By Angie Clark

I had a rocky, on- and off-again relationship with the man I knew as my dad my entire life. But in 2007, we were tight. We’d practically been best friends for about 10 years at that point. Unfortunately, he met a woman he would marry later that year and who, for various reasons, wasn’t a fan of mine or any of his other family members, and not long after, he completely cutties with me.

Ten years later, I heard his wife had been saying tacky things about me to my nephew and even had the audacity to say something to the effect of “Angie isn’t even his real daughter!” The next thing I knew, I was agreeing to a DNA test because, clearly, she is out of her mind … right? There was someone related to the family who was acting as a go-between, and she said we should take the tests. My “dad” took one the following week. I was happy to put to rest once and for all the rumor his wife had started. On Thanksgiving morning, 2017, at about 7am, I was awakened by the ding on my phone letting me know I had an email message. When I checked it, I saw: “SUBJECT: Your DNA Test results are in!” I was 43 years old, and my mind was flooded with memories and images of my life as I tried to comprehend that my dad, my hero, the man I’d wanted my entire life to make proud of me was, indeed, not my biological father.

Four years earlier, my mom had passed away. In those last days of her life, we had many deep conversations, and one of them was about my dad. She knew how hurt I’d been the last few years about his distance and that I never understood how he could just abandon me that way. How could anyone do that to their daughter? It crossed my mind maybe he wasn’t my dad, so asked my mom if there were any possible way that anyone else could be my father. She clearly and firmly said no, and I left it at that. It was just a random thought anyway.

After my DNA test results came in, without being able to go to my mom for answers, I immediately began making phone calls and sending email messages. I’d always heard rumors about my mom having had affairs, and my phone calls confirmed that. There was one man she was especially close with, a family friend, and there had been rumors about them being together. I knew him my entire life, so I called him. After we caught up on a few things and I explained what was going on, he told me that it would be him. He had been with my mom multiple times, and I even found a photo of them dancing together on New Year’s 1974, which is about the time I would have been conceived. I didn’t have a definitive DNA match, but I had an acquaintance helping me sort through all of the DNA findings because she had done a lot of DNA research. She told me he probably was my biological father because she found several of his ancestors in my matches. With my friend’s confirmation and his admission, we both accepted that he was my biological father. He told me that he didn’t want anyone to know because he was still married to the same woman he was married to back then, and he didn’t want to hurt her or their children.

Although it was painful and I felt rejected, I respected that he didn’t make this known to any of his friends and family. I tried to move on, but it was hard. I was dealing with so many feelings and different facets of rejection. I felt alone and unworthy of being wanted or loved. In addition, I was battling feelings about my mother. I would have expected to be very angry with her, but I wasn’t. I guess I was hurt more than anything. Hurt that she didn’t feel like she could be honest with me and that she carried that secret her entire life. I also found myself replaying so many times in my life, trying to dissect choices she made and things she said, trying to see if I could find any hints or clues that I might have missed. I also thought about the fact that the man who raised me was my “dad” for 43 years. Not long after my parents divorced and I was living with my mom, I came home from school one day and she had our apartment packed up. I was so excited thinking that we must be moving back into a house instead of the apartment, so I asked her where we were moving. “I am moving to California, and you are staying with your dad here in Texas,” she said. “He will be here in 20 minutes.” Before I could even process what was happening, I was in a car being driven by my stepmother, taking me to what would be my new home.

Now, as an adult with my newly discovered information, I couldn’t help but wonder how she could have done that? It’s one thing to abandon a child for five years, but she knew in her heart that he wasn’t even my dad. To think of everything I went through during those years, and again … he wasn’t even my dad. These types of thoughts and scenarios played out in my mind for the next two years.

Although I was coming to terms with this mind-blowing discovery, in the summer of 2020 something was telling me this story wasn’t over. I felt like I was missing something. As much as I didn’t want to open old wounds, I started to poke around again. On social media, I was introduced to a group called DNAngels. I sent them a message and explained my situation. I said that I’d discovered who I thought was biological father, but I felt as if something was missing. I wanted concrete evidence. DNAngels accepted my case, and within 10 minutes of just browsing my family tree and DNA matches, Laura Olmsted, who was working my case, called me. “Well I can already tell you that I don’t think he is your biological father,” she said. Wow! Here we go again, I thought. Another emotional roller-coaster ride, coming right up!

