Chapter 1: What drives Jess to search for her biological father?
Tortoise investigates.
Do I think about going to see these guys? I mean, this is kind of act two of this strange story, isn't it? I'm in a taxi with my producer, Katie, and we're on our way to meet one of Jess's newly discovered half-sisters and her mother. Kim and Debbie have experienced something really... It's like this terrible, terrible loss. We're trying to piece together how it came to be.
I'm speaking to them on the phone. I know how they're angry, really angry. The stakes feel quite high. Because they're hoping we'll help them find answers. Yeah, exactly. When I think back to the day Jess did her DNA test, five years ago now, I picture a large stone dropping into still black water. Splash, a circle of ripples expanding outwards.
And those waves, they've travelled quite far now, disturbing the water's calm surface.
Chapter 2: How does Jess feel about the risks of her search?
And they're still spreading. Jess's DNA sample has already linked her to her birth mother. Now Jess is using the technology to go in search of her biological father too. This time, Jess is hoping the DNA will confirm a lead she's been given. The name of a man. A man Jennifer was in a relationship with around the time Jess would have been conceived. So the timing stacks up.
His unusual Germanic surname also stacks up, because Jess's DNA results suggest some of her genes come from that part of the world. So Jess is pretty confident she's nailed this.
But she also wants to tread carefully. And I left it for a bit, though, because I thought, OK, I found them, I know they're there. And I said, but I just need to figure out how I'm going to approach this. Particularly because she's had a warning from Jennifer.
Let sleeping dogs lie. A message urging her to stop asking questions, to call off her search for her biological father.
Chapter 3: What discoveries does Jess make about her family dynamics?
And Jess tells me she understands the risk, that answers may come at a cost. She knows those ripples are about to disturb the calm surface of another family. And what she's learnt from contacting her birth mother is that she can't control what happens next. But she still has this void at the start of her life.
And she still wants answers. I'm not out to break up families and I'm sorry I was born. Like, what do you want me to do?
Jess gives it a few weeks before going on Facebook, and rather than contacting her possible father, she messages his five adult children. They all seem to live in the same town as their father, the same town where Jennifer grew up. It's a couple of hundred miles north of Jess.
It must be so surreal to be looking on Facebook at the profiles of people and you have such a secret that is going to burst into their lives.
I was like, I kept looking at the pictures thinking, how on earth is this going to work? Because the last thing I want to do is break up.
She keeps the message deliberately vague. She tells them she's researching her ancestry and she thinks they may be able to help. Only one of them replies. The eldest, Adam. And straight away, he seems to know exactly what Jess is looking for.
He kind of put two and two together and asked me how old I was. And then went, are you actually looking for your father? And I thought, I didn't want to outright say that. So I was like, well, I'm just kind of looking on that side. And he was like, but you're about the right age.
Adam's into family history, so he's already done his DNA. But he's used a different company, not the ancestry site that Jess is on. So now Jess orders a new kit. Once again, a small vial of her saliva is sealed and mailed. In a laboratory somewhere, technicians in white coats extract and decode the data.
As Jess waits for the results, that warning from her birth mother, Jennifer, plays on her mind. Please have some consideration for the impact another search could have on another family.
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Chapter 4: How does Jess's search impact her relationships with her newfound family?
Surely Jennifer knows that Jess is bound to search for her father, so why is she trying to put her off? Why is Jennifer so anxious about Jess's search? These days, Jennifer's no longer that frightened young woman. She's a respected figure, a woman with a reputation, a livelihood, a carefully built life. Is she worried that this second DNA test threatens that in some way?
As Jess's circle widens and draws in more relatives... Jess doesn't like being compared to her mother, but I think this compulsion to find things out makes her similar to Jennifer. Remember how Jennifer's curiosity led her, someone who didn't want to be found, to take a risk and reply to that Facebook message from Jess years ago? Jennifer could have ignored it, but she didn't.
And that desire to know things from the shadow of anonymity, well, it wasn't a one-off. Is this the street? Yeah, this is the street. I'm Lucy Greenwell, and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is Foundling. Episode 4, The Fallout. It doesn't take long for the DNA results to come back. They confirm, just as Jess suspected, Lewis is her father.
That man in the blurry photos Jess was shown taken in the pub back in the late 80s. So you text your birth dad and you know who it is. You've got a little bit of information from his eldest son, your new found half-brother, about him. What do you say to him in that text?
I first messaged him on the 18th of August of 2022. And I said, hi, it's Jess. Bit of a crazy day all round. I'm sure it's come as a shock to you, Jess. He replied and said, it's knocked me sideways. I just don't know what to say at the moment. I'm sure you understand, but it's so nice to hear from you.
This new connection, like so much of the story, hinges on DNA. And I want to be sure of something. It's not that DNA can lie, but it's entirely possible to misread what it's telling you.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Jess face in connecting with her half-siblings?
In your results, a close match tells you how much DNA you share with the person. It doesn't say what relation they are, because it can't. You share the exact same proportion of DNA, 25%, with someone who's your nephew, your uncle, or indeed your half-sibling. So there's room for mistakes.
My name is Michelle Leonard. I am a professional genealogist, DNA detective. I wear a lot of hats, but primarily I focus and specialize on solving mysteries, especially complex mysteries, using DNA testing.
And Michelle tells me too many people assume the DNA test process is straightforward. Spit is Lab, name pops out. In truth, it's a bit more complex than this. DNA is microscopic in size, but mighty in impact. Michelle uses it to help clients find answers about their families.
Everyone has the right to know where you come from, the right to know who your parents were and the right to have your medical history and know things that might be really important to your medical future as well.
