath’s late mother, Gertrude Cichoszewski—labeled Parent No. 1 by Ancestry—matches appeared in a long list that included dozens of Polish relatives. Names such as the Pletzkes and Szymikowskis surfaced. along with the implication that their families had been part of his life: birthdays. weddings and christenings celebrated together.

On the side of his late father, Charles McGrath—Parent No. 2—matches told a different story. The Irish relatives McGrath had known for decades—Ray and May McGrath. his father’s parents. along with the McGraths. Goines and other Irish relatives. including sisters. brothers. nephews and nieces who shared Christmases and St. Patrick’s Day festivities—failed to appear in the DNA results.

What remained on Charles McGrath’s side were strangers, most bearing Greek surnames.

A nonprofit genealogy expert at SearchAngels.org. Kira Bricknell. described this kind of unexplained matching as a “classic indicator of an undisclosed adoption.” McGrath said the science pointed to no familial connection to the relatives of his father’s parents—and instead to a different family tree overwhelmingly Greek. Taken together. the conclusion he drew was stark: his father was not biologically related to the people he’d been raised with. meaning he was almost certainly adopted.

The new DNA map also tied into details that had never fit neatly before. McGrath pointed to an “Affidavit of Birth” that replaced his father’s birth certificate. He also said his father was an only child, and that the family’s medical histories did not align with those of Ray and May.

The people behind the strangers’ surnames became part of his investigation. McGrath asked who might be among the relatives that shared his DNA. including those with Greek surnames such as Steriotis. Bokos and Carras. One person still possibly alive—someone who might be Charles’ sister—was described as a potentially close living connection. McGrath said his niece. Lisa Anderson. provided “crucial technical expertise” that helped trace the McGrath family DNA. and that this possible relative lived just blocks from where his father grew up.

What hurt most, McGrath said, was not merely that the family’s Irish identity had been overstated. It was that the DNA results suggested a hidden origin his father never knew or never revealed.

McGrath said his father may have been among the thousands of Greek children adopted in the 20th century, and he wondered whether this could explain why his father’s appearance—his “handsome face, dark hair, stocky physique and personal magnetism”—did not closely resemble those of Ray McGrath.

Yet McGrath emphasized a painful contradiction: adoption, apparently, had never been spoken of at home. “All our lives. ” he said. there was “not a single whisper or rumor of adoption.” His father was devoted to Ray and May until their deaths. Neither Charles McGrath nor McGrath’s mother, nor any of their aunts and cousins, ever suggested there was a secret.

That silence didn’t close the case for McGrath. Instead, it turned into an emotional detective story. He acknowledged he can’t be totally sure whether his father knew the truth. But he said knowing he “may have been an orphan. ” that his real mother may not have wanted him. or that his parents may not have loved him the same way he loved his family. left him sad—and kept him awake at night.

In those sleepless hours, memories returned as he tried to reconcile the father he knew with the father his DNA suggested.

And in the middle of that grief, McGrath found a different kind of resolution: a belief that adoption, for all the unanswered questions it can carry, can also be a “wonderful gift.” In his telling, the discovery reframed his father’s life as bigger than the family story he thought he knew.

McGrath described his father’s life in vivid, ordinary scenes that now carry added weight. In the early 1960s. a Saturday in spring brought the family to Chicago for a grade school reunion weekend at St. Anne’s Parish. They visited his school and church and then. afterward. his father bought root beer floats with homemade ice cream at the same drug store where he’d enjoyed them as a kid.

McGrath said his father became an exceptional student at Mount Carmel High School. citing “Rewards of Merit for Excellence in Scholarship” certificates the family still has. He also said his father proved exceptional in the Army. was sent to officer training school and rose swiftly to the rank of captain during World War II.

After the war, McGrath said his father worked in sales at Spiegel, then Consolidated Tile & Carpet, and then Calgon. He described him as funny, charismatic and cherished—someone who pushed his children on swings at Sherman Park on Sunday afternoon during that same weekend routine.

His father’s public life also appears in McGrath’s account. He served as president of the neighborhood association and later won election as village trustee of Evergreen Park. McGrath said his father was married to Gertrude for over 50 years and that together they had eight children and 15 grandchildren. He described their extended impact in a long list of professions: lawyers. public sector workers. teachers. medical professionals. electrical and machine technicians. writers. soldiers and artists.

To McGrath, the DNA revelation doesn’t diminish that life. It reshapes it. The rich and impactful story of his father, he wrote, was “a bigger success story than we knew,” made possible by what he called “a compassionate American adoption network” and by “a married couple who happened to be Irish.”

He ended with pride—not only in the father he knew. but in “his dad and all the others out there who are fathers in the very best sense of the word.” For a family that began with Irish identity and ended with Greek strangers in the DNA results. the transformation is what remains: a painful missing origin. and a renewed insistence on what love and family can become anyway.

Ancestry.com DNA test adoption genealogy Irish heritage Polish and Greek ancestry SearchAngels.org Kira Bricknell affidavit of birth family history