The Lie That Raised Me Part One

She thought she knew her story.

In 2021, a casual AncestryDNA test reopened questions Alicia had quietly carried her entire life. Why did she never see her original birth certificate? Why was her birthday often forgotten? Why did her brother feel like he belonged in a different way?

Then a first cousin match appeared.

And everything started to unravel.

In Part One of this three-part series, Alicia Sharon Denise Williams shares the early clues that something was off long before DNA confirmed it. From childhood inconsistencies to reopening her DNA results with new eyes, she walks us through the moment suspicion turned into action.

This episode ends at the turning point, when Alicia decides she has to start at the beginning and find out where she was really born.

What she discovers next will change her life.

Part Two takes us inside a government building in Detroit and the yellow card that confirmed the lie.

In This Episode

• Subtle childhood signs of secrecy
• Revisiting a DNA test with new perspective
• Birth certificate inconsistencies
• Spiritual wrestling and awakening
• The decision to search for the truth
• What late discovery adoptees often feel before they know

About Alicia Sharon Denise Williams

Alicia is a NAAP Board Member, speaker, storyteller, and adoption-truth advocate whose voice carries both compassion and courage. As the founder of From Hidden to Healed, she shares her late-discovery adoptee journey, one marked by silence, spiritual awakening, DNA revelation, and the sacred work of untangling identity after truth emerges.

With grace and faith as her compass, Alicia speaks to those navigating hidden histories, misattributed parentage, reunion, loss, and the lifelong impact of secrecy. Her message is not about blame, but about belonging. Not about shame, but about healing.

She reminds us that healing does not erase the past. It redeems it.

See Alicia Live at Untangling Our Roots

Alicia will be appearing at Untangling Our Roots, the national conference for adoptees, NPEs, donor-conceived individuals, and anyone navigating DNA surprises and identity discovery.

If this episode resonates, hearing her story in person will hit even deeper.

Learn more about Untangling Our Roots and how to attend at untanglingourroots.org.

This is Part One of a powerful three-part journey.

Part Two drops next.

If you have ever questioned your origin story, this conversation is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Family Twist, Corey here. So I was not in this recording, Kindled of this one, and when I sat down to edit it, I thought I knew the rhythm. We've been doing this for a few years now, and I've listened to a lot of DNA surprise stories. I know the beats. Suspicion, test, shock, then the fallout. That is not exactly how this unfolds. What grabbed me immediately was the slow build. A childhood that looks solid from the outside. Ann Arbor. Parochial school. Family reunions that go back more than a century. A family tree that everyone is proud of. And yet nothing quite lines up. Forgotten birthdays. No baby pictures. Parents who fund everything but show up for nothing. A sixth-grade blood typing experiment that quietly gets pulled aside and never discussed again. As I was editing, I kept stopping, rewinding, thinking, wait, this is not tiny. This first part of the story is about the clues. The subtle dissonance, the things a child feels but cannot fully name. We made this a three-parter because Alicia's story does not drop like a bomb. It layers. And what is coming does not make sense until you fully understand where she started. This is part one.

Kendall 1:26

Welcome to the podcast, Alicia.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

Kendall 1:32

I'd love for you to start with a little intro about what happened in your discovery. Like what happened? Were you an NPE? Or, you know, just give us a little history.

Growing Up in Ann Arbor with “The Oddest Parents”

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Well, honestly, I thought I was an everyday average African-American girl living in an African-American family. We did live in a suburban area of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I grew up right there in Georgetown, right in the middle of U of M territory. Boche Blecker was our neighbor, so it was all U of M professors and everything. So it was a predominantly white community. Very spoiled, very indulged, had an awesome life, but had the oddest set of parents that just never made sense. 90% of what they did just never made sense. It didn't click, it didn't all add up. But it became such a part of our life that mom and dad were different. They were different because they were older, different because we lived in a community that was very unlike where they grew up, unlike their culture. We were very far from our cousins, our other aunts and uncles. And so that was our normal life, but we realized that our life was kind of removed from our family. And my brother and I never really got that. But you don't, you know, as kids growing up from the start, this is just who we are, and this is how we were. So there were a lot of things that never made sense to us. And I guess one of the biggest things for me starting out was that I never had the foundational story of my parents or of our family, of our family creation. I didn't, my parents didn't celebrate their anniversaries. They didn't celebrate their birthdays. Most of the time, we almost every year, they would forget my birthday, get when it was, recall it days later, weeks later, months later. I'm saying sometimes it would be my brother's birthday in April when my mom would remember that she forgot my birthday in February. But mom and dad were older, you know. And so even though when we were little, they were in their 40s and 50s, when you're a little kid, you think that's really, really old for your parent. So you know, so we just took it at mom and dad are so old stuff just doesn't click in.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