Laura told me that she’d do her best to confirm her suspicion and to find my biological father. She asked me to allow her some time as she was still finishing up some other cases, and mine might be tricky without many matches on my paternal side. During the next few days, I couldn’t help but be excited. Was this a second chance? I already went through the rejection from the person I thought was my dad. Maybe this was going to be the happy ending I had always wanted! Maybe a dad, maybe more—maybe a family!

One week later, a little past midnight, Laura sent a message. She was sorry for messaging so late, but she hit a rabbit trail on my case and was so excited she wanted to share it with me right away. She said she’d discovered my great-grandparents on my paternal side. This was exciting and amazing that she found them so fast. Over the next hour she messaged back and forth with a few discoveries and to let me know she was getting closer. After about half an hour of silence, when I thought maybe she’d decided to call it a night and go to bed, she sent another message. “I would like you to meet your Father,” and she attached a picture of a very handsome man, a photo clearly taken a good 60 years earlier when he was a teenager. I could see the resemblance between us. It was amazing! She sent a few more photos and more information about him and his family. She even gave me contact information so I could reach out to him. I was so excited I didn’t even go to bed that night. I stayed up all night thinking about calling him first thing in the morning.

All night, I played out in my head what I would say and how he would respond, and I would go through scenarios of various outcomes. Although I knew better than to expect a happy ending, that hope inside of me had been reignited. I knew he would probably be shocked; after all, he was 83 years old. I didn’t know if he knew about me or if this would be a complete surprise. My goal was to let him know who I am, and at least give him my contact information so he could reach out to me after the shock wore off, if he was inclined to do so.

At 9 a.m., my hands were trembling and my heart was racing as I dialed his phone number. I almost couldn’t even speak; then I heard him say hello. My first thought was that he sounded so sweet—like such a nice man. I said hello, told him my name, and explained that I’d been researching online and found that he knew my mom—that they worked together back in the early 70s. “Yes!! Of course I remember Nancy,” he said. I told him what I’d been researching and that I’d discovered he was my biological father. I said I understand it might be a huge shock and that he might need some time to think about it.

“Well… what do you want?” he asked. “I don’t want anything other than to give you my contact information so that someday, if you decide you want to reach out to me, you can.”  He then said he didn’t see the point of that, and as he continued to talk about how other people involved would be hurt, I couldn’t help but to slowly fade out to thoughts of rejection, disappointment, and absolute heartbreak. Again. I couldn’t even get him to take my phone number before he said, “Well good luck,” and hung up. And just like that, my second chance for a happy ending was over. I couldn’t believe it. How could this happen? Again.

A few hours later, I learned that someone associated with DNAngels actually knew him. What a coincidence! She’d worked with him at the same company, but later in the 1980s. She offered to talk to him again for me, to explain that I wasn’t a fraud, and to share with him how all of this came about. Before she hung up, she asked me what three questions I’d like to ask him. I replied:

1. Did you know I existed and did you love my mother or was it just a casual relationship?
2. Is there anything in my medical history I need to know? I’ve battled several chronic illnesses so this would be great information to have.
3. Is there anything you want to know about me—anything that I could share about myself?

A few hours later, she called back and told me about her conversation with him. No, he did not love my mother, it was an on and off again sexual affair that started at work. He claimed he didn’t know about me or even that she’d been pregnant. He shared with her his medical history, and after she asked the last question about what might want to know about me, he said, “Well, I don’t know, I can’t think of anything.”

What a kick in the gut; not only did he not even want my phone number, he didn’t even want to know one single thing about me. Yet I had and still have so much I would love to share with him about me and his grandson.

People have asked if I regret pursuing this again only to be hurt. My answer is absolutely not. DNAngels brought me something priceless—the truth. And although this isn’t a happy ending, after a few days of wallowing in my feelings and drowning in my tears, I found such strength and resolution in knowing the truth and knowing where I came from once and for all. Most of all, I found closure.

