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Rhiannon Ingle
A man who fathered 96 kids via sperm donations has resigned from work to track them all down.
Dylan Stone-Miller, a 32-year-old software engineer from Georgia, has embarked upon a staggering 9,000-mile road trip this summer to see some of his many children.
It all started when he first saw a photo of one of his biological children - a toddler named Harper.
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"I think of her as my first child," he told the Wall Street Journal.
Stone-Miller first met Harper when she was just three years old and from that point, he decided to strike up relationships with as many of his offspring as possible.
To do so, he resigned from his job and funded his new life calling with his savings and has already met 25 of his biological children.
While that's a massive achievement for Stone-Miller, he revealed: "I will never know for sure how many children I have."
When Stone-Miller and his wife split up back in 2020, he received a message reading: "I really hope you don’t feel violated in any way, but it’s Canadian Thanksgiving and I wanted to tell you how grateful my family is to you."
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The message came from Alicia Bowes, one of Harper’s two mothers who had managed to track down her daughter's donor through social media and clues from his donor file.
Such clues included his first name and his father’s occupation as a forensic psychologist.
From there, Stone-Miller saw a photo of Harper on Bowes' Instagram page and asked the mother if he could join a Facebook group of parents named 'Xytex 5186 Offspring' after his sperm bank ID.
She went on to create a new group of those interested and, when Stone-Miller told the group he was eager to meet their children, the parents of 20 eventually responded.
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"I wanted to watch the children grow up," he said.
Bowes, who has allowed Stone-Miller to visit twice in the past year, has since revealed: "There are moments when it feels intrusive with Dylan.
"It’s about us figuring out what boundaries are, as well as him figuring out his boundaries."
Talking about her daughter, she added: "I don’t want Harper to feel like she can call him anything.
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"He is not her dad. Period. If she were to say that in front of us, we would straight up say, 'Dylan is not your dad. He will never be your dad. You don’t have a dad. You have a donor'."
That situation was clearly difficult for Stone-Miller who admitted: "It was hard to look my biological daughter in the eye and tell her I wasn’t her dad."
"We came on the scene when he was going through hard times," Bowes explained. "Being with the children gave him a renewed sense of purpose.
"As we get to know him more, we all feel more comfortable. But my sense is he is going to feel more entitled, which can be problematic. We need to keep enough walls up to protect our girls and our family, but to make them permeable enough that he can come in."
Stone-Miller now keeps a spreadsheet for his children's names, ages, birthdays and when he last saw or spoke with them to keep track of it all.