On Streaming: Our Father

 

Wikipedia; Netflix. Our Father (2022).

Our Father is a 2022 documentary currently available for viewing on Netflix. Although this has been available for a while, I recently watched it, and thought the documentary was important to share given the topics of DNA testing and the location of my school age home in Indianapolis. The documentary centers on a woman (Jacoba Ballard) who learns her mother went to a fertility doctor, and the doctor used his own sperm to impregnate unsuspecting patients. Ballard learned through testing on 23andMe that she had eight half-siblings (see this summary on Time from May 2022). The documentary describes her story and several of the half-siblings as they seek justice.

It's not a spoiler that at the end of the documentary, there were 94 half-siblings. Three years later, the sibling count is up to at least 107 (source: Reddit). There is an April 2025 article in the Indiana Capital Chronicle on another lawsuit against the doctor.

I partly watched this because the story is set in Indianapolis. We had moved away from Indy when the story initially broke on this case, so I was not familiar with this at the time. I certainly could have gone to school with people who were of the age of the children involved, who would now be adults. The doctor in the cases and documentary retired in 2009, and DNA testing may continue to reveal additional half-siblings.

The documentary highlights a consequence of DNA testing - relationships that exist will be revealed. Ancestry, MyHeritage and 23andMe have tools that show match relationships. Ancestry shows how matches of matches are connected, and if you have ProTools, it is incredibly powerful for identifying how people through their DNA matches are connected to each other.