The Story of My Life: Almost Certain

Last time you read about how I began searching and found the obituary of George Martin from Findlay, Ohio.  He had five children, two of which were sons.  The things I found out about his one son, Elliott, seemed to fit the description provided to me by the adoption agency.  So thinking that maybe I had found my birth father, I wrote him on Facebook Messenger and then waited.  You can read all about that here.

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. 

The Story of My Life: Cousin Anne

Last time I told you how Brad, Jessie and I had all done testing through 23andme.  Once our results were in, I was able to use them, along with the family tree from Carol's side of the family, to start determining which family line my different DNA relatives were from.  I had an anonymous first cousin match that I knew was on my father's side of the family, but he never responded to any of my messages. You can read all about that here.

Trying to figure anything out by using my DNA and people's family trees was pretty much like looking for a needle in a haystack.   If I had a predicted second cousin match, for example, I would have to try to figure out who on that person's family tree (if they had a family tree) could possibly be our common ancestor.  For a second cousin, assuming the relationship prediction is correct, we would share a set of great-grandparents.  We all have two sets of grandparents and then four sets of great-grandparents, eight sets of great-great grandparents, and sixteen sets of great-great-great grandparents.  The number of sets of grandparents doubles for every generation you go back.  So the further away a relation is to you, the more possibilities there are for you to choose from when looking for that common ancestor.  It would get complicated at times, because a person who shares the same percentage of DNA with me and is predicted to be my second cousin, could actually be a first cousin twice removed or a half-first cousin.  This is why 23andme originally thought my relationship with Jessie was a grandmother-granddaughter relationship. We share close to 25% of our DNA so I could have been her grandmother/daughter or a half-sibling.   I know that this is a bunch of nerdy talk, so I hope that you are able to follow me as I keep going.

I would sit and take every relative, starting with the closest related to me, who I knew was related from my birth father's line and try to find that common ancestor. I would go back however many generations I needed to for that predicted relationship and then once I found all of the however many great grandparents, I would then sit and try to construct a tree made up of all of their descendants.  Can I just say that a lot of these people that I was researching had large families with lots and lots of children?? It took forever.  If I was fortunate, someone on Ancestry.com had a public family tree which made researching so much easier.  But then to complicate things even more, if a person is currently living, Ancestry.com does not publish their name on any family tree. They are just listed as private.  I found myself googling in hopes of finding obituaries or websites that would help give information as to who those living people might be. 

I spent hours and hours and hours, looking at family trees and names, just hoping that somehow, somewhere I would come across names that would match on people's trees that would give me a clue.  If I could just figure out one common ancestor between a couple of people who matched me, that would at least start me in the right direction. I did find lots of people who lived in the Ohio, Indiana and midwest region.  I spent more time pouring over those trees and trying to see if there was any connection between them. One of those people was a second cousin match, the closest match through my father's side on Ancestry.com.  He had a tree and by the time I was done studying it, I could tell you all about the Brown family that lived in Ohio, but alas, nothing was found that was of any significance to me.

You might be wondering what exactly I was looking for and how I would know when I had found it.  Do you remember the two paragraphs of non-identifying information I had on my birth father from the adoption agency?  I talked about it back in this blog.  It wasn't much, and I wasn't even sure whether it was true or not, but I was trying to find a family that somehow matched this description -  a family with five children, where the father and son were in business together.  I figured if I could find that, then maybe some of the other descriptors would match too. 

After months of searching,  God sent the key that would unlock the puzzle.  Meet cousin Anne.  Anne is a sweet lady in her 60's who also happens to be my 4th-6th predicted cousin on Ancestry.com.  She first contacted me on November 30, 2015 to see if by chance I knew how we were related.  I had been contacted before by many "cousins" and I had even contacted a few myself.  It seemed that many times when I mentioned I was adopted that people were suddenly no longer willing to help and just didn't respond anymore or there was nothing that they could offer to really be of assistance.  But this time was different. 