And I'd also like never really had a lot of baby pictures around of me. And the pictures that I did have were like all in the same time frame. The earliest I'd ever seen looked like I was maybe 18 months, maybe two. I saw pictures of my second birthday. We had maybe only a couple. And I saw pictures of me maybe in two, three, maybe into four, and then pictures stopped again. And my parents were never big on pictures. So it was always like, you know, you'd go to your friend's house and they have stacks of photo albums, and you could literally look at someone else's life through their photo. We never had those things. And so that was another thing. It's just like mom and dad are never into pictures, mom and dad were never into occasions and making like memories that you could tangibly hang on to, but we did everything. Yeah, we always went to summer camps and we always went, we had exotic vacations, and my parents we went to timeshares in Jamaica and everything. So it was just those little things, it never made sense. As a joke, my brother and I developed this dual persona that mom and dad are not our real parents, anyways. And when when our friends would say something like, Your mom forgot your birthday, we would, as a joke, go, They're not our parents anyway.

Kendall 5:48

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

But in our heart of hearts, it was a joke.

Kendall 5:52

Right. Right. But would you ever say that to your parents?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

No, no, no, no, no, no. They never knew we said. Now, there were there were maybe occasions when as I got into be a teenager and I was an adolescence, and you know, I couldn't go roller skating or something, and I'd get mad and I'll say, You're not my real mom, anyways. My kids have said that to me. But you don't love me anyways. You know, those type of things.

Kendall 6:19

I was that teenager too, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

You know, especially when you're spoiled, it comes out even more because you don't understand the concept of no. Because you don't get a whole lot of no's. It's true.

Kendall 6:31

It's true.

No Baby Pictures and Forgotten Birthdays

SPEAKER_01 6:32

You know, and I went to, I always went to parochial school. I never went to private school. So, you know, so there were little moments that made you go, hmm, that doesn't make sense. Didn't make sense why we were the youngest of the grandkids. I like my first cousins were old enough to be my parents, and my first cousins treated us like we were their little babies. They mean they would take us around to get boys and to get girls because we were we were like in their arms being carried. You know, so there were so many little things that just went, this has never made sense, but it's our life, it is what it is. Yeah, there was another occasion when I was in maybe sixth or seventh grade, and it was a science project, and we were doing the learn your blood type program, and we had to take these little prick things with the little bitty vial and get a little sample of her mom and a little sample of our dad, and we had to bring these two vials back to school, and we were going to do the DNA matching and figure out our blood type.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

I remember that distinctly because my science teacher kind of took my kit and set it aside and had me go help some other kids. And I was I loved science. I loved, you know, doing the feeder pigs and all that stuff. So I was always the kid that was helping other kids get in there with my hands messy and everything. So I was disappointed that, you know, what's going on? Did I mess up? Did I not get enough blood for my parents? And I remember her calling my parents' house that evening, and everybody in this little whisper, and her explaining that, you know, I don't know who she brought this sample from, but this isn't possible, that this is her kid, because the DNA, the science isn't matching. My blood type is not matching either of my parents. Okay. And but it all got washed under the rug. And all that, you know, like the the sample was messed up, something went wrong, and I was never allowed to do it over again, and I was so disappointed, and it just kind of stuck with me. What's going on? Nobody's telling me the real thing. Why are all these secrets? What is this?

Kendall 9:05

And your brother knew this was happening too.

Raised Like Two Only Children in One House

SPEAKER_01 9:07

Well, my brother was two years younger than me, so I was in middle school. He wasn't in the same building yet, he didn't really know anything about it. And my brother never picked up or felt the same clues that I did. He had a much deeper connection to our mom than I did. I was a total daddy's girl, which also was another weird aha thing. We were raised like two only children in the same household. We didn't interact with each other, we very rarely played with each other. Anytime my father could leave the house, I was with him. My brother was always treated like such the baby that he needed to stay home with mom. That I was so happy to be old enough to go with daddy. I could go with dad to work sites, I could go with dad to I could go with dad to business locations because I was so mature and it's so appropriate in these places. So I was almost like nana nana boo-boo, Frank, you can't go. You know, you never thought that there was this separation of the two kids that were being kept apart. That never clued, I never thought of it that way. I was special enough to go with daddy, and I was fine with him being the one that had to stay with the mom. There was all those little things that didn't add up. As I matured and grew into adolescence and grew into high school, that separation, that catechism became larger and larger. Where I really didn't do much with my mom, didn't really associate with my mom very much. We were night and day, we were frickin' frack. If she said it's cloudy, I'm gonna go check. And I was like, Looks sunny to me. You know, we just didn't forget each other. A good portion of my life, I really started thinking something's going on here. Daddy is daddy, I'm 100% his girl. I'm 100% clued in, locked in with him. So I really started thinking that possibly she's not my biological mom. Maybe dad had an affair and mom accepted it, and I was allowed to live with them. Maybe dad had me before they got married, and that's why they don't really celebrate their anniversaries and all. I have started conjuring up these scenarios on how she could possibly not be my mom. Never was my father an option that he was not my father. Right. So there were just so many things I did that mom just didn't participate in. Like I was always in ballet, but she didn't come to recitals. You know, I would in these wording events, I was in band. I don't think my my mom, my parents never saw me in band, they never came to a game. I was a cheerleader, they never came to a game, they never came to a play, but I was taken to everything, everything was paid for, it was acknowledged, family knew, they always talked about me like they were so proud of everything, but the parental attachment was never there. And as I grew up and saw other parents and my friends and how their parents associated, and definitely as I became a parent and knew how connected I was to my kids, I never missed a thing. Right. I was, you know, some my kids sometimes stay on a helicopter mom because I never miss a thing because my parents were never at anything.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

So those things were weird and still it was just my life. I still never thought truly there was another story. I just thought that there were these weird little secrets, these weird little moments. I never had any family members that uh gave me any inclination. It was subtle. Reunions were solid. My father's side of the family celebrated family reunions consecutively over a hundred years. Oh. Then they were deep on their family reunions. We always had an ancestry tree. We were into that very early. Anytime there was a new baby, a new person, a new marriage, you got on there and you added them. We had spreadsheets and we had all these things. And then my mother's side, there was always somebody that was deep in the genealogy. So you were always talking about these things, and never was there any doubt that I was who I was raised to be.

Kendall 14:11

But there was what made you well, what was the turning point? How did you make a discovery?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

As I got older and I got married, I moved away from home very early, my first year of college. So by 18, I was living on, I didn't even live on campus. My parents paid for off-campus housing. So I had my own apartment up in Lansing. I went to MSU and I had a collaborative between Lansing Community College and Michigan State. So I was able to live kind of in between. And my parents paid for all of that, but they were not invested in my education or what I was doing. They didn't even know my major. You know, it was kind of one of those things. My boyfriend at the time came up to Lansing and was there all the time. And so we had decided very early that we were going to get married while I was still in college, and we would just do all of this stuff at the same time. You know, when money is not the forethought of we're struggling, you at 18, you think you can do it all. So it was, yeah, I'm in college. Yes, I have an apartment. Yes, I have a car, yes, let's get married, yes, let's have a baby, and let's do all of this right away. And we did.

Kendall 15:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

And we did.

Kendall 15:19

Aside from maybe I can relate to all of that.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

When we told my parents that we wanted to get married, there was not even the interest or the conversation about we, you know, my mind, because I didn't hear no before, was that mom and dad are going to pay for this wedding. Well, mom and dad weren't even invested in the wedding. It really wasn't even a consideration for them. And unfortunately, my husband's father, what he he would have was going to be my father-in-law, came out of remission of cancer and took ill very quickly. Our wedding, which was scheduled for Valentine's Day, 1986, his father took sick that December, and it doesn't look like he was going to make it. So we canceled our wedding, and he passing February 11th. So us having a wedding was no longer gonna, we can't do this to the family right now. They needed time to grieve, they needed time to get over this, and you just don't go throwing something that's supposed to be such a happy occasion into the mix when people are really grieving. That was no problem for us. We are happy to do that. But in the meantime, I found out that I was already expecting because we had planned, you know, we're gonna have this baby right away. And so November came and my daughter was born, and my mom didn't even come to the hospital. Wow.

Kendall 16:38

Well, that's really odd. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

This is your first grandchild. You know, I'm your only daughter. And it was not even something that, you know, it was no big deal to her. Yet my daughter became her all-consumed, you know, every time. Give me the baby, give me the baby, give me the baby, give me the baby. And I mean, they would pull up to my house, take the baby, and they were truly the every every TikTok video you see with the babies bypassing you to go to grandma and grandpa. That was our daughter. She, you know, and then she became the one that got everything, and that was awesome and amazing for us. Sure. You know, sure. But it still bothered me that they were not invested in my life, my marriage, getting to know their son-in-law. It was like, yeah, this piece I can do. Always had these little this list of little bullets that I made that you're paying now for my daughter to go to parochial school, but you won't come to her recital. You're paying for the ballet lessons. You're paying for the soccer lessons, but you don't come to her soccer games. Those things just never made sense. And so my children then adapted our family joke. Nana and Papa aren't really nana and pop.

