He Donated Sperm in 1994. Decades Later, His Kids Found Him

 What happens when a sperm donor from the 1990s suddenly discovers he has children decades later? 

This is one of those stories that could only happen right now.

A decision made in the early ’90s, when anonymity was expected and protected, collides with modern DNA testing, where secrets don’t stay buried.

In Part 1 of this conversation around the documentary Dad Genes, we sit down with Aaron and Jess to unpack how their lives became connected in a way neither of them could have predicted.

Aaron donated sperm in 1994, thinking it was a closed chapter. Jess built her family years later, carefully choosing a donor based on what felt right at the time.

Neither of them expected that decades later, a simple DNA test would connect them, and open the door to a network of biological children, siblings, and relationships that were never supposed to exist.

This episode focuses on the moment everything changes. The discovery. The realization. The first steps into something completely unknown.

Why This Episode Matters

If you’ve taken a DNA test, are thinking about it, or are navigating a family discovery of your own, this episode will hit home.

Because this isn’t just about donor conception.

It’s about how technology is reshaping identity, how past decisions don’t stay in the past, and how people are left to figure it out in real time without a roadmap.

Stories like this are becoming more common, and the questions they raise don’t have easy answers.

What You’ll Take Away

A clear look at how donor conception worked before DNA testing changed everything

Insight into how families made decisions without knowing what the future would bring

A grounded, human perspective on what it feels like when identity and biology suddenly collide.

 Listen now to hear how one decision in 1994 turned into a life-changing discovery decades later. 

Transcript

Corey 0:00

Alright, before we jump in, I want to set this one up for you because this story is wild in a very family twist kind of way. We're talking about the documentary Dad Jeans. And joining us are Erin and Jess, who are at the center of a story that spans decades, multiple families, and a version of the world that honestly doesn't exist anymore. This all starts back in the early 90s. Pre-internet, pre-DNA testing, a time when sperm donation was built on the idea of anonymity. You donate, you move on, and that's that. Except now we live in a world where that's just not how it works. Aaron makes a decision in his 20s that he thinks is firmly in the past. Jess makes intentional decisions to build her family, choosing a donor based on what feels right at the time. And then years later, DNA testing shows up and connects dots that we're never supposed to connect. Kids finding biological parents. Parents finding biological kids. Half siblings appearing out of nowhere. And suddenly, everyone involved is navigating something no one really prepared them for. This conversation hits on so many things we talk about on this show: identity, intention, secrecy, technology, and what happens when all of that collides. So let's get into it.

Kendall 1:20

Welcome, Erin and Jess, to the Family Twist Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Thank you for having us.

Kendall 1:26

So before we dive into your story, what's the relationship between you two?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

That's the story.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

We're a couple.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Okay. We are a couple. We live together on Vashon Island, Washington.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

We've lived in this house for seven years since COVID.

Kendall 1:48

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Okay. Cool. We live here with our three cats, 12 chickens, and daughter. Sometimes our daughter Alice, who is in college.

Kendall 2:01

That's very cool. Anyway, so I know very little purposefully, and so I'm excited to hear what the DNA surprise is in your story.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Do you just want us to take the ball and run with her? Absolutely. In 1994, I was between things in my life. Had been teaching English as a foreign language in Spain. I came back to the United States and wasn't sure what was next. I moved in with my mom. I started driving a taxi. And this was in a college town, State College, Pennsylvania. And I saw one day I was reading the student newspaper an ad looking for sprung donors to help infertile couples. It seemed like my entire thinking of the time was that sounds like easy money. I applied to do it. I was accepted. I donated about twice a week for a year. Now this was 1994. Pre-internet, pre-home DNA testing. I signed a confidentiality agreement. The sperm bank signed a confidentiality agreement. There was no expectation and supposedly no possibility of me learning who bought my sperm or of them learning the people who bought my sperm learning about me. So I did that for a year.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