Anne had noticed from my profile that I had said part of my family was from Findlay, Ohio.  She said that could possibly be a clue.  She suggested that I begin researching one of her sixteen sets of great-great-great grandparents who had descendants who were also from that area.  She was very helpful and gave me some tips on how to make mirror trees and figure out where my strongest DNA matches were on a family tree.  We were in contact for a couple of months, trying our best to figure this thing out. I was slowly researching that line when suddenly, one day in very early February, I stumbled across something....

Until next time. ;)

The Story of My Life: Sorting It All Out

In the last post, I told about how I had contacted Carol's half-siblings. Because of that connection, I now know all kinds of things about that side of the family. I have medical history, a family tree and stories of the sweet grandmother I was never able to meet.  You can read all about that here.

Right about the same time as I found the aunts, I had also decided to do another DNA test. I figured it would not hurt me to put my DNA out there in as many places as possible if I was hoping to figure out this whole birth father mystery.  I had originally tested with ancestryDNA.  The closest relative I had was a second cousin and I really had no clue how she was related to me.  I decided to do another test with 23andme, the other big DNA company.  Not long after I send my test in,  Jessie and Brad decided they would take one too.  We were all curious to see what kind of information we could find out about ourselves.  

One by one, our results came in. We all got a good laugh when Jessie's came back.  23andme predicted that she was my granddaughter. I went in an corrected that assumption really quickly.  I may be older than her, but I am not THAT much older.

Once everyone had their results, I was able to start the process of figuring out how people were related to  me.  If a DNA match was related to all three of us, that meant they were related through our mother.  My new aunt Jan's husband, Ray, had given me a family tree for Carol's side of the family. Using this information, I was able to figure out which of the relations were related to us through our grandmother and who was related to us through our unknown grandfather.  Turns out, the lady who was my second cousin and closest match on ancestry is related to me through our unknown grandfather.  We worked together for a while, to try to figure out who he might be, but to this day it is still a mystery.

My very closest match though, came on 23andme.  It was a first cousin match.  A male who was anonymous and he was related only to me.  Brad and Jessie were not matches. I still remember the uptight feeling I would get in my stomach whenever I would see him on my match list.  Such a close relative. He could be the key to solving this whole thing. If I could just figure out who he was, the mystery could be solved in a very short time.  I tried contacting him on a couple of different occasions and received no response. I just kept on hoping that one day he would answer.

In the meantime,  I would take every close match I had on ancestry or 23andme and try to figure out all of their close relatives to see if I could find a family that seemed to match the description given in the non-identifying information from the adoption agency. Sometimes, for days on end, I would sit at the table with my laptop and papers with people's family trees drawn all over them spread everywhere. I would work until I was so tired of researching and then I would take a couple of weeks break, only to come back to it and find myself repeating the process over and over again.  Some days, I would feel my task was hopeless, while other days I was sure the answer was just around the bend. I worked like this for a year.  And then in November of 2015, God sent someone along to help guide me in the right direction....

The Story of My Life: The Indian Princess (or not!)

Four years ago I went to the eye doctor for a check up.  What happened during that appointment gave me another glimpse into the unknown part of my life.  Check it out for yourself. Here is a screenshot of my status update that day:

I remember many times after that appointment looking in the mirror at myself and seeing things just a little bit differently. Hmmm....Native American, huh? Suddenly having dark eyes and high cheekbones began to mean something to me. Maybe I could have been an Indian princess. :)  You might be wondering what is such a big deal about this anyway.  Well, my whole life I had known nothing of my ethnicity at all.  When I would ask my parents, they would just tell me I was "just American".  I always thought that it was cool when someone could say they were German, Italian, etc. They had a piece of culture and history that they could embrace. When I lived in Romania, the people there often thought I looked Romanian so I had sometimes wondered if that could even be a possibility. For me to be able to say that I had some Native American in me was super cool because I finally felt like there was a piece of culture I could claim as my own.  Not long before this discovery, I had dyed my hair a darker brown and started wearing some jewelry that was made with rocks, so I began to say that those fashion decisions were obviously based on my heritage and the fact  that I was indeed an Indian princess. It was just "in me".

