Shirley and her half-sibling Becky told their stories at a DCN national meeting in 2014. 

“Firstly I will give you a little background information, as we have each come to this search for our biological father and half siblings with widely different experiences.

My parents – and already I have run into the semantic difficulties endemic when discussing donor conception – my parents, mother Eileen and social father Ray married during the war. Ray, who was a draughtsman, was turned down for military service on the grounds, as far as I ever ascertained, of tics and twitches and general oddness. Many, many years later he was diagnosed as suffering from Huntington’s disease, an inherited degenerative neurological disease. Whatever the difficulties being conceived through donor conception have brought, I have always been mindful of how very much more hard my life could have been if Ray had been my biological father.

The marriage was never consummated.

In the winter of 1947 my parents adopted a baby girl, Hazel. In 1949 they were adopting a baby boy but he died at 6months from a congenital heart defect . Not being able to face the trauma of adopting again my mother decided to conceive a baby through ‘artificial insemination by donor’ as it was then called. I was born in May 1950.

At nine or ten I started saying that I would never have children in case they were like Ray. My mother decided that I had to be told of my conception. I felt betrayed and angry, as though I had been punched in the stomach. And I wanted to know who my ‘real father’ was.
All my mother could tell me was that he was probably a doctor or a medical student or a policeman: that he would have had three children to make sure that any babies he made would be strong and healthy. Interestingly, a few years ago, we discovered my sister’s birth father was a policeman and her mother had three children – I wonder if my mother wasn’t trying to create some narrative to unite our cobbled together family. I wanted to know more but my mother knew nothing else and was clearly uncomfortable discussing the matter.

I fantasised about this missing part of my life, imagining a dashing young doctor as my father – but this didn’t fit in with the three children that my mother had said he had, so later on I created an avuncular GP with three shadowy teenage children in the background. At 15 I left home and went to live with my boyfriend and at 16 I married him.

When I was 19 we discovered that he was sterile: later he was diagnosed with a lung disease, bronchiectasis, which is associated with male sterility. My experience led me to feeling more sympathy for my mother’s decision to have a baby through donor concception and I wrote off to the clinic where I had been conceived, to see if they would treat me. But I never followed this up. Partly because as much as my husband loved children, he loved alcohol even more. And it felt all wrong to have a child as adrift in the world as I felt – two generations of weirdly conceived children. Later, in about 1974, I wrote to the clinic again asking if there was any way of finding out who my father was but the reply stated that the clinic had been closed and all records burned.

I tried not to think too much about the whole subject but always wondered who my biological father was and how many half brothers and sisters I had out there. Fast forward to about 2000. One Sunday morning my husband – not the one that was overly fond of alcohol: that marriage ended in 1980 – my second husband, David, passed me the Sunday paper. There was, he said a very interesting article. And there was. It was about a man called John and his sister who had been conceived at the same clinic as me, and the half brother who they had traced. Well I read and reread that article. I studied their three faces, looking for similarities, searching for a little bit of me in them. I drafted several letters to them but never sent them.

Then I saw another article about donor conception that gave details of the Donor Conception Network and I contacted Olivia. She put me in contact with David, the half brother that John and his sister had traced. He invited us around that very day and I met the very first donor conceived adult of my life. Suddenly I was not quite so odd. I liked David. He was very clever and quick and insightful and a little bit prickly. Of course I studied him, as I am sure he did me. I looked at his hands mainly, perhaps because that is less embarrassing than studying someone’s face, as he told me about some of the other donor conceived adults he knew. He mentioned that he thought that I looked like one, Barbara. For the first time in my life there was a feeling that I could have some hope that I might discover half brothers and sisters. I didn’t dare hope that I might one day discover who my biological father was.

As we left John’s house my husband asked if I thought that there was a chance that he could be a half brother. I confidently replied that I thought it highly unlikely as we did not look at all alike as he was fair with blue eyes. Over the next year I was tested against ‘Barbara’ and Tina, another donor conceived adult. Both times I was disappointed to be told that a relationship was unlikely. It was not easy. I somehow knew that Barbara wasn’t a half sibling, and when I met Tina I didn’t feel that she was either. The colouring was all wrong.

Here I must point out that DNA testing for half sibling relationships is not straightforward if the father is unknown. As more potential half siblings and their mothers’ DNA are added to the equation so the picture becomes clearer. I don’t feel that DNA testing should be undertaken lightly. The very fact that one is searching for ones identity makes one vulnerable. I felt very much as though I was on an emotional roller coaster at this time and I think that had I not been in a supportive relationship or had been younger and less secure I would have found it overwhelmingly disturbing.