1994, I was graduating from high school, and none of this was a blip on my radar at all. But in 2004, I was with a woman and we were thinking about conceiving our first child. And we were, I was in grad school at the time and was getting ready to like do the part of grad school called all but dissertation. You do nothing but sit home and write. So it seemed like a great time for me to be the first one to get pregnant and to be able to have that year to be pregnant, have a baby be home with the baby. And so we looked to match the DNA of my partner at the time who had brown wavy hair and was in creative writing. And there was a donor that had brown wavy hair and was an MFA in creative writing. And had what we thought at the time, since she was obviously right-brained, and I'm a social science PhD. We really thought he had at the time a profile that looked like this could be any kid. This kid could fit in our family. There are a lot of sperm donors that are med students because it's right down the hall from them, presumably. Right. And so there are a lot of sperm profiles that are like, what are your hobbies? My hard hobbies are calculus and Rubik's Cube and coding. And you're like, oh my God, no, no offense to the good you do in the world, but I can't raise this kid. I'm not going to be able to help this kid with homework, like starting in sixth grade. And this kid might like just be bored every weekend hanging out in our family, right? There just seems to be such a laser-focused mindset on these like little left-brained math kids and cool on them. But here was this profile that was like, my hobbies are games, music, sports, and I have an MFA in creative writing. And we were like, that's the gamut. So genetically, like this kid could be half us and half any, like this kid could pick its own path. And that was the freer version of DNA for us at the time. Like I think people don't go into this with the wisdom of how much this contributes to a kid. We had just seen sperm banks. There was one sperm bank that shipped to your home, and it was from the Pacific Northwest at the time. I call them kids because I presume they're college students. Every kid in that sperm bank was like hobbies, hunting, fishing. You know, and me and my lesbian wife are like, well, we don't think that's genetic. Not that's it's probably fine, but it really is you're reading this like a dating profile. You're like, okay, if it's all genetic and we get this Mr. Dominant DNA in our household, who's gonna fit here? Who's gonna be happy here? Who are we gonna be able to raise successfully to be whatever they want to be? Eeny meeny miny mo. And at the end of the day, you don't care so much. Healthy, beautiful child. Then in 2005, our daughter Alice came and was perfect. And we thought we'd clone her and use this DNA again on our second daughter, which we did. And they were both perfect, and DNA worked out great.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

The second daughter was carried by Jess's partner.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Yes. And at the time we thought this is ideal. We have this Mr. Recessive here, like we have a little me, we have a little her. You can't really see when you're not a part of the donor's life what the these girls have a lot in common, but also very little in common. And you look at who's the donor? We never even saw a picture. We didn't have the voice recordings and the astrological chart and all the stuff that you get today, even wasn't a thing in 2004. So we also in 2004 thought there was no way we were ever gonna know who this person was. And we picked an anonymous donor being very cool with that as a gay family in 2004, in a world in which like there were real dangers to our family and our child from a known donor. And so we were totally cool with okay, fine anonymous donor. And there I think there was at the time a known donor sperm bank for people who did want that. But there just was no conception that one day, even if he wanted to be anonymous, he couldn't be. It just doesn't enter your mind if it doesn't exist in the world at the time. And 10 years later, after that, so 20 years after your initial donation, it did become a reality.

