Carly McMaster was looking for more information on her father’s side of the family when she submitted her DNA in 2019 to Ancestry.com.
The longtime Brantford, Ont., resident, whose father died several years earlier, said while she wanted to learn more about her family’s health history, a test to determine her genetic information linked her to the DNA of a Minnesota woman named Riley Hall.
After connecting through Ancestry.com, Hall and McMaster began talking in April 2019, including about how they might be related.
So McMaster learned that they shared a biological father whom they had never met.
“I was definitely shocked because I had no idea, and really, if I hadn’t done Ancestry, I probably wouldn’t have known,” McMaster, 28, said.
Hall, shown here as a child, always felt she looked different from the rest of her family growing up. Now that she’s discovered McMaster, the two sisters say they can see the similarities in their faces. (Submitted by Rylee Hall)
Hall, 26, said she was shocked too, but she always felt something was wrong – she felt she looked different from other members of her family and suspected her father might not be her biological father.
Hall’s mother had told her she was conceived through a sperm donation a year before she contacted McMaster.
Hall said her mother had always planned to break the news to her eventually, but the timing never seemed right. She said her mother finally told her the truth after Hall told her he planned to take a test on Ancestry.com.
“It’s not like everybody’s going to tell their child it’s coming from a sperm donor, so you can’t really prepare for that,” Hall said.
“I was happy that she told me, but maybe a little upset about the way she did it and that she waited so long.”
McMaster, shown in a childhood photo, says she never would have known she was conceived through a sperm donation if she hadn’t submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com. (Submitted by Carly McMaster)
Hall said that when she approached McMaster, she didn’t say outright that they were half-sisters because she wanted to be gentle about breaking the news.
McMaster said that after she and Hall concluded they were sisters, the Brantford resident backed away because she thought Hall was playing a prank on her.
“Now that I think about it, I probably doubted my identity a little bit, but at the time it was more like, ‘Push this unknown thing. I don’t want to deal with it,” McMaster said.
Ten months after Hall and McMaster first connected, McMaster said she sat down with her mother and they finally talked about it.
McMaster said her mother told her she was conceived through a sperm donation and the father who raised her was not her biological father.
McMaster quoted his mother as saying, “It was very taboo back then, so we didn’t know how to tell you.”
While McMaster initially didn’t know how to process the discovery, “I’m definitely happy about it now because I have Riley.”
The donor
Both McMaster and Hall are in contact with Grant, a Toronto resident they didn’t know existed, but who they learned was their biological father.
In the early 1990s, Grant left Canadian Blood Services, where he was a regular platelet donor, when he noticed an ad.
“They had an ad for fertility donors in the clinic elevator,” Grant told CBC Hamilton in an interview. He signed up to donate sperm for the same reason he donated blood — because he wanted to help, he said. He did not want his full name used for privacy reasons.
Grant said he has been donating twice a week for almost three years, except for Christmas. Each donation produces about four vials, he said.
Grant, now in his late 50s, said he tried to do the math and estimate how many people he could be genetically related to through sperm donation. He suggests there may be hundreds, but the exact number is unclear.
Hall said her mother went through a full year of treatment before becoming pregnant.
“Because my mom is older, she went to the clinic every month and did it 12 times … once a month for a whole year, and at the 13th month they were like, ‘Oh, it worked.'”
It’s unclear how Grant’s sperm donation ended up in Minnesota, but he theorizes that it was due to his longevity and success as a donor.
The documents the Hall family received when choosing a man named Grant as their donor. He was then identified only by a donor number. (Submitted by Rylee Hall)
“If you’re a long enough donor and you have successful pregnancies, they’re going to have to change geography,” he said.
Grant said he was told that for every five successful pregnancies in a given geographic area, the sample would be moved. (Grant said the bank never specified the exact size of the area.)
Fertility clinics use this approach to prevent an area from being overpopulated with children who are genetically related.
In the two years between the births of McMaster and Hall, Grant said, the donations probably worked and should have been moved further west.
Grant said that when he donated in the 1990s, he had no idea that technology would advance enough to be detected through online DNA testing. He said he had almost forgotten about his time as a sperm donor over the decades until a young woman, not McMaster or Hall, reached out to him.
Meeting the young donor-conceived women was a moving experience for Grant.
“For 30 years you just wonder about it and you know, all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve got a kid that’s grown. What does this child look like? What are their usual things?’ You know, nature versus nurture,” he said.
From strangers to sisters
After McMaster embraced she has a sister in the US, they became closer. At first, they shared long phone conversations, and Hall said they still message each other a lot on every social media.
But their relationship deepened last fall, about a year after they first met, when Hall traveled to Ontario and stayed with McMaster in Brantford for 10 days.
“It felt so normal when we were together,” McMaster said.
“We have a lot of catching up to do,” Hall said.
McMaster and Hall got butterfly tattoos during Hall’s visit to Ontario last fall to celebrate their sisterhood. (Submitted by Carly McMaster)
While in Ontario, Hall met all of McMaster’s family and her friends. The two even got matching butterfly tattoos as a symbol of their sisterhood.
Hall plans to return to Ontario this August for an even bigger reunion.
Grant said that at the end of the summer, McMaster, Hall, he and his 17-year-old son will meet up and spend a weekend together in Toronto.
“They’re just going to see what happens,” he said.
3 other siblings
There’s more to McMaster-Hall’s story.
Through DNA websites, they have found other relatives.
“We found three other siblings, so we’re five so far,” McMaster said.
The other siblings are female and were born in the mid-1990s in Canada. The three live in Western Canada, mostly British Columbia.
McMaster and Hall said that when they find a potential sibling, they will work together to draft a message that doesn’t directly mention how they might be related to see if the women already know.
“We don’t want to upset anybody or upset them if they don’t know,” Hall said.
“Obviously, I never want to ruin anybody’s life,” McMaster said.
“Or the relationship they have with their parents,” Hall added.
The podcast tells the story of half-sisters
Because they both had to tell their stories many times to different people, McMaster and Hall got the idea for a podcast they called Our Dad is a Donor.
McMaster and Hall’s podcast, Our Dad Is a Donor, will reveal their story and also have discussions about other sperm donor stories. The two hope to release their first episode on Spotify and Apple Music this August. (Submitted by Carly McMaster)
The couple plans to retell their own story and then branch out and discuss other stories of people conceived through sperm donation who have discovered the truth.
Grant said he’s proud of McMaster and Hall for starting the podcast because it can help others in similar situations.
“Hearing someone else’s story makes us feel better because we don’t feel alone,” he said.
The podcast is scheduled for release in August and will be available on Spotify and Apple Music.
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