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SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Earlier this year, eight siblings gathered at a beachfront resort in Fort Lauderdale for a reunion.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Wow.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hey, sweetie. How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Hello.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Good.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Good to see you.
PFEIFFER: Like you see at some get-togethers, this family makes T-shirts. Bryna (ph), a retired college professor, hands them out.
BRYNA: Someone take a picture of Joe (ph) with his T-shirt.
PFEIFFER: The T-shirts feature a photo of their father. He's a bald man with glasses.
GIL BRODSKY: Rather pleasant picture - thin lips, of course.
PFEIFFER: This is Gil Brodsky (ph), another sibling. He reads the speech bubble next to his father's mouth.
BRODSKY: It says Gilbert was my favorite.
PFEIFFER: The T-shirt is a joke in more ways than one. Gil never knew his biological father. Neither did anyone else at the table. Until a decade ago, none of these siblings knew any of the others existed, and yet here they are at a family reunion, but not like one you've ever heard of. This is the story of a secret family, a group of strangers who uncovered a decades-old deception, then out of that built genuine family bonds, turning what could have been a catastrophe into something affirming and meaningful. NPR's roving national correspondent Frank Langfitt spent the last year interviewing 18 family members as they told their story for the first time. We'll be telling it over the next three days on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Frank takes the story from here.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: I'm going to begin with Bryna. She's 65, grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. Like some other people you'll hear from in this story, Bryna doesn't want NPR to use her full name to protect the privacy of family members. For Bryna, the discovery of her secret family began with a question. Who am I related to? Bryna's mother was adopted. In 2014 when Bryna took a DNA test, she expected to find relatives she'd never heard of on her mother's side and, of course, to see some familiar names of relatives on her father's side. But when the results came back, she didn't recognize a single name.
BRYNA: I don't recognize anyone, like, no one.
LANGFITT: Where were her cousins on her father's side? Why weren't they there? There was more.
BRYNA: I think there are, like, four or five people who were listed as close relatives.
LANGFITT: Close enough to be half-siblings, but neither of her parents had had other children. Bryna wondered who these people were and thought, was she the target of some kind of scam?
BRYNA: I kept thinking, this is really sophisticated. And how much money do they actually think they're going to get from me? It's - you know, it's just crazy.
LANGFITT: Despite her initial distrust, Bryna connected with some of these supposed half-siblings. They were as baffled as she was. Bryna realized this wasn't a trick. A number of the half-siblings told Bryna they were donor conceived. Could the same be true for her? Bryna and a half-sibling named Cathy (ph) decided to share their raw DNA with an independent research geneticist to figure out how they were connected.
BRYNA: It was 3 o'clock in the morning when I received a text message from her. I hope I'm not waking you. There is no other possibility, except that you and Cathy have the same father. I don't know who the father is, but I am 100% sure.
LANGFITT: Bryna was stunned.
BRYNA: I went into a panic, and I felt like I was sinking. And then the question was, where am I in the universe? And I had a desperate need to find out.
LANGFITT: As far as Bryna knew, she had two biological parents - her mother, who had passed away, and her father. So Bryna called her dad, who was then in his 80s.
BRYNA: The question I asked is, did you and Mom have any help with fertility treatment back when I was conceived? And my father's very good at - he's - he was a master. If he didn't want to deal with something, he would deny it. And he basically said, you know, oh, I - no, no, I don't know. Maybe your mother did something that I don't know about. And I just thought, OK, there it is.
LANGFITT: Bryna now knew the man who had raised her, whom she'd called Dad for five decades, he wasn't her biological father. She became determined to find out who was. And along this journey, she'd get a lot of help. As the months and years passed, more half-siblings appeared through DNA websites such as 23andMe and ancestry.com. David Staskin, a fellow half-sibling, is a urological surgeon in Boston. He, too, took a DNA test and remembers reading the results.
DAVID STASKIN: I get up, and I look at the thing - half-brother, half-sister, half-brother, half-sister, half-brother.
LANGFITT: Eventually, they discovered 64 half-siblings, all with the same biological father. The actual number is probably much higher. Only a small percentage of Americans have taken a consumer DNA test. One of the siblings, John Lowell (ph), is an actuary. He estimates that the total number of siblings could be 400 or more. Bryna created a private Facebook page for the growing group. Figuring out who their father was was tough, but there were clues. All the half-siblings had been born in and around Philadelphia between 1945 and 1971. Most grew up in Jewish families. A genetic cousin got in touch with the half-siblings. More than a year of sleuthing and blind alleys followed. They learned the donor was a doctor, and the cousin had a realization. Diane (ph), a half-sibling and author who lives in Boston, explains.
DIANE: He had an uncle who was a world-renowned male infertility specialist, and he just had a feeling that this could be the missing link.
LANGFITT: The specialist's name was Dr. Charles Charny. Charny was an Ivy League-educated, pioneering medical researcher. He'd served as the senior attending urological surgeon at what was then Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. The half-siblings needed to confirm it was Charny. The problem? He'd been dead for years.
DIANE: But he had a living daughter.
LANGFITT: This is Diane again.
DIANE: So they call the daughter. They say, hi - we think your father, ta-da-da-da (ph). And she basically says, I don't want to have anything to do with you guys. This is ridiculous, da, da, da, da, da (ph).
LANGFITT: I reached out to Charny's daughter several times. She never responded. The half-siblings brainstormed. How could they confirm it was Charny without his daughter's cooperation?
DIANE: They're so overthinking this. So I finally said, look, does this woman have any kids? Yeah. Do you know their names? Yeah. I said, well, give us the names, and let's all go on LinkedIn and see if we know anybody connected to these guys.
LANGFITT: Diane found she had a friend who'd gone to law school with one of Charny's two grandsons. The law school grandson did not take a DNA test, but his brother did.
DIANE: He did 23andMe, and he was connected to us. And that's kind of how it all got confirmed. I think there was some just plain old relief. I mean, this was a long process.
LANGFITT: But there was so much more to come.
DIANE: It was a mystery story. OK, so we have a name now. Who was this person?
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PFEIFFER: That was reporting by NPR's Frank Langfitt. Tune in tomorrow same time to find out - who was Charles Charny?
DENA HARRIS: I think he was a bit eccentric. I mean, it must have been sitting somewhere in his mind that what he did was odd.
PFEIFFER: How did this work?
DIANE: What they were told was, we are going to take your sperm, and we're going to give it a boost.
PFEIFFER: And what might have driven him? Come back tomorrow for more of this story. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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