Healing Generations-Old Family Wounds with MyHeritage DNA

My name is Petra and I was born in Hungary in 1999. When I was 10, my parents and I moved to Norway. When I think of my time in Hungary, I remember my grandparents: my grandmother’s beautiful rose garden, the smell of her cherry and apple pie.

Petra

I remember asking them a lot about their parents and grandparents when I was a little girl. I’ve always been curious about where we came from and what they experienced in their lives.

Petra’s grandmother

When I asked my grandmother about her parents, she was always a bit short and told me her mom had died young and her father passed away when she was a little girl, and that she doesn’t know a whole lot about him.

I could tell that it was a piece that was missing. A painful one. It seemed like she was longing for someone she never had the opportunity to get to know.

Petra as a kid

But I loved hearing her stories. My grandmother had this beautiful, intricately carved oak antique cabinet in their house — the kind not even 4 people could lift up. She told me a story about some priest in the family who smuggled some liquid goods in the cabinet between the Hungarian and Slovakian border. It was only many years later that the true significance of that story became clear.

As the years went by, I heard all these stories over and over again, and I could never get enough.

A DNA test reconnects family generations after a feud

Around the time I turned 18, I took a MyHeritage DNA test with the idea that I’d one day visit every country I had some ethnic origins from. When I got the results back, I didn’t really know what to expect. It was like Christmas morning — I was so excited to click on the link and discover all the parts of me that no one knew about.

The results were amazing! I did a lot of research based on my results and I wanted to know everything. It was so exciting getting matches, talking to distant relatives.

But after a while, you know… life happened. I forgot about MyHeritage for a long, long time.

Then, in December 2023, I got a message request on Facebook.

It was kind of strange. His name, István Jávorcsik, was Hungarian, but the message I received was in English.

I looked at his social media profile. Oddly enough, we had a lot of mutual friends and he was from the same city I was from. I remember thinking, “Let’s see what kind of joke this is.”

He asked if I had any roots back in Hungary because according to MyHeritage, we might be close relatives. We had a 1.7% shared DNA match, with a probable relationship of “parent’s 2nd cousin.” 

At this point, I had broken into a sweat. I replied in Hungarian and told him my parents’ names, and he saw my message right away. I think I almost gave this poor guy a heart attack by responding in Hungarian! He instantly told me that he went to elementary school with my mom and he also knew who my father was.

We put together the pieces and we figured that, on my father’s side, our grandparents were siblings. It turns out that they argued over some land, and never spoke again.

Meanwhile their kids and grandkids were growing up next to each other not knowing they were even related!

‘This couldn’t be real’

But wait a minute… this guy wasn’t my closest match on MyHeritage. He’s the second closest one, and our grandparents were siblings. My closest DNA match shared 3.5% DNA with me: a woman named Andrea. Her DNA was managed by a certain Mirco. If my second-closest match resulted in a paradigm-shifting discovery… what would I discover from my closest match?

I searched for her on Facebook and didn’t find her, but I did find the man I assumed was her son, Mirco.

I messaged him and asked him if they took the MyHeritage DNA test to make sure I was reaching out to the right people.

Hours went by and I convinced myself that nothing would come of it. But then my phone pinged. I was excited but so terrified at the same time — should I even look? Do I really want to know how we’re connected? Was there something else in my family’s history that I didn’t know about?

In his response, Mirco confirmed that his mom Andrea was indeed my closest DNA match. I asked him if I could speak to her and if he could send me a picture of her. I went into full investigation mode: at this point I had no idea how we were connected.

He told me he would ask her when he got home, but that he had no idea how we would communicate as his mother spoke Hungarian but couldn’t write in Hungarian. He asked me if I spoke German by any chance, mentioning that his mom grew up in Slovakia but that they now live in Germany. 

My mind raced. The story my grandmother used to tell me — the one about the priest that smuggled goods in that beautiful wooden cabinet between the Hungarian and Slovakian border — kept running through my head.

Then he sent me a picture of his mom and I immediately started crying.

This couldn’t be real. She looked exactly like my grandmother. Same haircut, same facial features… the same kind of character, if you know what I mean.

Petra’s grandmother (left) and Andrea

The truth about my great-grandfather

There was no doubt that the connection was on my grandmother’s side of the family.

I was fascinated and had so many questions. Unfortunately, my grandmother wasn’t around to answer them, so I had to find the missing pieces and put them together myself.

Mirco got home, and I spoke to him and Andrea on FaceTime.

Mirco

It was like seeing and talking to my grandmother. I was a bit anxious to tell her that they pretty much looked the same person and how overwhelming it was for me, but she handled it well.

