“It kind of consumed me,” says the mother of eight. She finally discovered the identity of her biological father, Bill Chavez of New Mexico, who had died when Ketchum was just 17. “Every Hispanic person I saw on the street, I thought, ‘Are you my cousin?’ ”Īs an only child whose parents were both deceased, she had nobody to turn to for answers. “I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t know who I was anymore,” she says. I’m Hispanic! All these years I thought I was German on my dad’s side, but all of a sudden it was dawning on me that my dad wasn’t my real dad and I had an entirely different ethnicity.”Īt 51, half a century into her life, Ketchum’s familial and cultural identity had changed in an instant. “But then I kept re-checking it, and I realized, oh my God, does this mean I’m. “At first I didn’t believe it,” she says.
Even more unsettling, at least two-thirds of Ketchum’s matches had Hispanic surnames. When she went on the AncestryDNA site to view her DNA matches, there were no connections between her and her father. “I thought it’d be fun to learn a little about my genetic ethnicity, to trace how all the pieces came together.” But she ended up getting far more than she bargained for. “My dad was German, and my mother was Scottish-English,” she says. She had no family secrets she was trying to uncover, no genealogy mysteries that needed answers. When Linda Ketchum of Glendale, Calif., asked her husband for an AncestryDNA kit for Christmas, it was just a lark. Slain girl 'Little Miss Nobody' identified 62 years later Scientists finally finish decoding entire human genome Get personalized health insights with this DNA test kit, now 54% off Learn more about your dog for National Pet Day with this breed ID test
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