Almost four years since that DNA test, I have been through many challenges, most of which are all directly related to fallout of this discovery. It’s amazing to me how such indescribable hurt and loss can morph into such a source of strength and resilience. Not long after the initial discovery, I had a complete emotional breakdown. I stopped working. I became very ill and I even lost my home. I remember sitting there in my car in the gas station parking lot looking through my phone trying to find someone, anyone, I could stay with. There was no one. I was officially homeless. Since then, I rebuilt from the bottom up. Physically, emotionally, and financially. I even went back to college and I’m about to complete my MBA. After much time of healing, I reached out to my two new sisters twice, with no response. I have since put myself in their shoes, and I do understand how one email completely changed what they believed and thought about their father and the family they were raised in, and I certainly understand wanting to protect their mother. I will never lose hope that one day they will want to know me and my story and share theirs with me. Until then, I’ve found family and comfort in others who have been through this lifechanging experience. I’ve decided I must share my story with others. I have to let them know they are not alone and that not all of us have ideal happy endings with our newfound families. But, this doesn’t mean we haven’t gained something extraordinary from this experience, and I am forever grateful for that.

Angie Clark is from Dallas, Texas and has spent time in Los Angeles, Boston, and Stockholm. She’s a proud mother to her son Erik and a devoted cat mom. She discovered her NPE status in November 2017, and her story has been featured in several podcasts and publications. Clark is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and is in the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program with an anticipated completion date of November 2023. She was a featured guest speaker at Harvard Medical School, and is working on her first book, to be released in December 2024. Follow her on Instagram @angiecarolyn74 and on Twitter @angiecclark.

By Kellie Schwartz

Many times in our lives we are told things we assume to be true. Some of these are harmless. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all visited me, and I didn’t feel betrayed or harmed when I found out the truth. I continued these traditions with my children and love that they’ve continued them with my grandchildren.

Sometimes the things we are told simply prove to be less valid over time. In 1988, my eighth-grade pre-algebra teacher didn’t believe he was lying when he said, “You have to learn and memorize all of these algorithms because it’s not like you are always going to carry a calculator everywhere you go.” At that time, he was right. Fast forward 25 years, and we do carry a calculator everywhere we go, and it takes great pictures too! And we even use it to make phone calls and receive text messages. He had no idea what the future had in store. Nevertheless, we don’t have to know everything because… well … Google.

Other times, we’re told falsehoods that have a profound effect on our lives and the lives of others around us.

I was born in 1975 in El Paso, Texas. I went home with my mom and my beloved grandparents, whom I affectionately called Gaga and Papa. My mom married when I was about 18 months old, and although I have no memories of those first months, I vividly recall my life with her and her husband. I called him Dad. They went on to have three more children, two girls and then a boy. I was the oldest and always different in looks and personality. I cried easily, wore my feelings on my sleeve, and was treated differently. Dad was a mean SOB, and I was his favorite target. When I was about six years old, my mom and dad separated again, and then we lived with Gaga and Papa.

Gaga pulled me onto her lap, played with my hair, and rubbed my chin (all the things she did to calm me and show me affection). She then let me know she had something she needed to tell me. I can remember so many things about this moment—the gold crushed velvet chair, the end table with a lamp next to it, a few tears in her eyes, and her hands. One on my back, rubbing softly, and one under my chin so I was looking directly at her. She took a deep breath and said, “Kellie Lynn, I feel like you need to know that Bill is not your real dad. Your mom and he married when you were very young. I love you, and I didn’t think it was fair for your mom to not tell you.” Even at six years old, I felt an incredible sense of relief. Although it would change nothing about my daily home life (my mom went back to Bill soon after this), things made sense. He treated me differently, and badly, because to him, I was different. I wasn’t his. The other revelation that followed was that my mom was not my protector. Maybe she wasn’t capable of it. She didn’t come to my rescue nearly as often as I needed to feel safe and loved.

For the following six years, life was status quo. I thrived at school academically. I was very quiet, read everything I could get my hands on, made great grades, and, thankfully, was a part of a loving church family. My mom left Bill a couple more times, and finally, on their wedding anniversary in 1987, she packed us into a rental car with a couple suitcases and we left. We went back to live with Gaga and Papa, where I felt safe and loved. There were nine people living in a crowded double-wide mobile home, but there was no more screaming, yelling, hitting, or name calling.

