Five years ago at the age of 62, for the first time in my life I needed my birth certificate. Simple you would think but not if your mother is a pathological liar. So it took the Clerk of the Clerk and myself 6 months of research to find it. Her name on it was not her married or maiden name. She went back a generation and used her grandparents name as her last name. For my last she did not use the name which I went by the first 25 years of my life. She listed her step-father as my dad.
All of this required that I obtain a lawyer and go before a judge to change my birth certificate so I could get my driver's license and register my vehicles.
Shortly afterwards, I did the DNA from Ancestry. I have found my biological father (he had passed 5 yrs prior to me finding him), a half brother, a first cousin, 100's of 2nd and 3rd cousins. At this point only met my half brother and talked to a few of the cousins.
Both my biological parents families believed strongly in extremely large families, I still cannot get past recording family trees beyond 3 generations. On both side my grandparents all 4 were 1 of 14 to 18 children.