Documentary traces student’s search for dad

By LISA THOMPSON

Erie Times-News

ERIE, Pa.

JoEllen Marsh’s ancestors surveyed her hometown in Warren County more than 200 years ago.

Many lie buried in a cemetery that still bears the family name.

A love of music and culture flowed through that family line to Marsh, a 21-year-old senior at Mercyhurst College.

But Marsh’s willowy build and natural physical grace?

Those traits came from no Marsh, her grandmother June Jones assured her.

When it came to her father’s side of the family, there were no cemeteries, family photos or nearby cousins Marsh could study for traces of herself.

The only clues to the secrets of that half of her DNA came in a brief profile of an anonymous donor to a lab in Southern California. “Dancer,” it told her. “Blue eyes.” “Philosophy major.”

Marsh is among the first generation of thousands of children born with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.

The technology gives life.

But as donor children like Marsh come of age, they are raising questions about their origins and provoking debate on subjects that include the secrecy of the process in the U.S., as well as the bioethics of the industry, where anonymous donors could potentially father dozens of children, without the donor children, their mothers or the donors themselves knowing it.

A documentary called “Donor Unknown” that aired this weekend follows Marsh and several of her half siblings as they discover, explore and define family relationships made possible and complicated by science.

Marsh’s quest to learn more about her donor and the others born from his genetic material transformed her family “tree” into a web of ties that, on paper, looks like a snowflake.

She now has an explanation for long-held questions.

“I can look at a lot of things about myself and know where they came from,” Marsh said.

Her definition of family has expanded to embrace her donor family with whom she shares uncannily similar physical and personality traits.

“My definition of family is anyone I feel some sort of connection with, whether it is someone who has raised me or someone who I am related to,” she said.

“My mother always said, ‘Anything that brings more love to a situation is a good thing,’” she said.

It started 21 years ago with a simple wish: Marsh’s mother, Lucinda Marsh, a chiropractor and a lesbian, wanted a child.

California Cryobank Inc., a sperm bank in Los Angeles, helped her realize her biological potential — this at a time when single motherhood, achieved through conventional means, was still unusual in the small village of Lander, Warren County.

“I was secure enough in myself. I knew I wanted a baby,” Lucinda Marsh said in the documentary.

She pored over the donor profiles before settling on Donor 150, a dancer and philosophy major with blue eyes, a trim, tall build and a spiritual bent.

JoEllen Marsh, born in 1990, said she can’t remember a time when she didn’t understand her family was different from others.

She had a donor, not a dad, her mother told her.

“She said a nice man helped make you,” JoEllen Marsh said.