Kendall 18:11

Oh my. I had to hope they wouldn't say that to your parents.

The AncestryDNA Kit Christmas Gift

SPEAKER_01 18:14

No, we would never say that to her because it because it couldn't be true. They're just weird nana and papa, they're just odd nana and papa. So my children grew up, and my parents missed most of the milestones. I don't think they ever showed up at any birthday parties. They didn't come to my kids' graduations, they didn't come to open houses, they didn't, you know, they didn't participate in those things. But they would very readily write a check, you know, and they would, you know, and and reap the accolades and tell everyone about all of their older friends all knew the kids' graduations are coming and checks would start coming and cards would start coming because my mom and dad told them, but they weren't there. So we're going to advance all the way up to six years ago, 2018. And the ancestry DNA kits are on sale, they're huge, the commercials are everywhere. And my my kids, my family, we've always grown up with this rich family history. We have our ancestry tree, the kids' names are all on them, they've gone to family reunions, they know their aunts and uncles and first cousins. It's big, our family is huge, we know all of this stuff. Let's just package it all up and put it all together. And my daughter bought me an Ancestry DNA kit as one of my Christmas gifts for 2018. So by this time, my daughter is 35 years old. I have my first child, is my stepson, who also is 38. My birth daughter, 35. I adopted two children. So they're now much older. Everybody is an adult, everybody's married, everyone has their own family. So my mom is on two great-grandchildren, and we just thought that this is a nice way to pull everyone's DNA and put it in the system. We're not one that are afraid of having your DNA out there for the government to spy in. We're, you know, that's just not us. We would rather have the legacy of knowing that this is secured and that our our families have a place to go to keeping to this information. I'm not one for doing like I still have gift cards that I just pulled out of my wallet. I've got to remember to use these because they could expire. I'm so I'm a person who doesn't do and take part in a gift right away. This is what I wanted to make sure I got this taken care of so that my daughter wasn't thinking, I wasted this money and mom's gonna go. So February is my birthday, and I it was on my mind, and I said, I gotta get this sent in. So I sent it in right along my birthday, so that would be February of 2019.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

And, you know, knew it took some time. And so, you know, put it on the back burner because there's really not a lot of information I'm waiting for, right? I know everything.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

So because we already had an account and everything, email is already in there. April 9th, I got an email that says that your on your kit has now been processed and information is now available online. It's not complete, but you can start watching your information develop. And they encouraged you to go on there and start seeing your leaves start connecting to your tree. And it was so cool. And I couldn't I couldn't wait to get on there. And I logged into my account. I attached my DNA code to the tree that was existing and I didn't have leaves. So I was like, okay, that's weird. So I separated my account and went back to my DNA kit and logged in as a new account. Well, it bloomed. And the matches were popping up. And already at that point I had over 1,300 very close matches. So I started clicking on it, I started opening it, and I had first cousin matches. And I was so excited about them. And I looked at them and I went, I don't know these people. No, it says first cousins. Yeah, it says first cousins. And you know, I literally went back and looked at my box to make sure I had the right code because nobody on this list even carried my family names. And like, well, we know the family names. My father had German goblets with the family names on it. Because if you go back far enough, my father's family has German descent and everything. We were even, you know, collecting those things from the start. Nobody on this kit. Nobody in this plan was matching anybody I ever knew. Well, that can be right. Ancestry DNA's messed up.

Kendall 23:27

Somebody switched your specifics.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

