Woman Finds Out She Has Over 228,000 Close Family Members After DNA Test Reveals The Truth About Her Father
Krakenimages.com | Shutterstock What would it be like to discover you had been lied to your entire life by your family? One woman’s astonishing story of going through just that has gone viral.
There are a lot of options out there for people who can’t have children naturally. For example, there are no official records kept on how many births result from sperm donations, but estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of women conceive this way. Of course, it’s up to the parents to disclose that information, and they don’t always choose to do so.
This woman found out she has over 228,000 family members because her biological father was a donor.
For Christmas 2021, Gayle Worath and her husband each treated themselves to AncestryDNA kits to learn more about their heritage. After submitting her DNA and getting the results, everything seemed pretty predictable to Worath, except for one detail.
“A woman appeared on my results as a first cousin,” she recalled. “I don’t have first cousins. Both of my parents are only children. No aunts, no uncles, no first cousins.”
Worath sent the possible cousin a message through the Ancestry website, but she never responded, so she honestly just forgot about the whole thing. Then, in January 2025, the same woman reached out to her through Facebook.
She informed Worath that she showed up on her own Ancestry dashboard as a half-sibling, and she thought she knew why. “She said, ‘My father recently passed, but he was a doctor. In the late '60s/early '70s, as a way to pay for medical school, he was a sperm donor,’” Worath shared.
Worath compared learning the truth about her family to the feeling of a bomb being dropped.
She shared the rest of her story in a series of TikTok videos that is currently up to 42 parts. Throughout the different videos, Worath explained that the father who raised her passed away a few years ago, but she did confront her mom about the news. She described her mom as “difficult” and didn’t get much help from her initially, but her persistence paid off.
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Worath’s mom eventually told her that Marty, the man who raised her, had fertility issues due to a case of mumps in his childhood. So they could have children, they used two different sperm donors for her and her older sister, and never planned to tell them.
Knowing who her biological father was sooner could have changed Worath’s life in so many ways.
She experienced what researchers referred to as an NPE, or not parent expected, discovery, according to a study published in Genetics in Medicine. People in similar situations reported having both positive and negative feelings about it, depending on how their family members reacted, although most felt it was “worthwhile” to know.
There’s no way to know how many people are in Worath’s shoes. Evolutionary ecology professor Rob Brooks believes that 1% to 3% of people are wrong about the identity of their father, but it’s just an estimate.
Worath received plenty of comments from people who insisted this didn’t really matter since she was raised by a father who loved her. However, she pointed out that the man she knew as her dad suffered from bipolar disorder, and she always lived in fear that she or her daughters would develop the same condition.
Worath also went into respiratory distress after she was born and needed to be intubated, which doctors believed caused an injury to her vocal cords. It wasn’t until her eldest daughter faced the exact same situation when she was born that Worath learned they had a rare hereditary condition that was confirmed through genetic testing. Knowing the truth about their genealogy could have better prepared them for this.
The amount of money sperm donors make varies by the organization they donate through, although some are given as much as $90 per donation. It’s easy to see why that would be intriguing for someone paying for medical school. Unfortunately, the lack of regulation in the industry means stories like Worath’s are all too common.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
