Perry Kinkaide, who lives in Edmonton, Canada, said that after two decades of tracing his family's paper trail, he thought he knew many of his ancestors.
Then he sent in a DNA sample. The results suggest that he wasn't biologically related to the people he had been studying -- not that it bothered him.
Any indiscretions probably happened at least a few generations back, he guessed.
"I looked like my father," he said. "We even had the same walk."
Don Severs, a 47-year-old data manager from Des Moines, Iowa, said DNA helped him confirm that his great-great-grandfather, William Severs, born in 1815, was not a Severs at all.
William Severs' biological father was a postmaster named George Kinkade, and his mother the family's housekeeper. When she became pregnant, the family arranged for her to marry a Severs.
The secret probably saved his mother and the Kinkades from scandal.
Don Severs, who has the Y-DNA of the Kincaid clan, wonders if anybody would go through such pains today.
"Now illegitimacy is no big deal," he said.
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alan.zarembo@latimes.com
