Secrets of the family tree

Do-it-yourself DNA tests are a popular hobby. For some the results are predictable, for others they’re a revelation. Genevieve Gannon meets historian Rose Overberg, who followed clues from her own test to find her biological father, and now helps others do the same.

- Genevieve Gannon

We all carry inside us people who came before, wrote American author Liam Callanan. And in every new family line, glimpses of the older can be seen. A grandfather’s lopsided smile reappears in a grandson. Three generations of women have the same violet-flecked eyes. For historian Rose Overberg, it’s chestnut-colored hair and distinctive height that she shares with her mother. “A lot of people say I look like Mum,” she says.

But while Rose has freckles and brown eyes, her mother has olive-toned skin and green eyes, and there are other features that can’t be accounted for. “Nobody in my family has my eyebrows,” she says.

For most of her life, Rose didn’t know who gave her those attributes, and she never thought much of it until she tried to find out and was blocked at every turn. Rose was conceived with the help of donor sperm in 1975, when the now-thriving fertility business was just a cottage industry without regulation or proper record keeping. Years later, when she tried to find out about her donor, she was shocked to learn that all evidence of her conception had disappeared.

And Rose was not alone. By the time the Victorian government made record-keeping mandatory in 1988, thousands of donor-conceived babies had been born. Many have files, but a significant number have not.