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Jake Scott (left) and three newly
discovered half-brothers.look like? What did he do for a
living? Is he alive? Do I have
any siblings?
She explained that she and
my father had tried for years to
get pregnant. At one point, they
were set to adopt a baby girl,
but her mother decided not to
give her up. That’s how they
ended up at Gamete Services, a
now-defunct fertility clinic in
Toronto. The donor was only
identified by the number 36.
Most of the answers I wanted
were out of my reach, but my
mom mentioned a donor-sibling
registry, a site where users can
post information—donor number, doc-
tor’s name, the clinic where you were
conceived—to identify possible siblings.
In 2017, I found a user whose info
matched mine—my biological half-
brother. His name is Tommy and he
lives in Huntsville, Ont. He’d always
known he was conceived via a sperm
donor. My mom and I went to meet
him and his mom at a coffee shop. We
studied each other, picking out our
similarities and differences. It was
surreal. We’re close now, and we even
tattooed our dad’s donor number on
our collarbones.
In the past couple of years, two more
siblings have found us and reached
out through the donor-sibling registry.
They were the sons of lesbian mothers;
Gregory was born in 1995 and Bren-
dan in 1998. We all met up for drinks tocompare notes. Now there were four of
us swapping stories.
Tommy found two more siblings in
early 2018 through an AncestryDNA
test. Jacob and Emma are fraternal twins
born in 1994 to a Mennonite mother
out east. We chatted with Emma over
Skype, but I haven’t spoken to Jacob
yet. Each company has a different
data pool—if I do more tests through
other companies, like 23andMe, I might
find more siblings.
It’s peculiar to think you’re an only
child, then suddenly discover you have
four brothers and a sister. I’ll forever be
grateful to my mom for cracking that
joke. It took me a while to tell my dad
what I’d discovered, because I didn’t
want him to feel ashamed. But I made
sure he knew that he never stopped
being my father for a single moment.rd.ca 65