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Canada has been slow to end anonymous paternity, but cheap and easy genetic testing makes staying unknown all but impossible.
It was by accident that Jason Tarshis learned the truth about his origins. At 49, he bought a home genetic test kit, mostly to keep his wife company as she searched for a brother who had been adopted as an infant. Her results soon led her to her long-lost sibling. But his results were puzzling.
According to the genetic test company, Ancestry, his ethnicity was half-British, but his DNA was connected to a British family he didn’t know. They seemed to be Anglican, and Tarshis had grown up Jewish.
His father, a dentist, had died at 47 of pancreatic cancer, and over the years, Tarshis had drifted out of touch with his paternal side. But now he reconnected with them. His father’s older brother admitted the family didn’t know much about Tarshis’s grandfather, who’d immigrated to Canada on his own from Russia. Intrigued by the mystery, Tarshis and his uncle met up and started digging.
Tarshis mentioned the confusion to...