The following summer, I reached out to my mom’s older sister, writing to tell her I wanted to contact my real dad. I knew that if anyone would help me, it would be her. I sent the letter on a Tuesday, and on the following Thursday evening the phone rang. Papa always answered the phone, and after a few minutes, he said, “Kellie Lynn, it’s for you.” It was my aunt, Carollyn. She asked if my mom knew I’d sent the letter to her. When I told her she did not, Carollyn said I had to tell her. She added that she and my uncle were  going to pick me up over the weekend, and I would meet my dad on Monday. I was terrified. I knew my mom would be angry; I was scared of an in-person meeting with my father and yet a little excited. This was the heyday of the daytime talk-show, and that week several had episodes about people meeting birth parents and it going terribly wrong. Oprah, Donohue, Geraldo, and Sally Jesse did nothing to ease my mind. But there was no turning back. I went with my aunt and uncle, and less than 24 hours later a blond guy walked through the door with flowers, a stuffed dog, and a card. He showed me pictures of my grandparents, great grandparents, and a brother and a sister. I was shy and said very little. He was nervous, too. We ended the evening at Pizza Hut. I remember eating next to nothing and staring at my Dr. Pepper a lot. My mom came to town a few days later and they had a talk. Our relationship grew as best as it can with a teenage girl and a single guy who worked full-time.

 My mom moved us to the same town, and the relationship ebbed and flowed. He remarried, I made a few life choices he didn’t agree with, and we ended up with no contact for a few years. He missed my wedding and the births of my first two children. He eventually called and wanted to talk. I agreed, but wouldn’t let him meet my kids quite yet. We went to a local park and he said the words I had always worried he would. “I should have asked your mother for a paternity test.” I was devastated. It had been 15 years since we met at this point and a test seemed like such a moot point. Then he refused to acknowledge that he said it, but I could never unhear those words. They haunted me.

Life continued, and our relationship stayed very cordial, but not close. I didn’t know what to say or what he wanted to know. In 2015, my life took another unexpected turn. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 triple negative breast cancer. Four months from the date of diagnosis, she was gone, and my life continued to change. I was left with three of my four kids still at home, and my husband and I inherited three additional kids that my mom had adopted from foster care. So we had two 13- year-olds, a 14-year old, two 15-year olds, and an 18-year-old. My house was chaos.

I took a 23andMe test, and when my results came in, I looked at the DNA matches and recognized only one name, but this maternal side would be easy to trace. Gaga had done extensive family research, and the one name was a second cousin once removed on my mom’s side. I closed the app and really never thought about it again. Life continued, and due to other hurdles in our lives, I put this on a back burner. Maybe not even on a burner really, just not even thought about.

In August 2020, I took an Ancestry DNA test. This time I was determined to prove to my dad that he was, without a doubt, my dad. As I looked at my results, I found numerous matches on my maternal side and I worked to try to connect other matches to my dad. The matches not from my mom’s side were further down, and I couldn’t figure it out. But again, life got busy, and I put the results away. In hindsight, I think I realized that something wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it.

In November 2021, I couldn’t attend church with my family because I had bronchitis. Thinking I had nothing to lose, I messaged the top nonmaternal match and asked if she had any family living in the El Paso, Texas or Las Cruces, New Mexico areas in 1974. Within a few minutes, she messaged back saying she had grandparents and an aunt and uncle who lived there at that time. The aunt had two kids who then would have been in their early twenties—a son and a daughter. These were my match’s only relatives, so the logical conclusion was that the son was my biological father. I sent another message for more information and soon discovered that the uncle worked for the same company as my grandfather. The pieces started to fit together, but my life felt as if it were falling apart. It was like a puzzle I’d spent my life putting together was suddenly put through a paper shredder and made absolutely no sense. The pieces no longer fit, and I had no one to ask questions. My mom and both my grandparents were gone. My aunt tried to be helpful, and she was supportive, but she was also shocked. My goal of proving myself to my dad had backfired. I’d proved that he had every reason to be suspicious.

Unbeknownst to me or his other daughter, sometime around Christmas 2022, my birth father took an Ancestry DNA test as well, and his results show us as a parent/child match. My goal for the next year is to grow our relationship. I want him to meet my kids and my grandkids and for them to know him as well. I want my new sister to meet her nieces and nephews and for our relationship to become closer. All of this takes time, energy, and willingness to step out of our boxes.

