Speak Out

By Kelly Vela

I was born September 14, 1956, the third daughter to my mom and dad.

My parents were married in 1947 when my mother became pregnant with my sister. They moved to Los Angeles County and in 1951 they had another daughter who  was born with a hole in her heart and only lived for 9 months. Her death sent my mother into a depression which she couldn’t seem to kick.

I was never close to relatives or my dad. My sister was 9 years older than I, so we weren’t very close, even as we got older. I never felt a bond with my dad or my sister, but I never had any reason to think my dad was not my dad.

When I was about 6 years old, my mom became friends with a man next door. She would spend weekends with him and visit him during the week at his home. This affair went on until my parents divorced after 17 years. My parents had been married for 32 years. My dad, who was a functioning alcoholic, never knew about the affair.

I was 23 went they split and my mother moved in with the neighbor.

My sister sided with my dad, with whom she was close, and I sided with my mom, who always treated me special. My sister developed a strained relationship with our mother. They didn’t get along at all and fought since my sister was in her teens. I was the very quiet kid who never got into trouble. I just developed an eating disorder.

I didn’t marry until I was 37, probably because I saw the dysfunction in our family. By that time, my sister was on her third marriage, my mom married the neighbor, and my dad married a woman I never knew. He stayed married to her until he passed away in 1997. My mother stayed married to the neighbor until she passed away in November 2021.

So mom and dad are gone, and my sister and I do not speak at all, even though we live two miles from each other.

It is just me and husband, happy enjoying life, no more drama.

In January 2022, we decided to spit in a cup and see exactly what our nationality and ancestry is—much English and how much Spanish. When the results came back in February, I was super excited, curious to see what I am. I’d heard rumors we were related to the Prince of Wales.

I saw the relatives on my mom’s side of the family, but none on   my dad’s side. I contacted my cousins on his side and ask if they saw me in their tree. They didn’t. And my sister appeared as a half sibling.

I couldn’t understand how this could happen. I didn’t know DNA could screw up. I spent months checking my DNA relatives every day on 23&Me and Ancestry; I knew somebody was going to show sooner or later.  I noticed that I had some Greek heritage, but my cousins had none.

I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, and by June I was still trying to figure out where everybody was. I was ready to hire a genealogist to help me.

My husband and I were on vacation in June, but I was still searching on both DNA sites. I started opening trees that belonged to relatives I’d never heard of and looked at their pictures.  I started seeing a pattern in. I came across one photo from about 1944, a man in his military uniform. The photo was labeled “Johnny.”  I stared at the black and white photo, and  the hairs on my arms stood up. I had no idea who this man was but I could see myself in him.

I snagged the picture and put it next to a picture of me. I sent it to my cousins and asked if they thought  the man and I look alike. “Yes, they said. “who is this?” I had no idea.   no idea.

It’s been 6 years since I got the news over the phone late one night from my brother David. He told me to sit down because he had something shocking to tell me. I thought it was about our dad, Abe, who was in the hospital due to severe dementia and a fall two weeks earlier, but David said it was something else. He’d been cleaning Abe’s New York apartment and found a metal box with a lock on it. When he opened it, he found documents pertaining to my European adoption—an adoption I never knew had happened.

Stunned and blindsided, he read from the documents. I’d been born in Baumholder, Germany to a Jewish woman from Strasbourg, France and was adopted at 3 months old. Half of my adoption documents were in German and half in French with English translations.

I’d always known I’d been born in Germany because the woman I now know to be my adoptive mother, Norma, told me she and Abe, who was a Jewish chaplain in Chateauroux, France, had been sightseeing in Germany when she had me. Now I know the truth was that they went to Germany from France to adopt me.

Mom’s stories about her family history were like bursts of steam from a pressure cooker—brief, tantalizing, and at times, disturbing. She started telling me her disconnected anecdotes when I was about eleven years old. The most frequently repeated story in Mom’s canon went something like this:

      My mother had an uncle who set her up in business running a delicatessen. During the Great Depression, the business failed. When I was seven years old, my mother became mentally ill and was sent to a mental hospital. I was taken from my father and put into the county home.

In just a few sentences, Mom would sum up a family tragedy that was Dickensian in proportion:  a girlhood weighted down by financial disaster, her mother’s insanity, and separation from her father.  When she finished telling the story, Mom would evade the inevitable questions her story prompted with facile explanations and the occasional shoulder shrug. Although she admitted that her father had divorced Grandma while she was in the mental institution and that he had never tried to get my mother out of the county home, Mom professed that Grandpa had been the most wonderful father ever. It made no sense to me.

Mom became interested in genealogy a few years after Grandpa’s death in 1966. Over the years, she worked on it intermittently while she and Dad raised six children. Genealogy didn’t interest me.  Looking at the pedigree charts and family group sheets filled out in Mom’s distinctive scrawl, I was unable to make any more sense of the past than I had by listening to her stories. After all the work she’d done, I expected that they would have become more detailed and connected. But Mom continued to tell the same old tales, which were unaltered by anything that she might have uncovered in her genealogical research.

What I wanted was a more coherent narrative of Mom’s childhood. A lifetime of listening to her brief and disjointed stories hadn’t given me that, so I had no expectations of getting it out of genealogy.  It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I gave her genealogy a closer look.