New Jersey Woman Got an Ancestry DNA Test in Her Christmas Stocking. Then She Found Out She Has 230,000 Relatives
She has more relatives and counting by the day.
Ancestry tests can glean into a person’s genetic past, but when Gayle Worath (@silverspirals714) from New Jersey took an Ancestry DNA test, it wasn’t because she was looking for a long-lost parent. What was supposed to be a fun Christmas gift revealed that not only was her family large, but she has 230,000 relatives and counting.
“Get this: Christmas of 2021, as a stocking stuffer, my husband gets me an Ancestry DNA kit. He gets two—one for me and one for himself,” Worath told TikTok. She asked him for a test because she was curious about her ancestors. Worath clarified that she wasn’t necessarily suspicious about her parents or even her husband—she just wanted to know more about her roots.
Two weeks passed, and Worath’s results came in. At first, she said nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The page said she was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, which she expected because both her parents are Jewish from Eastern Europe. Then she spotted a woman on her dashboard, who the results claimed was her first cousin.
“I don’t have first cousins. Both of my parents are only children—no aunts, no uncles, no first cousins,” Worath stated. The woman, supposedly her cousin, had a photo, and Worath observed that they looked similar. Worath decided to reach out on Ancestry to get to the bottom of it.
“I don’t hear back from her. She doesn’t check her Ancestry messages,” Worath said. Nevertheless, she found the woman on LinkedIn, and she notably had a clearer profile picture. When Worath showed her mother the picture, her mother allegedly shrugged, not knowing who the woman was.
Finding out about her ancestry and so much more
“Fast forward to January of last year, 2025—talk about three and a half years later—this same woman messages me through Facebook,” Worath said. The woman said hi and then informed Worath that she was actually her half-sibling. Her presumed cousin, now apparently a long-lost sister, said that her father had recently passed away.
“In the late ’60s to early ’70s, as a way to pay for medical school, he was a sperm donor. She said he was a donor for years,” Worath claimed. The woman also told Worath that she resembled their aunt. In shock, Worath showed the messages to her husband and asked him to confirm if the woman was the same one from Ancestry. Her husband checked and agreed. When he read the messages, her husband was equally stunned.
They asked the woman, Francesca, to call them. As Worath and her husband sat by the kitchen counter, Francesca recounted the same story. Francesca allegedly said, “If you check your Ancestry dashboard, you and I are appearing as half-siblings.” Worath nodded along in shock when her husband suddenly said, “You’re not Marty’s daughter.”
Thousands of relatives and counting
Not only did Worath find out she had a half-sibling, but she also had a different biological father. “I can’t process his words. I was a 52-year-old married mother of two teenagers in suburban New Jersey, sitting on my kitchen island on a random Saturday morning, finding out that I’m another man’s child,” Worath recounted. She said it was as if someone had dropped a bomb in her kitchen.
But then, she told her husband she’d also been getting emails from Ancestry, informing her she had a new connection. Her husband was confused, showing her that he had three connections—his father, his sister, and himself. Then her husband checked Worath’s dashboard to find an unbelievable number of connections.
“I’m over 230,000 relatives and growing by the day,” Worath revealed. She easily beat this man’s huge family of 300 siblings and 27 mothers.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
Follow The Mary Sue:
