Ancestry.com Test Reveals Woman's OB/GYN Might Be Her Biological Father

Websites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe purport to give people insight into where they and their families came from through DNA testing. When a Washington state woman sent in a DNA sample to Ancestry.com in 2017, she had no idea what kind of familial and legal drama would come from it, according to a Washington Post report.

After her DNA sample was tested by Ancestry.com and the results got back to her, Kelli Rowlette cried foul. The service not only connected her genetically to a man she had never heard of, named Gerald Mortimer, it told her that Mortimer was her father.

Rowlette contacted her mother Sally Ashby with the news, calling the results bogus. However, Ashby got in touch with the now-divorced father Howard Fowler, as they both knew the truth: Mortimer was the OB/GYN who helped the struggling, aspiring parents conceive with what was supposed to be an anonymous sperm donor when the couple lived in Idaho.

In 1980, Ashby and Fowler decided to resort to artificial insemination, using a combination of Fowler’s sperm and that of an unknown person who supposedly matched their requested traits. They wanted a tall, college student with brown hair and blue eyes. Mortimer said he got sperm from someone matching that description.

Rowlette, who had no idea she was even the product of such a procedure, has accused Mortimer of surreptitiously using his own sperm and not the sperm of a donor like he said he would. All of this came to light in a lawsuit filed to Idaho’s U.S. District Court in March.

Though Ashby and Fowler had their suspicions after Rowlette told them the Ancestry.com results, they did not divulge everything to her right away. She discovered that Mortimer delivered her on the day of her birth on her own, by looking at her birth certificate. In the months since, the family has “suffered immeasurably,” per the language used in the lawsuit.

The now-retired obstetrician was accused of medical negligence, breach of contract and fraud, among other things, in the lawsuit.

Rowlette and her family seem convinced by the results of her Ancestry.com test, but there have been plenty of questions over the years about the trustworthiness of private, internet-based services like it. DNA tests from Ancestry.com and 23andMe have been known to show slightly different geographical ancestry for siblings or even identical twins, for example. While the big picture results are generally on-point, specific, smaller details might be wrong due to database errors or other problems.

However, not all stories like this are unhappy. A Texas man was able to reunite with the daughter he gave up for adoption when he was a teenager after more than three decades apart over the weekend, KHOU reported. The two found each other thanks to the results of an Ancestry.com test.