Search for dad leads down twisted path

By Matt Crenson

updated 11:32 a.m. ET April 23, 2007

When Martin Marshall started looking for his dad a three years ago, he had a fantasy: One day, he might sit down over a cup of coffee with a half-sibling he’d never even met and hear a few stories about the father he’d never known.

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

Marshall has learned some fascinating things about his heritage. But he has also infuriated and antagonized complete strangers who can’t believe that he would suggest that a loved one might have sired illegitimate children — and then ask for their DNA to help prove it. He has been accused of harassment and even extortion. And he still doesn’t know who his father was.

“It’s more of a twisted tale and journey than I envisioned,” Marshall acknowledges.

It is a journey that has become more common, as the curious and the lonely have seized upon DNA testing as a way to find their families. Some have been successful. But others, like Marshall, have found it a difficult and sometimes bitter experience.

Nobody ever told Marshall how to approach people to ask for their DNA. Nobody ever explained how to tell a complete stranger that maybe, just possibly, the man who raised him — the man who played catch with him in the yard, who taught him to drive, who sent him off to war and welcomed him home — may have cheated on his mother.

“What are the procedures,” Marshall asks. “Where’s the handbook for how you go about doing this kind of research?”

How it all began
This is what Martin Marshall’s mother told him:

His father was a GI, stationed in St. Louis during World War II. But when the Army transferred him to Texas in 1944, Al Marshall left St. Louis — and his family — behind.

Marshall was born four years after that. His mother always swore he was conceived when her estranged husband made his one and only trip back to St. Louis, but Marshall found that hard to believe. He always knew in his gut that Al Marshall wasn’t his father.

Marshall grew up in California, where his mother moved with her three sons in 1952. His brothers were rough-and-tumble young men who never finished high school, but Marshall was a bookish boy. He won a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology, where the other members of his class named him their poet laureate.

He pursued careers as a tech journalist and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Eventually he started his own Internet consulting firm, the Martin Marshall Group.

He raised a family. He wrote poems and essays. He didn’t give much thought to his paternity.

But a few years ago Marshall started wondering what his mother, who died in 1987, had covered up about her past — and his. He was on the verge of becoming a grandfather, and wanted to have answers when his grandchildren asked the same questions his mother had always evaded.

The first thing Marshall did was confirm what he already suspected. He had his DNA tested, then set out to compare it to his brothers’.

Marshall’s brothers were both dead, but the older one had a surviving son who agreed to submit a DNA sample. Marshall and his nephew scraped a few cells off the insides of their cheeks and sent them to Relative Genetics, a DNA testing lab in Salt Lake City.

A few weeks later, the results came back. They didn’t match.

Just to be sure, Marshall did some research and discovered that Al Marshall had yet another son by a second marriage. That son also agreed to be tested.

Again, no match.

Marshall could have stopped there. But he understood that there was more information to be wrung out of his DNA — much more.

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