Kendall 9:03

How did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Okay, I guess I was the first one of us to take a DNA test. Somewhere 2015, maybe, I began to see ads for home DNA testing. Specifically the ones I remember were 23 and me. And I thought, huh, maybe this would be a way to find the children that were born using my sperm. And the whole thing was new, and I don't know, I just kept seeing the ads. Like I I didn't do anything about it for about a year. Eventually I was like, all right. You know, I'm I'm curious, let's do this. And so, you know, I I spit in a tube, mailed it off, and got my results back. And of course, the first thing you do, I think I did it even before I looked to see what my ancestry was. I knew what my ancestry was, and I clicked on the DNA relatives and boom, there was someone listed as my son. Just one person listed as my son, and my son's name was Bryce. And I I wasn't quite sure what to do with this information. I also didn't really know how 23andMe works. Like as soon as I was in their system and opted into seeing my DNA relatives, had Bryce been sent an email that said, Hey, your dad's on the site. And it is like that. They don't send you something that specific, but they say, Hey, you have new DNA relatives. Of course, I later learned you get one of those emails like once a week, and pretty soon you're just ignoring them because you look and it's some more fifth cousins. But I had no idea. So I'm sitting here thinking, like, has Bryce been notified about this? What's the etiquette in this situation? Am I kind of obligated to write to him immediately? I just wasn't quite sure how this was gonna work. But what I did instead, which I guess most people would do, is I Googled his name and I didn't find much, and I actually enlisted the aid of a friend of mine who's an NPRL of water. She helped me uh search him out and found him. Like he had altered his name somehow. I forget exactly what he did, but his name was slightly different than what it really is, or what he goes by. And but she found him and the thing we found was he had a I guess his college sponsored this thing, but it wasn't Facebook, but it was a thing like he had a profile on his college's page that showed like what his major was, what his hobbies were, what were what campus groups he was involved with, and it had some pictures of him. And when we saw the pictures, we were like, oh, 100% that's my kid. Like he looked so much like me. He was like half a foot taller than like really tall. Well, but most of my family other than me is is kind of tall. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

No, my very first and only question for Aaron is like, you're the shrimp of your family, aren't you? Because your profile said average, and yeah, none of this is coming from me and my partner.

SPEAKER_04 12:31

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

And so, you know, I looked at his profile and it said he was in the Poet Society, said he was in a frat, said his major was geography. Geography, yeah. And so I had that information, and then I was like, okay, I'll just write to this guy. So one evening, I remember it was just kind of before I was going to bed, I I wrote him a letter, it was just like a couple of paragraphs through the 23andMe messaging system that said, Hi, I believe I am your biological father. You know, here's 10 facts about me. I'm interested in connecting if if you're up for that. So I I sent this message, I went and like brushed my teeth, got in bed, checked my email one last time, and Bryce had already written back. Yeah. You get used to the electronic age, but sometimes things still happen very fast, and you're like, what and he wrote back, and his message starts off dad. Like, wow. He says about how happy he is that I wrote. He was hoping to connect with me this way. He told me a couple things about himself. And I was a little taken aback by the use of dad, like I had no idea what his expectations might be of our relationship. And I view dad as kind of an cultural earned designation. And but pretty quickly our correspondence continued on, and pretty quickly I just he was just sort of like having fun with it. We're all struggling with what terminology to use in these kind of relationships. And whatever. He wasn't expecting me to become his dad. But he was curious about me.

Kendall 14:25

So he had known that he was donor-conceived.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

He was born into a lesbian couple. I I don't know if this is true. Like at at Utor, I talked to a few people about this, and my impression, just because it's been the case with most of the children I've discovered, is the vast majority of them came from lesbian couples. But someone at the conference said they weren't sure if that was really true, that maybe just like my sperm bank had maybe specialized in that more. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

We just Google I was given no lesbian-specific advertising.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Because the advertising I got to donate was help infertile couples, and sure, lesbians fit into that.

Kendall 15:12

All it takes is one successful marketing campaign, and then suddenly you're the go-to.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

And very quickly, Bryce told me that he had used, in addition to 23andMe, he had used donor sibling registry, which I had actually looked at like about 10 years earlier, but there had been no one listed for me, and I just forgot about it after that. But Bryce said that he had used it and he was connected to five other of my children. So I immediately went from like one to six. And he told like Bryce was 20 at the time. And that that mapped out to like the dates that I had donated sperm, but he told me that some of the other children were quite young, like a couple there was like a pair of twins that were seven. And so one thing I learned is like I had no idea what the shelf life of the sperm or like how quickly they sold it. I'd assumed it had all been used back around 1994 when I donated. Right. But it turns out it'd been used over the course of decade or more. Yes. He contacted the other like the other donors through donor sipping registry or their moms. Because I told him it was okay to put me in contact with them. So he was the intermediary for that, which seemed like the right way to go about that. One of them was a 19-year-old girl named Maddie. And she connected with me right away, and she, Bryce and I just formed like a little Facebook chat group and began to have chats and exchange information about ourselves. And you know, there was a like a flurry of activity with that for about a month. I wrote them a very long history of my life. I mean, um I was 50 at the time, and it it was only like a page a year, but but Jess likes to make fun of me for this.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

I do. But I really liked the I make fun of him for that, but I really liked later when we come into the story, like being handed the 56-page life history welcome packet.

