The Story of My Life: Could It Possibly Be??

If you remember, in the last blog I told you about sweet cousin Anne.  She was my predicted fourth cousin on ancestry.com.  She had written to ask if I knew how we were related. The only thing I was able to tell her was that I was related to her through my biological father that I did not know since I was adopted.  She had noticed on my profile that I had said some of my family was from Findlay, Ohio. She suggested that I begin looking at the line of descendants coming from one of her sets of great, great, great grandparents.  You can read about all of that here.

Anne had been helping me some and we had decided that it was possible that I could have descended from her great, great, great grandparents, Sophia and Solomon.  I put their names on a family tree and begin working on finding all of their descendants.  As it got closer to modern times, the searching became more difficult as ancestry does not publicly list the names of anyone who is still living.  You have to search obituaries and other public listings on the internet to try to determine these pieces of information. 

Anne had first contacted me in November.  It is now the very beginning of February.  I was home working one day on all of this, when I came across a name on one of the branches of the family tree.  I will call this person George Martin.  George was from Findlay and had passed away in 2011.  Since his death was fairly recent, I was able to locate an obituary online fairly easily.  As I began to read the obituary taking notice of all of the details included in it, I began to get a funny feeling in my stomach.

It said George was survived by his two sons, Elliott and Dave, and by his three daughters, Susan, Ella, and Janice.   Now I don't know if you remember all of the details that were listed on the non-identifying information from the adoption agency , but there were FIVE children in my bio-father's family and there were FIVE children in George's family.  I kept reading....

I read that George had owned a business.  After much research, I learned that his sons had been involved with and taken over the business.  My bio father was the Vice President of a family business that his father owned.

Then I read that George had been a member of a Lutheran church. My birth father's religious preference was listed as Lutheran.

I then turned to one of my favorite research sites - Facebook.  Yes, I admit,  I may be pretty good at being a Facebook creeper. This time though, it was for research, so I did it shamelessly.  

I found profiles for Elliott and Dave.  Almost from the get go, I felt that if my biological father were one of them, it would be Elliott. His profile was private, but the information that could be seen was exactly what I needed to know. In his profile picture he was outdoors and wearing glasses.  He graduated from a university with a business degree before I was born. His birthday was listed and I realized that he would have been 27 at the time of my birth. All of this matched the information from the adoption agency. 

My heart was pounding. I called Steve. He wanted to know how I had come to the conclusion that Elliott could possibly be him.  I tried to explain, but I am not sure he completely understood. I don't think he believed it possible that I could have found my birth father on the first try.  And maybe he was right.  I wasn't sure exactly what I ought to do.

I wrote to cousin Anne to see if she knew anything about him.  She said she really didn't know too much about that part of the family. She suggested that maybe I should write him a letter. 

I thought about it and continued researching in the meantime, frantically and as fast as I could.  I found pictures of Elliott from his high school and college yearbooks.  He was skinny as could be and I could see remnants of my own face from my younger days in his pictures.  I was becoming more and more convinced as the day went on.  

So, I began to research how to write to someone when you think they might be your birth father.  I found some really helpful suggestions, the most important being that you don't come right out and suggest that or ask them directly in case someone else were to come across the letter before they do.  One person suggested that you write a letter saying that you are working on your family tree and ask if they might be willing to help you.  That sounded reasonable to me, so I sat down to compose a letter. 

I wrote to Elliott and told him that I knew we were related because I was related to cousin Anne through great, great, great grandparents Sophia and Solomon so I knew I was related to him.  I told him I was interested in learning more about relatives who were business owners in the Findlay, Ohio area in the 1970's.  Then I said I knew there was a woman named Carol Close who was also somehow connected to the family, and I was trying to figure out what that connection might be.  I asked him to contact me if he were willing to help me with my research.

After writing the letter, I sent it to Elliott via Facebook messenger.  And then there was nothing I could do but pray and wait.