PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — DNA testing kits that can reveal ancestry have been growing in popularity over the years. But what do people do when they find out life-changing information?

Lisa Swyer from Philadelphia lived most of her life not knowing she was anything but Caucasian.

“I sing, and if I got to the point where there was too much soul coming out, it scared me because I was like, ‘Where is that coming from?’ Like honestly, I mean, I was a white woman!” she said jokingly.

Swyer became interested in tracing her family tree in 2014. She wanted to present the results to her father for Christmas.

Her mother, however, became irritated that she was digging into her history, telling her, “You will never know where you came from and I’m not talking about this while he’s still here, while he is still living.” She was referring to whom Lisa thought was her paternal father.

But with that, Swyer couldn’t let it go. She was in her early 40s when she took a DNA test, and when the results came back, the first word she saw was…

“Africa!” she said.

“I grew up with two white parents. My dad’s telling me we’re from Ireland. I knew I looked like my mom’s side of the family; her entire family has curly hair so that wasn’t anything unusual.”

She said for years, people always asked, “What are you?” People would ask her mother, “Is she yours?”

So there was a sense of relief when she finally…