CENTEREACH, NY — When Alyssa Lubbe asked her boyfriend for a DNA testing kit for Christmas, she never imagined what would happen next. Lubbe, 23, of Centereach, wanted the 23andMe kit to learn more about her ancestry. Turns out, she has at least 23 other half-siblings spread across the United States.
“It was definitely overwhelming to say the least, at first,” Lubbe told Patch. “I didn’t know if it was exciting or scary. I kind of just broke down at first, because I didn’t know how to react. To me, it’s stuff that I see in the movies, and I’m like, ‘That would never happen to me,’ or ‘That would never happen to anyone.’ And then it did. It’s just so unreal.”
A few weeks after Christmas, the results of the kit came in. Soon after, Lubbe’s 23andMe inbox lit up with people saying they were related.
“I swore it was the wrong DNA, and I had someone else’s DNA in my account,” she said.
Lubbe spoke with her mother, who informed her she and her brother were conceived with the use of a sperm bank donor. Lubbe then realized the site wasn’t wrong — she did have nearly two dozen half-siblings.
Overall, there are 25 known children of the same sperm donor, including Lubbe and her brother. Lubbe knows about 15 of them and the others haven’t expressed interest in connecting with the group, she said. While Lubbe hasn’t met any of her half siblings in person yet, she routinely communicates with them in a group chat. Everyone is around the same age: young-to-mid 20s.
The half-siblings soon hope to organize a mass face-to-face gathering, though nothing is set in stone, she said. She is the only known member of the group who lives on Long Island, and her brother hasn’t gotten involved. The others live in states including California, Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
“We have a lot of states covered between the 25 of us,” Lubbe said.
While some of the initial excitement has settled down, the discovery still feels overwhelming and crazy — but in a good way, Lubbe said.
“I never had anything super exciting happen to me,” she said. “Everyone at first was like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and they were trying to console me. Right from the start, I was saying ‘This is awesome, this is so cool. I can’t wait to explore it more.’ It means a lot to me, because I’m excited to get to know all these people and visit them.”
Lubbe is not even the newest member of the group. She met another half-sister — her 23rd half-sibling — in February.
“I was like, ‘There’s no way there’s going to be more after me.’ But there was. So who knows if there’s even more out there?”