The longtime Bradford, Ont., resident, whose father had died a few years earlier, said while trying to learn more about her family’s health history, the test to determine her genetic information matched her to a woman’s DNA in Minnesota named Rylee. Room. After connecting through Ancestry.com, Hall and McMaster began chatting in April 2019, including how they might be related. That’s how McMaster learned they shared a biological father they had never met. “I was definitely shocked, because I had no idea and really, if I hadn’t done Ancestry, I probably wouldn’t have known,” McMaster, 28, said. Hall, shown here as a child, always felt like she looked different from the rest of her family growing up. Now that she’s discovered McMaster, the two sisters say they can see their facial similarities. (Submitted by Rylee Hall) Hall, 26, said she was shocked too, but always felt something was wrong – she felt she looked different from the rest of her family and suspected her father might not be her biological father. Hall’s mother had told her she had been conceived through a sperm donation a year before hooking up with McMaster. Hall said her mother always planned to break the news eventually, but the time never seemed right. She said her mother finally told her the truth after Hall told her he planned to take an Ancestry.com test. “It’s not like everybody has to tell their child that they came from a sperm donor, so you can’t really prepare yourself to do that,” Hall said. “I was glad she told me, but maybe a little upset the way she did it and that she waited so long.” McMaster, seen in a childhood photo, says she never would have known she was conceived through a sperm donation if she hadn’t submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com. (Submitted by Carlie McMaster) Hall said that when she contacted McMaster, she didn’t make it clear that they were half-sisters because she wanted to be polite when giving notice. McMaster said that once she and Hall came to the conclusion that they were sisters, the Bradford resident walked away because she thought Hall was making fun of her. “Now that I think about it, I probably questioned my identity a little bit, but then it was more like, ‘Push this unknown thing away.’ I don’t want to deal with that,” McMaster said. Ten months after Hall and McMaster first came into contact with each other, McMaster said she sat down with her mom and they finally talked about it. McMaster said her mother told her she was conceived through a sperm donation and that the father who raised her was not her biological father. McMaster quoted her mother as saying, “It was very taboo back then, so we didn’t know how to tell you.” While McMaster initially didn’t know how to process the discovery, “Now I’m definitely happy about it because I have Rylee.”

The donor

Both McMaster and Hall make contact with Grant, a Toronto resident they never knew existed, but who they learn is their biological father. In the early 1990s, Grant was leaving Canadian Blood Services, where he was a regular platelet donor, when he noticed an ad. “They had an ad for fertility donors in the clinic elevator,” Grant told CBC Hamilton in an interview. He signed up to donate sperm for the same reason he gave blood — because he wanted to help, he said. He did not want his full name used for privacy reasons. Grant said he has been donating twice a week for nearly three years, excluding Christmas. Each donation produced about four vials, he said.
Grant, who is now in his 50s, said he tried to do the math and estimate how many people he could be genetically connected to through sperm donation. He guesses it could be in the hundreds, but the exact number is unclear. Hall said her mother went through a full year of treatments before becoming pregnant. “Because my mom is older, she went to the clinic every month and she did it 12 times … once a month for a whole year, and on the 13th month she was like, ‘Oh, it worked.’” How Grant ended up donating his sperm in Minnesota is unclear, but he attributes it to his longevity and success as a donor. Hall’s family received the documents when they chose a man named Grant as a donor. At the time, it was identified only by a donor number. (Submitted by Rylee Hall) “If you’ve been a donor long enough and you’re having successful pregnancies, they should change the geography,” she said. Grant said he was told that for every five successful pregnancies in a given geographic area, the sample would be moved. (Grant said the bank never determined the exact size of the area.) Fertility clinics use this approach to avoid overpopulating an area with genetically related children. In the two years between McMaster’s and Hall’s births, Grant said, the donations probably ran their course and had to be moved further west. Grant said that when he donated in the 1990s, he had no idea that technology would advance enough to be found through online DNA tests. He said he had mostly forgotten about his time as a sperm donor as the decades passed, until a young woman, not McMaster or Hall, approached him. Meeting the young donor-conceived women was an eye-opening experience for Grant. “For 30 years, you’ve kind of wondered about it and then suddenly you realize, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got a grown kid. What does this child look like? What are his usual things?’ You know, nature versus nurture,” he said.

From strangers to sisters

Once McMaster embraced having a sister in the US, they became close. At first, they shared long phone calls, and Hall said they still message each other a lot on every social media outlet. But their relationship deepened last fall, about a year after they first discovered each other, when Hall traveled to Ontario and stayed with McMaster in Bradford for 10 days. “It felt so normal when we were together,” McMaster said. “We have a lot of work to do,” Hall said. McMaster and Hall got butterfly tattoos during Hall’s visit to Ontario last fall to signify their brotherhood. (Submitted by Carlie McMaster) While in Ontario, Hall met McMaster’s entire family and friends. The two even got matching butterfly tattoos as a symbol of their sisterhood. Hall plans to return to Ontario this August for an even bigger reunion. Grant said that at the end of the summer, McMaster, Hall, himself and his 17-year-old son will meet and spend a weekend together in Toronto. “They’re just going to see what happens,” he said.

3 other brothers

There is more to the McMaster-Hall story. Through DNA websites, they have discovered other relatives. “We found three more brothers, so we’re five, so far,” McMaster said. The other siblings are all female and were born in the mid-1990s in Canada. The three live in Western Canada, mainly British Columbia. McMaster and Hall said that when they found a possible sibling, they would work together to draft a message that wouldn’t directly state how they might be related, to see if the women already knew. “We don’t want to scare anyone or upset them if they don’t know,” Hall said. “I never want to ruin someone’s life, obviously,” McMaster said. “Or the relationship they have with their parents,” Hall added.

The Podcast tells the story of half-siblings

Since they both had to tell their stories many times to different people, McMaster and Hall came up with the idea for a podcast they call Our Daddy is a Donor. McMaster and Hall’s podcast, Our Daddy is a Donor, will cover their story and also have discussions about other sperm donor stories. The pair hope to release their first episode on Spotify and Apple Music this August. (Submitted by Carlie McMaster) The couple plans to retell their own story and then discuss other stories of people conceived through sperm donation who have discovered the truth. Grant said he’s proud of McMaster and Hall for starting the podcast because it can help others in similar situations. “Hearing someone else’s story makes us feel better because we don’t feel alone,” she said. The podcast is scheduled for release in August and will be available on Spotify and Apple Music.