Woman’s ‘Joke’ DNA Test Exposes Huge Family Secret
DNA tests can reveal some wild family secrets. Just ask Farrah Khiji-Holmes, who discovered she had a secret sibling.
Khiji-Holmes, 52, always joked she must have been "switched at birth" because she felt "nothing like" her family. She often teased her family for being weird, telling them "there's no way I could be part of such a bizarre family."
Sharing her story with The Mirror, Khiji-Holmes said she took a DNA test as a gag.
"So I did a DNA test as a joke and made my mom do one too. She's my mom, there's no doubt about that," Khiji-Holmes confirmed.
However, her results surprisingly revealed a "close match to a man" named Steve Bolton, 62, who was initially suspected to be "a first cousin or closer."
Questioning the results, Khiji-Holmes began to investigate.
None of her relatives knew anything about Bolton. However, she was able to find him online and they began messaging each other. Eventually, Khiji-Holmes discovered Bolton was actually her half-brother.
After communicating on WhatsApp and video calls for 18 months, the siblings finally decided to meet in person.
"It's absolutely like seeing dad in the flesh. My friends who have seen him say he's the spitting image of dad," Khiji-Holmes shared.
It turns out the half-siblings share the same father, Dr. Mohammad Elijaz Khiji, who had a relationship with Bolton's mom in the 1960s while traveling to London.
After Khiji returned to his home country of Pakistan, he fathered Khiji-Holmes, her sister and three other half-siblings, who Khiji-Holmes already knew about.
Khiji, who died in 1998, never knew he was Bolton's dad, too.
After figuring out the timeline of events, Khiji-Holmes sent the information to her mom to make sure they had their details correct. "She said Steve is most likely my half-brother. My dad looked after all his children, and if he'd known he had another child, we'd have known about it," she explained, adding, "He would have ensured he was part of our family too."
Unfortunately, Bolton had spent his entire life not knowing who his father was. After his mom died of pneumonia, Bolton spent time in and out of orphanages before he was eventually adopted by a Canadian family in Toronto.
"After you've been waiting for so long, it's hard to believe it's happened. It's completely surreal. I didn't know how to process it," Bolton shared, adding that when he got older, a friend helped him get his English birth certificate.
"My wife did all the research and got me to go on Ancestry.com," he continued. "It's really amazing."
Now, Bolton is encouraging other people who have been adopted to research their lineage. They might just find out they have more family than they think.