So I literally got on their support site and fired off a letter to Ancestry DNA. And I was kind of, you know, I as I kept looking, it took a few days, and I kept looking and I kept looking, and my and more and more names were popping up there, and fewer and fewer of them were connecting to the family I'd known. So I was really kind of getting upset because I'm, you know, I'm also in healthcare. I've also been in education, and I'm thinking, you know, this is a breach of confidentiality. This is ADA compliance, and you're giving out people's personal information, and I have access to their data. And I was like, even should not be messing up like this. So I fired off this letter to them saying, you've given me the wrong information. You switch samples. I'm going to stop looking at this because I'm uncomfortable looking at other people's information. And fired this letter off to them. And it was really kind of nasty. And you guys have screwed up. Please send me a new kit on you. I'm not paying for it. And so I got a what I thought was a pretty generic letter back assuring me that no mistakes had been made, that everything is checked, double-checked, and triple-checked before they even give you the data and the information. And I didn't believe it. I was like, okay, told my daughter this ancestry DNA thing, it's you know, if they're as far as their kids go, I'm gonna stick with the other tree where we know that we're entering our information. And I kind of put it on the Bad Burner, kind of put it over here on the shelf. And although I kept going in and looking at it, thinking that corrections were gonna be made, they just wasn't. So what had happened was in May, my youngest daughter was expecting her first child. And as I said, most of my kids are growing up now. So my youngest daughter is the only one that attended the same church as I do, my husband, and my mom attends the same church. So this Sunday, my daughter was not in church, and my mom always does a Sunday afternoon call, recaps. She's the mother of our church, she's the oldest member of our church, and so she recaps and does goes through her mother Bennett checklist, whose skirt was too short, who said the wrong thing, I didn't see so-and-so go pay their tithe and offering, you know, through a little mother of the church checklist. And she was commenting that my daughter was not in church and why not? I have always developed a habit of listening or talking to my mom on speakerphone because the things that she says could very easily go left, very easily. You know, she's she's always been very pessimistic. She's kind of a Debbie Downer to talk to a lot of times because when you're celebrating your greatest moments, she will bring up something negative. You know, this is a very small town. It's very easy to become Jackson famous. So I I have been on TV a lot. I have been in the newspaper a lot. We own businesses here. I am the what was the president of the NAACP. And so there are occasions that I've been on TV and she'll call me and she'll say, I saw you on TV. You should have told me I would have been here. And I was like, No, no, you wouldn't. That's why I didn't tell you. But then she'll go, Why did you wear that? That was not my favorite dress, you know.

Kendall 26:54

Thanks, Mom.

“You Know She’s Not Your Mother”

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Like when I was talking to my mom on this particular Sunday, and I had her on speakerphone, I was totally bugging my husband because he is a total NASCAR and Formula One race fan, and it was in the middle of a race, and he was just he, you know, he he's to the point where he was sick of many of the conversations. There was something that was said, my daughter was still experiencing some morning sickness late in her, she was in her third trimester already, and the doctors, you know, were like, you know, that's kind of concerning, you know, you should have stopped this already. And so I was sharing that information with my mom, and my mom just wasn't getting it. She didn't understand the concept of what I was saying with the morning sickness and the trimesters, and she was asking me, How long is each trimester? What does morning sickness feel like? Is it like she has the flu? Is it like she has a cold? And I'm like, No? Don't you remember that? You don't remember the feeling of butterflies? I bet dads who get to put their hands on the belly don't forget that. My mom had forgotten that. My husband snapped. He like that's it. That's it. Hang up with the gosh darn phone. I'm sick of this conversation, I'm sick of hearing this. You know that this woman has never given birth a day in her life. You know that she is not your mom, and you need to stop pretending that that DNA kit is not yours, and you need to get back in there and find your people.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

Wow. I mean hard to hear, but I admire that.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

I literally just had this heart gasp, even saying over that's how hard it was to hear. And we're talking, me and my husband have been married 35, 34 years at this time. You've never said anything like this to me before. Wow, you've never told me you felt this way before, and the anger at which he's like out there now, that it just like snapped something in me. Like, what are you saying? What are you talking about? And I did get off the phone with my mom, and then I'm like addressing him, and he's like, You don't believe she's your mom. You've always said you don't believe she's your mom. I've never thought she was your mom. He's like, How many times did I ask you that when we were dating? And I was like, Well, you didn't ask it like that. It was like your mom would say something, and you would go, That's your mom? She's really that's your birth mom. And I'm like, Yeah, that's my mom, you know. But it was never, I don't believe this woman gave birth to you, and I'm just going to go along with this family story, even though I don't believe. That's what he was finally saying to me.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Alright, so this is where we pause. We have not even gotten to the full DNA revelation yet. We are still in the stages where the pieces seal off but are not confirmed. That science project, the lifelong joke about not being their real child. The husband who finally says out loud what she has always half wondered. When I was listening to this, this is the point where I leaned back and thought, oh, this is going somewhere. We keep our podcast episodes around 30 minutes because that's what you tell us what works. But Alicia's story kept deepening, so yes, this one needed some space. In part two, the DNA results take center stage. And trust, you are not going to believe what she sees when she logs back in. You're heading to Untangled War Roots, you'll get to hear Alicia share the story live. After sitting with this audio in my headphones, I can tell you her voice carries weight. Part two is where everything accelerates. The Family Twist Podcast is presented by Sabahwa Fair Marketing Communications and produced by Mosaic Multimedia.