I told them everything I knew about my grandmother’s side of the family, and they talked about their immediate family, but it just didn’t add up. We just couldn’t figure out which family member we were connected through.

Then we went over all the details again and it hit me. I was even scared to say it out loud because it was just scandalous.

My great-grandfather did not pass away when my grandma was a little girl; he vanished and created a whole new family.

So Andrea’s mother was my grandmother’s half-sister.

Andrea and her mother, Petra’s grandmother’s half-sister

Processing the discovery

You always want to think the best of people, especially your family and ancestors, but this hit me really hard. A thousand things went through my mind. I felt anger and disappointment towards my great-grandfather. I never really knew a lot about him, but I saw the emptiness his absence left in my grandmother. I saw the pain in her eyes.

I also felt guilty for not realizing how big of a discovery this was when I first received the DNA match, when my grandmother was still alive. She died without knowing about her half-sister, which I know would’ve meant the world to her, as she didn’t have any family growing up.

My grandfather is still alive, and I told him about the discovery. He told me later on that the story they had told me about him dying wasn’t completely true. The only thing they knew was that my grandmother’s father disappeared. According to my grandfather, my grandmother tried to send him letters, but never received a response, which made them believe that he could’ve passed. But my grandfather was positive that they weren’t aware of any half-sister. He also told me that our great-grandfather was working as a guard on the Hungarian-Slovakian border. That’s most likely how he met Andrea’s grandmother and left our family for theirs.

So I now question my grandmother’s story about the priest. I think either he dressed up as a priest to smuggle the goods because who would inspect a priest or suspect that a holy man was breaking the law; or he made someone dress up as a priest and let them through the border when he was at work as a guard. Andrea never met her grandfather; when her mom was around 4 years old, her grandmother kicked him out of the house as he was having a relationship with another woman! That was in the early 60s. It seems like he was a serial cheater. We don’t have any photos of him and we have no idea when and where he died.

Striking similarities

Lately, I started to wonder whether my great-grandfather’s departure was a blessing in disguise for our family.

Mirco and I spoke about the generational differences through all of this. I haven’t had the chance to get to know my grandma’s half-sister yet. For her, it seems like this discovery wasn’t all fun and exciting as for Mirco and I. I can definitely understand why: imagine that a girl shows up one day and says you had a half-sister who’s now dead! If I were in her shoes, I would feel a terrible sense of missed opportunity.

But for Mirco, Andrea, and I, the discovery has been a blessing. We FaceTime from time to time and I find it so incredibly interesting how we share the same way of thinking, interests, and hobbies without knowing each other.

My mother is a chef — and it turns out Andrea works at a prison cooking meals for inmates.

Andrea also has a beautiful garden full of flowers like my grandmother used to. I wear my hair long, but my grandmother, my mom, and Andrea always had short hair.

Mirco and I are even more alike. We are both very creative. His art is classical music. Let me tell you, he truly has a gift. I, on the other hand, have always had an interest in painting and expressing my feelings through creating things with my hands. In the past two years, it has been renovating: building my own furniture, painting my house, and learning to do plumbing work.

So the one thing I’ve learned for sure is that you don’t have to know your family or ancestors to inherit their habits and ways of being.

I find it really fascinating that we don’t have the chance to get to know our ancestors, at least not personally. But they are there in our DNA. My grandmother and her half-sister never got the chance to know each other, and quite frankly they’re not a lot alike. But the daughter of my grandmother’s half-sister? She looks like my grandmother’s twin. They act similar, have similar interests and weirdly enough, they quote the same sayings — even though they never knew each other!

I haven’t met them in person yet, but it’s on my bucket list.

‘Our story has a happy ending’

This year has been special: for the first time, I crocheted scarves and headbands for my newly extended family. So there’s a package out there making its way to them as I write this.

Petra’s daughter

When my daughter was born, I ordered a DNA kit for her, and her father has taken one as well. It’s truly amazing. So it wasn’t a hard choice to make what to buy as a Christmas present for my new partner. A MyHeritage DNA kit! I can’t wait to learn more about him — maybe there will be another interesting story to learn.

For me it’s been a life-changing experience, and the whole journey of discovering my great-grandfather’s deep buried secrets started with a swab of my cheek.

My advice is to never stop being curious about your upbringing. It can turn your life around in many different ways. Thankfully, our story has a happy ending after all.

Many thanks to Petra Charlotte for sharing this incredible story with us. If you’ve also made an amazing discovery with MyHeritage, we’d love to hear about it! Please send it to us via this form or email us at stories@myheritage.com.