Kendall 17:37

I feel as if I've known my biological father now for getting close to nine years, and I feel like I can still only fill a couple of pages. You know what I mean? Like I'm having to get stories from other family members about he's suffering from dementia, so that's part of it. But the other part is that he's just not very communicative. I can count on one hand the number of questions he'd asked about my first 47 years of life that he missed out on. It's he's just not inquisitive at all. If you pick a writer as your donor, yeah, do you make sure that he assumes that he knows, but he knows nothing.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

I think that you want to see these this person and you want to see their face move when they talk too. So you want to meet them.

SPEAKER_04 18:26

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

And then you're kind of at a loss because you weren't there. It didn't concern you. It's probably not genetic. It's is it a story history? You're you have to put all of that together and actually just want to get to know you as a person and do that in a different way than you've ever done with anyone else in your life. So even if he feels that, to be able to actuate that new relationship is it's hard. And if you're older and you're starting dementia, it's even harder.

Kendall 18:58

So I quiz everyone else about him, and you know, like his parents and you know, things like that. So it's still wonderful, don't get me wrong. It's just I didn't imagine it would be so difficult to extract information, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

All right, I can continue on. Yeah, you know, for about a month and I Bryce, Maddie and I had like kind of a lot of communication, but you know, they were in college and pretty quickly they just went back to leading their college lives. We're Facebook friends, sometimes we'd like each other's posts or whatever, but you know, things tailed off a bit, and a few months pass.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

So what's interesting is I think this speaks to how like something like 23 and me comes out and it's new, and you're like, nobody's gonna be there, nobody does it, but we're all doing it basically at the same time. Right. And Alice for Christmas, my mom had done 23andMe, and I was raised by my mom as a single mom. I have never known who my dad was. And Alice at 10 was like, now hold up just a minute here because good stories, but that's 25% of what my ancestry looks like.

SPEAKER_04 20:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Grandma, give me that test. And my mom was, of course, just yes, I would love to share this genealogy hobby with you.

SPEAKER_04 20:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

And immediately for Christmas of that year, December provided said test. And like before Valentine's Day, we had the results back.

Kendall 20:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

And perhaps very stupidly, like I hadn't thought anyone was going to be under DNA relatives at all. Like that was just going to be a throwaway section with fourth cousins with last names we didn't know. And it also didn't occur to me that like I could just physically on my own make the family trees of all those fourth cousins and come to a conclusion like this because it was 2016.

SPEAKER_04 20:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

So quite dumbly, I also opened up the test results and clicked through the countries and the ancestry report and clicked on DNA relatives. And the first thing there for my 10-year-old was 50% father.

SPEAKER_04 21:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

And you're like, oh okay. So didn't at all expect that. Start you start Googling. It's a common enough name that you have to wade through some stuff and you have to do a little bit of research to find the right Aaron Long. They had once out of seven months of trying to conceive sent a vial that said September 9th, 1994. Mistake on their part because I learned that somebody had a master's by 94, but was still young enough to donate sperm. That gave me a window of his ages, and I have his full name. And I know he has interacted with Fairfax Cryobank, which, silly me, I thought was in Fairfax. Fairfax, Virginia. Turns out Spermbanks have franchises. But luckily, there was an Aaron Long of the exact right age who is a writer for his job on LinkedIn. And he's a musician because he's playing a trombone in his LinkedIn picture. He didn't know how to use LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Say I was not trying to use I was not trying to use LinkedIn for the first time. Any kind of gross sleep.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