Now I could stop here because really this is where this particular part of the story ended.  Nothing  came out of this discovery as far as my search goes, at least not for a while. But to save myself from the hate emails and death threats of having such a short post, I will keep going. But in order to do so, you have to fast forward with me a year and a half to late Spring 2014.

I had taken Zoe to piano lessons. She takes from a sweet 80+ year old lady, Mrs. Martin,  who was my piano teacher when I was a little girl. That particular day when I arrived,  Mrs. Martin told me that her daughter, Kathy, was here visiting and I could come in and talk with her if I wanted to. I knew Kathy from when I was younger as we had gone to church together and our dad's both worked at Piedmont Bible College.  Kathy and her brother had also been adopted so we had that in common too. We started chatting and she began telling me about how she had done some DNA testing and even though she had not been able to locate any close relatives, she had been able to get some medical information from the testing. She had also been able to figure out her ethnicity and some other information from it too.

I came home and told Steve about it and after some thought and online investigation of my own, I ordered a DNA kit from ancestry.com.  It arrived just a few days later and after I spit into the little tube, I excitedly sent the packet back off in the mail again.  It seemed like forever before I heard anything.  Finally the email arrived that said they had received my DNA and were processing it and then not too long after the email came saying my results were finished.  In reality, the whole process took only about a months time but the wait felt much longer.

I logged into my account and began looking at the different charts and graphs that would give me information about myself. There was a list of DNA relatives, but none of the known relatives were particularly close in relation.  Then I got to the ancestry composition graph.  99.8% European,  0.2% of a mixture of other things so insignificant that I cannot remember at this point in time what they were, and 0% Native American.  Yep, that is right. No Native American in me whatsoever. I could not believe it. That isn't what the eye doctor had said!  I even called ancestryDNA to make sure that they hadn't mixed up my test with someone else's. They assured me they hadn't . When I told them that my eye doctor was sure I had Native American in me and that the test said I didn't, they told me that the ancestry percentage may change over time as their process continued to be refined.

I just couldn't believe it.  I was so disappointed.

The following day, Zoe was going to my parents for the day and Josiah was going to go to a playdate in the afternoon with a friend. I went over to their house in the morning to drop her off and when I got there, I began to tell my parents about the test results.  I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but at the end of it, my dad said, "If you have a few minutes, we can find the information that the adoption agency gave us about your birth parents when you were adopted and you can have a copy of it."   I agree to help him look and TWO HOURS later, we found it in an old filing cabinet in the garage. He said they had always tried to keep our adoption files hidden so we wouldn't accidentally come across them if we were looking through their drawers. I guess they had done a good job of hiding it if at 40 years of age it took me so long to help him find it. :)

As you can see from the following picture, there really wasn't much information on the paper at all.    One half sheet of paper typed. That was it.  When my younger brother was adopted in 1982, my parents received a whole file folder full of stuff on him.  It didn't seem fair.  As I read through the paper, there really wasn't much on there that my parents hadn't already told me, except for maybe the part about my birth father having a growth removed from an arm pit.  That part made me chuckle then and still does today as that seems like such an odd detail to include.


I left with the paper in hand and went home.  There was a bit of time before I had to take Josiah to his playdate. I went in my bedroom with the paper and my computer and decided it was time to try to search again.  As I stared at the paper wondering if there was any bit of information that could help me with my search, one thing seemed to jump off the page at me. Of course, why I had I never thought about this before.

"Since she was adopted as an infant, we know nothing of her natural parents."

If I was adopted and searching for my birth mother, who is to say that my birth mother didn't do the same since she was adopted herself. Maybe, just maybe, I could find a family tree or something else that talked about HER being adopted.  So I googled once again.

Carol Close + Adopted.

The results came up and the second hit caught my attention. I clicked on the link and I could not believe what I was reading.....


And yes, I am sure by now you know what is coming....... more on this next time. ;)