Next I met John, together with David, at the Tate Gallery Cafe. David and John were very at ease with each other, joking and teasing each other: very much the brothers. I felt a bit of a spare part but as I glanced at John’s face something reminded me of my own: the lines on his forehead, the set of his chin. Probably fanciful. Out came the swab for John to take a DNA sample from my cheek – with the waiter looking on curiously and rather impatiently as he wanted to shut up the café. Six or so weeks later the results came back – negative.

There was one other person that I could be tested against – Nancy. John thought that I was a little like her. Now she had tested positive against the son of a scientist who it was known had donated sperm about the time that we were conceived, and who had agreed to have a DNA sample taken. Therefore Nancy had found not just a half sibling but also who her father was – Dr. A. Once more I was tested. Six weeks later the result came through. Positive. And that was one of the most fantastic days of my life. I felt euphoric. It was the fulfilment of that long ago childish fantasy: I had found out who my father was. OK, he was dead but he did, in fact, have three children.

Dr. A’s son did indeed have two sisters, neither of whom wished to be involved in this endeavour, quite understandably. But I had long conversations with Nancy on the phone and emails whipped back and forth and we sent each other photos of ourselves at various stages of our lives and she was prettier than me throughout her life. She was better educated, had a high profile, high status job, was very witty and clever – luckily she was older than me. I had very definite stirrings of sibling rivalry.

And then there was my sister, Hazel. I kind of think of her as my proper sister, although we share not one jot of DNA. between us. I was concerned that my discovery would have an impact upon our relationship and for a while I felt our relationship was a little strained. At her behest I had researched her birth family and tracked down where her half siblings lived but she had never wanted to contact them, fearing rejection. We are very different people, but she is my proper sister and I love her dearly. My mother didn’t really want to know anything about my new found identity either but that was understandable – she came from an era where secrecy was the norm.

My husband David and I visited Dr A’s son and his wife. He was so warm and generous hearted, showing me the family albums and talking all about his father, well my father too I suppose. I hoped that I wasn’t invading his space, taking too much of his time. And how did he feel about yet another half sibling turning up?

Then I discovered that I had two more half siblings, Peter and Diana.
I met up with Peter and Dr A’s son and we talked for hours. I was beginning to see one definite family resemblance, we are all talkers. And again I felt that feeling of sibling rivalry – Peter was again very well educated and extremely bright. I felt rather less than either of those things. Funnily enough I don’t feel sibling rivalry in relation with Dr A’s son, perhaps because I see him as de facto head of the clan. I did, however, wonder just how he was adjusting to all these half siblings. Well the poor man hadn’t seen anything yet. Further DNA testing sorted relationships out, revealing that nine of us were his half siblings! Wow.

This was rather a bomb shell. Certainly not what I was expecting when I first set out to find a half sibling or two. Now, I can’t wrap up neatly just how I feel about all this. The picture is now very much more complex. We now have another half sister Louise, who was identified less than two years ago. She’s great fun, talks a lot and writes well, a teacher like me, so we have a lot in common.
Louise, together with John, David, Peter, Becky and assorted partners and children, got together with Dr. A’s son and his wife in September 2004 for a remarkable picnic. I think that we were all apprehensive but it turned out to be one of the most memorable days of my life. Never, in my wildest adolescent dreams could I have imagined such a scene. Blimey, could everyone talk. And it was clear that the men were very competitive. I felt great pleasure in having such interesting half siblings but the by now familiar feeling of being rather less than them, didn’t leave me all that day – I guess that I am pretty competitive too.

The alliances and bonds that are inevitable in such a large group are there but we all get on and I feel that there is great tolerance of each other foibles. I think that what we have all discovered is far too precious to be jeopardized by any egotistical behaviour. Now yet another half sister has turned up. In the end there are too many of us to have close, frequent contact with each other. We are not some adult Von Trapp family, as Louise remarked; we are too diverse and anyway the eldest and the youngest keeps shifting and changing… but we are a clan: there is some essence that I presume comes from Dr A’s DNA, that makes each of my half siblings seem to be familiar to me. Of course more half siblings could turn up at any time during the future which can make it all seem a little daunting at times.

None of this has been easy, nor is there a fairy tale happy ending. Rather it needs a great deal of working at, like anything worth having and will keep evolving and changing. A friend, who has been very dismissive of the enterprise from the very beginning, asked the other day, “Do you still see those people?” Of course I do, ‘those people’ are very special. In them I see a commonality and a reflection of who I am, or at least the part of me that was missing for so long. Not a fairy tale ending but just about as good as life gets.