Ontario resident Carly McMaster says she submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com in 2019 to discover more about her father’s family after his death.
The 28-year-old Brantford, Ont., resident said she was just looking to learn about her family’s health history when she made the life-changing discovery.
The website matched her genetic information to a woman in Minnesota named Riley Hall, and they started talking about how they might be related.
“I really didn’t say much when Riley first reached out because I just didn’t know. I just questioned everything … It was shocking,” McMaster told CTV News Toronto on Monday.
“I think four months later I finally got back in touch with Instagram and said maybe we’ll try to dig in and figure it out.”
At that point, she said she and Hall talked often and found unique similarities — their mannerisms, the distinctive blue ring around their hazel eyes and their musical backgrounds.
They eventually learned that the similarities were no coincidence, as McMaster and Hall shared a biological father and were both conceived through sperm donation.
“At first I was shocked. I think it was a lot of questioning my identity, but I was also really excited to have that relationship at the same time,” McMaster said.
“I had to process the fact that the father I grew up with wasn’t my biological father, but also that I had this new relationship.”
Hall said the sibling relationship didn’t come as a huge shock to her because her mother told her she was conceived through a sperm donation a year before she took the test.
“I knew there was potential to meet siblings,” the 27-year-old American told CTV News Toronto on Monday. “So I wasn’t shocked when the news was confirmed.”
The siblings say they feel grateful to have met.
“For me, it’s just winning over someone who I know is there for life. It’s just such a strong bond that we share,” McMaster said.
Their story took a new turn when they decided it was time to look for their ‘donor father’. Hall said she was able to find him on Facebook after connecting with other relatives on genealogy websites.
“He messaged me after I added him,” Hall said.
“Which was nice because it was kind of a confirmation that he really wanted to talk.” We’re not forcing it, which was nice,” McMaster added.
The siblings said they now talk to their biological father, a Toronto resident, at least once a week.
“He’s been very supportive of us already,” McMaster said. “He’s been really great so far and he’s just a super cool sweet dude.”
They said that in the early 1990s, their biological father was donating at Canadian Blood Services, where he was a regular platelet donor, when he noticed an ad urging people to help families who could not have children.
“In the paperwork my parents got, there was a question ‘would you be willing to meet an offspring,’ and he ticked yes,” Hall said.
Hall said he plans to visit Ontario a second time in late August. The sisters say they will also meet their biological father in person for the first time.
The sisters say they discovered there are three other siblings they know about. The other siblings, they said, are female and were born in the mid-1990s in Canada.
Both Hall and McMaster said that while they are excited to meet new siblings, they are very careful in how they approach potential siblings because they don’t want to give the information away prematurely.
“It just depends on the other person and whether they’re ready to have siblings, because some people probably don’t want to deal with it at all,” Hall said.
The sisters are launching a new podcast on Monday called Our Dad is a Donor. The podcast will look at their experiences and discuss the stories of other people who were conceived through sperm donation and who discovered the truth later in life.
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