That right to understand where you come from means Michelle will go digging whatever the potential fallout is.
However, the right to know is not the same as the right to a relationship. The parent has the right to say, I don't want to be contacted. I don't want to have a relationship. And as sad and devastating as that can be at times for the child in that instance, that has to be respected.
I went to Michelle to check that Jess had drawn the right conclusions from her DNA tests. But this feels like a salutary warning that just because you find family doesn't mean you get to keep them close. And mothers who give up their children for adoption or even abandon them as babies, they aren't necessarily waiting with open arms for the moment the child arrives back into their life.
For the person searching, it can feel like the most important quest of their life. For the person being found, it may feel like an ambush. I asked Michelle, with Jess's say-so, to take a look at all of Jess's results from the DNA companies she's used.
Hopefully we're in the right place here. OK, let's see if we can make that a bit bigger. All right, so we are looking here at Jess's ancestry results.
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Chapter 6: How does Jess's story reflect on the complexities of family bonds?
Michelle goes back further and further in time, building out generation after generation of Jess's ancestors, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. I watch the screen as she gets to work. It's kind of amazing.
these kinds of cases are like giant jigsaw puzzles. However, they're old jigsaw puzzles. All the pieces are a bit, you know, worn. There's bits missing. The box is long gone. You don't know what the original jigsaw is meant to look like. And you just have to slowly start to put these old worn pieces on the board until a picture emerges.
And it inevitably does emerge if you get enough pieces on the board. In Jess's case, the picture seems pretty clear. Jess has matches across the board.
And here's the thing. All of Michelle's detective work to check Jess's conclusions is possible even though Jess's biological parents haven't done their DNA. These databases are now so big, Michelle's able to use other people's DNA profiles to narrow a search right down. And at that point, it doesn't take much to fill in the blanks. These days, it's very hard to stay hidden.
Is it generally the case that finding out big gaps in your family using DNA leads to happy endings?
Ah, dear. That is a really good question. And it is just so individual. I've seen some beautiful happy endings. Honestly, amazing, amazing happy endings. And I've also seen some terribly, terribly sad outcomes as well.
I'd gone back home and Lewis said to me, I need to talk to you about something.
Lewis's long-term partner is Debbie. She's a slim woman with light brown hair tied back in a ponytail. We're sitting in her daughter's kitchen as the sun streams in the back window. Debbie starts slowly, like she's not used to being the one doing the talking, and she tells me how she found out about Jess.
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Chapter 7: What mental health struggles does Chloe face after Jess's arrival?
They said, can we go for a drive out, which were unusual because by this time, relationship were... I mean, tatters, really. I'd been for a while.
Debbie and Lewis have been a couple since they were in their teens. They've had five children together. But the way she tells it, the relationship hadn't been good for some time. When you think back, were there happy times?
Erm... To be honest, at the moment, I can't really think of any. I suppose there were, but at the moment, I can't.
So when he asks her to go for a drive that August evening, just the two of them, she smells a rat.
And I just said, well, can't you tell me here? And he said, no, because he didn't want neighbours to hear you. So he drives her to a pub in the countryside and buys her a drink. I sat outside because it was nice. It was summer. They were just talking like just normal and not telling me what it took me there for. And then I said to him, well, what did you want to tell me?
And he said, this is what he said. He said, I think I've got a daughter or something. This woman's been in contact and said she thinks I'm her dad. Because obviously I'd been with him since I was 17. He were a bit older, but not that much. 19. So I was just like, gobsmacked sort of thing.
Debbie asks Lewis how old this daughter is and he tells her, Debbie does the maths. Jess is almost exactly the same age as their second son.
And I just said, take me home. I did feel like smashing glass over his head, to be honest. And he just acted normal, took glasses back to the bar.
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Chapter 8: How does the revelation of Jess's existence affect Debbie and her family?
Because he knew that I couldn't kick off in pub car park, or he knew I wouldn't kick off. I know some people would have just kicked off, but he knew I wouldn't. So I just got in the car with him and he was just trying to talk and I just, I didn't want to talk to him.
Eventually, Debbie asks him to pull over and she gets out. She calls her eldest daughter, Kim.
Whenever I get a phone call, I instantly know there's something wrong. If it's not a text, I'm like, right, what the hell's going on here? So I answer his phone, I'm like, hello. And she says, do you know as well? And I'm like, what? Do you know?
And I'm like, know what? Because Debbie's paranoid that everyone's heard before she has. At the pub, Lewis had said that their two eldest sons already knew about Jess before Debbie did.
What are you talking about? And she said, that you've got another sister. I mean, my heart just dropped. I'm just thinking, what on earth? How? When? What?
Looking at the messages between family members during those crazy days after Jess appears on the scene, they all seem pretty stunned. I know at least two of his children are sure their dad Lewis had no idea Jess existed. Maybe because of this, Jess doesn't seem to judge him as harshly as she does her biological mother.
He replied and said, it's knocked me sideways. I just don't know what to say at the moment. I'm sure you understand, but it's so nice to hear from you. I don't know, he sounded quite caring. Yeah, that's what I got from it as well.
Still, it must have hurt a bit when after that brief exchange of messages, she hears nothing more. That was more than three years ago now. Jess tells me she doesn't mind, but I'm not so sure.
You go through life wanting to be accepted and wanting to be loved because you've got this little seed in your brain right from when you were born that you're not loved and you're not wanted. And then you've got this fear of rejection going into new relationships of are they going to meet me and are they actually going to want to continue to see me? And do they like me as a person?
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