And he had attended Johns Hopkins. Oh wow. So he's really close to the DC area, which is Fairfax, Virginia. And I was like, okay, so like maybe after school he comes back to DC because he went to college there. And so I found that Aaron Long, and that Aaron Long was living in Seattle, Washington. And so I went to Facebook and I whittled away the Aaron Longs there. And there was an Aaron Long who had just recently, unbeknownst to me, connected with these sperm doney children. And so he had put on Facebook really recently all of his K to 12 school pictures. And that was my like just drop dead 100%. Of course, this is correct moment because 50-year-old man does not resemble your 10 and 9-year-old daughters. But you know what? First grade Aaron Long is my daughters with 60s boy David Cassidy bold cut. Which was not the best look for my daughters, but it was just instant recognition that you're like, yeah, right guy. Wow. On the nose, correct. This is who it is. And like Aaron, I was like, oh my God, he's gotten a note that we're here. Time is ticking.

SPEAKER_04 23:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

I better write back because I have the profile of a minor. This is it's on me to reach out to him. And so I did. And I said, I'm I think I really messed up that letter because I was in such a rush because I was because it's coming from her account.

SPEAKER_04 24:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

And I'm typing it, and I'm like, I've got another daughter. You want to see her? Write me back. But we figured it out. And he told me he had just connected with Bryce and Maddie and said, Here's a little bit about me. Here's the life history I wrote for them. And so I had Alice write him her life history. And just sort of mitigated that relationship as best I can because I never expected it would happen, number one. And number two, I never expected to be a part of it. Because at the time, the only models for that were like adult adoptees. And so you're picturing that. You're picturing someday my kids will be 21 and maybe they'll go do this, and I won't be there doing it for them. And so I wasn't really sure how to go about that, but it felt nice exchanging documents. It was a little bit of a step removed when you have a little kid. And that that it was just the best we could do. So I joined the Facebook group chat and we all started talking about how maybe on the summer when those the kids weren't in college anymore, they wanted to come and meet Aaron, and we would maybe come when they came, and that would be an easier way for my little kiddo to meet him too.

Kendall 25:19

Yes. But did you tell Alice right away that that was? Good.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

In part because I couldn't possibly keep it a secret. And number two, that's gonna come unraveled, and I it's gonna be worse.

SPEAKER_04 25:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

I did, and she knew she grew up in a lesbian household. She knew she had a donor. We had actually looked at donor sibling registry at some point when the kids were of that elementary school age, that was interesting to them. And kind it was almost just here's the donor number, kids, because right now that only lives in my head. So if I die, there's your information, this is all we know.

SPEAKER_04 25:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

So we had that conversation that if you want this, you need to remember this number.

SPEAKER_04 26:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Let's look at it. How interesting. Isn't that cool? But mommy and mommy love you very much.

SPEAKER_04 26:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

And this is why we did this. And look, he likes music just like you, and we whatever. You can't you keep it light because if it's not a big deal, I believe that we don't act like it is a big deal. If you want your kids to think that this is it's normal, it's cool, you're awesome.

SPEAKER_04 26:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

Like it's not it to make things this huge secret, it makes a lot of things worse.

Corey 26:39

Completely agree. Yeah. This is one of those conversations where you can feel how quickly everything shifts. What started as something that felt anonymous and contained back in the 90s turns into something completely different once DNA testing enters the picture. And what stands out to me is how thoughtful Aaron and Jess are in the way that they're processing this. Because nobody did anything wrong here. They made decisions based on the information, the culture, and the expectations of the time. But now, years later, those decisions are intersecting with the technology that's rewriting the rules in real time. And at the center of it are the real people trying to figure out what connection looks like, what family looks like, what role they want to play in each other's lives. And that's where this story really starts to go deeper. So, next week we're gonna pick this up in part two because there's a lot more to unpack here once these connections move from discovery into actual relationships. And remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist. The Family Twist Podcast is presented by Sabwa Fair Marketing Communications and produced by Mosaic Multimedia.