After years of believing she was one of five full siblings, Payton Lee learned the family joke about her having a different dad wasn’t a joke at all

NEED TO KNOW

• Payton Lee’s siblings began joking that she might have a different dad after noticing she didn’t look like the rest of the family
• Her mother-in-law surprised Payton and her youngest sister with DNA tests, which they took, expecting to laugh about the results
• When Payton opened the results, she learned her sister was actually her half-sister and had to tell the man who raised her that he wasn’t her biological father

For most of her life, Payton Lee never had a reason to question whether she and her four younger siblings shared the same parents, even if they didn’t exactly look alike. Then a running family joke about her being the odd one out led to a DNA test — and at 29, the punchline suddenly became her reality.

“The idea that I have a different dad than my four younger siblings had honestly never crossed my mind until a few months ago,” Payton tells PEOPLE. “I had always just thought none of us looked alike.”

The joking started after Payton returned to her hometown and her brother mentioned that her siblings had been talking about how little she resembled them, which she shared in a now-viral TikTok video. She laughed at first, but when she started comparing old baby photos, she noticed something she hadn’t before: her siblings and her nephew looked like one another, while she didn’t.

@paytonnlee

I wish I was joking idk how this is my life honestly #putafingerdown #dnatest

♬ original sound – Payton Ellis

For the first time, a small part of her wondered whether the joke could hold some truth, though she says neither she nor the people around her seriously believed it. She likely would have left the question there, too, if her mother-in-law hadn’t surprised Payton and her youngest sister with DNA tests.

“I don’t think I ever would have bought or taken one if it was up to me,” she says. “One of the hardest parts of all of this has been that I never really made the choice to take that test, so I wasn’t emotionally prepared for what it could actually uncover.”

When the results arrived, Payton was out of town, so her siblings gathered at her sister’s house and they opened them together over FaceTime. Payton saw it first: the sister she had always believed was her full sister was listed as her half-sister.

She stared at the screen, confused enough that she initially wondered whether someone was pranking her. When she announced the result, her siblings responded, “We knew it,” a callback to their summer-long joke even as they were processing the same shock.

Then Payton kept looking, and the discovery got bigger. Directly below her sister’s name was another half-sister, someone Payton had never heard of, making it clear that the biological relatives appearing on her paternal side belonged to an entirely different family.

“That’s when it really hit me that the people on my father’s side were a completely different family,” she recalls. The result also meant something even harder to absorb: the man Payton had called Dad for 29 years was not her biological father.

Payton immediately called her husband, and once he returned home, they FaceTimed her dad to tell him what the test had uncovered. He didn’t believe it at first, but Payton says his response once they talked through the results quickly eased one of her biggest fears.

“He made it very clear that this doesn’t change anything and I’m still his daughter!” she says. For Payton, that reassurance carried decades of history behind it.

She remembers her dad as the “fun parent,” the one who took the kids on outings and trips and helped fill her childhood with happy memories. After learning that her mother had been about six months pregnant with Payton when her parents married, however, Payton found herself thinking about the discovery from his perspective, too.

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“I honestly felt really bad knowing that he entered that marriage believing I was his biological child,” she says. Rather than respond with anger, she says her dad has remained supportive as she has searched for answers, and Payton has kept him informed about what she has learned.

“He has had such a great attitude about everything and hasn’t held any resentment or been angry, which I don’t know if I would be able to do if I were in his shoes!” she says. The DNA results changed what Payton knew about her biology overnight, but they didn’t change the relationship that had already made him her dad.

The experience has also changed the way she thinks about at-home DNA testing, particularly when someone takes one expecting nothing more than a little fun. “So take it from me,” Payton says, “DNA tests should never be taken lightly!”

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