Journalist Samuel Burke on the Podcast “Sudden Family”

SAMUEL BURKE, HOST, “SUDDENLY FAMILY”: I think what really ripped a layer off for me is that you see all of these ads, so much marketing from the DNA industry showing that this is a happy, joyous occasion when your results come in. But there’s this other side. Eleven percent of people who take a DNA test find out that one of their parents isn’t their biological parent. And that seemed ridiculous to me when I heard that number, until it happened twice in my own family. And so there’s really not a lot of laughter as you try to solve your mystery DNA, make some huge realizations. Really, your whole world can be turned upside down. Who you are can be rewritten by this technology, at- home DNA testing.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, let’s talk about your family. I mean, it is actually episode four. But it is what, as you say, brought you into this investigation. It’s about your father, right, and your grandfather. What happened in their investigation?

BURKE: Well, I come from a Jewish Dutch family on my father’s side,. Very proud to be Jewish and Dutch. And when we get the DNA results back, right away, my father is incredibly upset, because it comes back half-Jewish, as we’d expect from his mom’s side, but half-Swedish. And that just makes no sense to us. There are no Swedes and our family. And the DNA test also says that we’re Mormon. And it’s a big surprise for a Jewish family to see Mormon. And, of course, Mormon is a religion. You expect an ethno-religious group like Jews to show up on your DNA test, but not a new proselytizing religion like Mormons that take people from all different parts of the world. And so, very quickly, my dad knew that something was off. Now, I didn’t agree with him. I said, oh, well, maybe Sweden is close to Holland. Maybe we had some ancestors who went back and forth. But the more we looked, we saw that there were no Burkes on our DNA test, not a single Burke. And my last name is Burke. My dad’s last name is Burke. And we really started realizing that his father was likely not his father, and we were related to all these Mormons instead. And it was a very dark period to go through, my dad realizing that the man who raised him, the man who he thought he looked like he was not his father biologically, and that we had this whole other history and a secret in the family that nobody had any idea about.