A San Francisco woman has gone from being an only child to having 29 siblings after joining a DNA testing service.
According to CNN, Shauna Harrison, 41, logged into her 23andMe account and switched off her anonymity setting back in 2017. She was immediately contacted by someone who told her they share the same donor father.
When Harrison was 27, her parents had told her that they had used a sperm donor to conceive her. However, she didn't realize how quickly and dramatically her family would expand.
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Now there are 30 siblings in all, ranging in age from 24 to 41. Most of them live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and many went to school near one another. Harrison met Jodi Hale, one of her siblings, two years ago and they established an instant connection.
“It’s just nice to have someone else that is in sort of the same place and you have a lot of the same history,” Hale told ABC News. “It’s fun.”
Hale explained that she grew up as an only child and that she always felt different from her family. But once she finally met up with some of the people who share her DNA, Hale discovered that they shared similar interests and mannerisms.
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Via: SFGate[/caption]
Some of the siblings created a Facebook page to keep connected, Harrison said. While some are more involved than others, Harrison said that they use the Facebook page to share updates, keep tabs on birthdays and share information on the growing family.
One brother, Ben Clark, has even created a set of slides that provide information on the donor, the siblings who are involved in the page and how they all came together, with as many FAQs as possible. The group suspects there are more siblings to discover.
"The biggest thing is that it's such an odd situation that there's not a lot of people who can understand," Harrison said. "You know what it's like to know that your dad is not your dad or to wake up and have a new sibling."
He added: "It's nice to have people to go through this process with." Well, the more the merrier!
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