A woman has shared the incredible story about how a DNA test revealed a huge family ‘secret’ after the results revealed her grandmother’s history wasn’t quite as she said it was. Watch her TikTok video here:
The TikToker, who’s been sharing updates at @thekennedyproj, explained that her family recently took DNA tests from a company called 23andMe.
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The results came back to tell them that they are of African American descendant, despite being told by the grandmother that they were of ‘English’ heritage.
She said: "My grandmother took a secret to her grave and we just found out what it was.
"She passed back in 2002 and at the time we thought she was born in 1933, we knew her name and we knew that she was an orphan and she was an only child and that we had no other family connections to her whatsoever and the family line lived and died with her.
"So find me confused when our family gets results back from 23andMe test telling us we are African American, when my grandmother said that we were English and I know, looking at me, you're going to be very confused because I am too."
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She said her family was currently ‘figuring out all the details’, adding that the test had matched them up to a family in Virginia, US – something that wasn’t ‘too strange’ as her grandparents had met in Maryland and ended up moving ‘across the country’.
However, things became particularly baffling when the family in Virginia started pulling out photos that revealed the grandmother was one of 15 siblings, having told them she was an only child.
She continued: "It turns out that Millicent Vaughn was born Mammy Vaughn back in 1927, not 33. She was born to a family of 15 children, all African American living in Virginia.
"While her parents did die when she was young, she was not an orphan and an only child like she had said she was.
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“She had people taking care of her and she had a whole family.
“It turns out that she had decided to run away from her family and completely exorcise herself from her identity. She picked up a new name, she picked up a new race and she completely erased who she was.”
The woman said it felt ‘surreal and strange’ to have a ‘whole new family’, saying: “There’s this part of me that doesn’t really know who I am.
“And I think what surprises me the most is the fact that her story is not uncommon for the US at that time.
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"Because she was white-passing, she chose to completely reinvent herself and go by a completely different name and racial identity, just to create a better life for herself.”
In a later video, she also encouraged others to share their own family history stories using a form listed in her bio.
“I know that my grandmother’s story is not unique,” she said.
“And that is so exciting, because that means that so many other people are going to have the opportunity to heal their own family relationships, heal their past.”
Jess Hardiman