I had dealt with Facebook Messenger and the difficulties with the other party not receiving your messages if you aren't "connected" on Facebook before when I was trying to first contact my half-brother Brent's wife, Alyssa. This was a couple of year prior to the time I was writing to Elliott. When I had written to Alyssa, my message had gone to her "other mailbox" until I paid a dollar for it to go directly to her inbox. This time, Facebook did not offer me the option of paying the dollar. I knew from other experiences that Elliott probably would not see my message unless it was by some random chance. I even did the whole "Invite Elliott to Messenger" thing in hopes that would alert him that I had written to him. Still nothing.
In the meantime, I started thinking about what I had done. I mean, really, what are the chances that I could go through someone's family tree, find a family that appears to fit the description of my birth father's family, choose one of the men in the family and think he was my birth father? It was so crazy and I knew it. The more I thought about it, the more I began to doubt my discovery.
Then a thought occurred to me. If I was related to Elliott, then my relation to fourth cousin Anne was through his father's side. If I was related to Elliott, then how would I be related to the second cousin, called J.S., that was on ancestry.com? Somewhere, there would also have to be a connection between Elliott and him. It wasn't through Anne's side of the family, as J.S. did not share any DNA with Anne at all. I figured that maybe the connection came through Elliott's mother's side of the family. I began looking for that connection. The family trees would have to cross or my research would have been faulty.
It is now about a week after I have written Elliott. I am sitting at home working on the research. I started with Elliott's mom. I will call her Mary Alice. She had died in 1995, so I was not able to find an obituary to help me with her parent's names. I turned to ancestry.com's database in hopes that I would be able to find something. I searched and searched, but it was like her parents were not to be found. Then somehow, I don't even know how, I stumbled across something. It had her name written as Alice Mary. I thought it would be worth a try to put her name in backwards from what I had been doing and when I did, what popped up on the screen made me about fall out of the chair.
I am tempted to end this blog right here, but for the sake of many that I know who would struggle with that, I will continue. ;)
Remember when I told you I had been researching that second cousin, studying his family tree for hours on end because so many of his family was from Ohio?? I probably could have almost drawn his family tree for you from memory. So when the information popped up with the name of her parents on it, I immediately recognized them from J.S.'s family tree. It was a set of names I had looked at over and over and over again with no results.
Now I was shaking. I called Steve and again tried to explain to him what I had discovered and mostly what this discovery meant. Since I was related to Anne and I was related to J.S., the cross of the two family trees happened right there with George and Mary Alice. With the cross being at their parents, the only possible people that could be my birth father were Elliott or Dave. There were no other options.
With this newfound bit of certainty, I became a bit more brave. I decided that I would also write to Dave. Even though I really thought that Elliott was the more likely candidate, I knew there was still a possibility it could be Dave. The other thought I had was this: If Elliott had been in a relationship with Carol, then maybe Dave knew about it and could tell me so or he would contact Elliott and let him know I was looking for him.
I copied the same letter that I had sent to Elliott and sent it to Dave on Facebook messenger. I did the whole "Invite to Messenger" thing with him as well.
I don't remember how long it was before I was alerted that "Dave has accepted your messenger request". It might have been a week or so. My stomach was in my throat because I knew then that someone had seen the message. But then....nothing. There was no answer.
I didn't really know what I was going to do. I didn't have peace to do anything other than what I had already done. I felt like when the time was right, God would give me direction. I had been praying about the whole thing from the first time I wrote Elliott. I prayed for him that if he was my birth father, he would be open to talking with me about it all. And I prayed for his wife. I knew from my research that he had been married to his wife, Hazel, for about 40 years. I knew that there was a possibility that my birth father never knew that I existed and if that were the case and Elliott was him, I knew there could be problems. I didn't want to make problems for anyone. All I wanted was to find out some answers for myself.
One day about a month after I had written to Elliott, I was talking on the phone with my friend, Jude, about the whole thing. She said, "Lolo, you just need to write him a letter - good ol' fashioned snail mail." I knew instantly that was what I was supposed to do. I got off the phone with her, and later that day I wrote out exactly what I had written to him on Facebook. At the end, I included my email address and phone number in case he wanted to contact me. I addressed the letter with his address that I had found on the internet, put a stamp on it, and before I had time to change my mind, I drove to the post office and dropped the letter in the mailbox. 
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