I will never know why my mom made the decisions she made, and I have no idea whether she lied because she thought there was no way we’d ever know or if  she simply guessed about my paternity and picked the wrong man. I wish she would have been honest with me, but to say my mom was slightly “truth challenged” is a huge understatement. As hard as it would have been to hear, “I’m just not sure who your dad is,” it would have saved so much heartbreak. Being an NPE (not parent expected) is tough enough; being a double NPE is even harder. Meeting a biological parent you were unaware of profoundly changes you, but I have now done that twice. Or so I thought. Not knowing how to handle a changed family dynamic makes you feel alone and completely misunderstood.

So the next time you choose to withhold the truth, stretch the truth, or just lie by omission, please think of the ramifications of that decision years later. Who will be impacted? What will it do to your relationships? And how will affect another’s memory of you?

Truth is powerful, and at times painful.  But without the truth, healing will never be complete.

Kellie Schwartz is a wife to Doug, a mom to Kelsie, Kyle, Cassidy and Caden, and a Lolli to Kendrick, Karston, Caylie and Aubrey. She’s made her home in Eastern New Mexico  since 1988. She sews, quilts, crafts, and reads when she’s not working or enjoying time with kids and grandkids. She and her husband enjoy fishing and spending time outdoors. She’s a double NPE. Follow her on Instagram @Kellie.Schwartz.

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—how 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. 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.

I continued to research the new name and history. I wanted to reach out to these people but was too afraid to try.  I changed the family names on my bio to include theirs and boom! I got a message the next day. I showed up on their DNA connections, and they wanted to know who I was.

According to the DNA sites, I was chatting with my first cousin. As she explained who the people in the tree were, I blurted out that I thought Johnny is my father. After a few more emails, they agreed.

When I was growing up, my mom mentioned that she had had a boyfriend named Johnny. I never knew his last name or during what time frame they dated. Maybe she was dating Johnny and my dad at the same time? She might have become pregnant with my sister and had to marry my dad. Or maybe she met him later when she worked at Bank of America, where he and his wife banked. Maybe out of depression she reached out to Johnny after my middle sister died.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that she had numerous opportunities to tell me and she never did. She took this secret to her grave.

This explains why I never felt that bond with my birth certificate father or my half-sister. Maybe this was why she treated me special and maybe why my sister was jealous of me.

My Greek family and I met over lunch. They brought me family photos and gave me Johnny’s retired police badge. They had taken the time to make and share a CD of his funeral and memorial.  He passed away in 2009.

They told me I look and speak like him, and if he had known about me, he would have reached out.

So even though I never would have suspected my birth certificate dad was not my father, I felt there was somebody out there. A big brother is what I’d been hoping for. Someone to protect me.  Instead I had a father who was a police officer. That falls into the protective category!

In June, when we were on vacation, before I knew anything concrete, my husband and I were kayaking in the Ionian Sea off Sicily, across the water from the  Ionian Islands in Greece. I felt a pull to be in that water. It was a big deal to touch it. Now I know why.

My husband is Spanish and Indigenous. His son from a previous marriage is Spanish/Indigenous and African American and has daughter born four years who is African American, Spanish, and Irish. And they named her Athena, as in the Greek goddess.

I believe things come to you at the right time.

I’m 66 and have only been on this journey for four months. It’s overwhelming to have your world turned upside down in one click of a mouse. I’ve been through a wide range of emotions—  mad at my mother for never telling me.  She’d been adopted when she was three years old and found all of her family when she was 40.  She should have understood what would mean to me.

I was happy to know I looked like my biological dad, but then had to grieve his passing and the fact that I never knew him.

I’ve been so frustrated, sad, angry, and happy all at the same time. I’ve cried and yelled at mom’s picture.

Friends and family don’t really understand the full effect this can have on someone. I have a one friend and my husband who are supportive.

I have my art that I pour myself into. I joined NPE groups and listen to all the podcasts. Hearing all the others’ stories helps me know that what I’m experiencing is normal.

 We are on this journey together, and there is strength in numbers.

Kelly Vela is a retired photographer, woodworker, and watercolor artist.  She lives California with her husband, 1 dog, and five cats. She and her husband spend their free time traveling and wine tasting on their Victorian front porch. You can reach her at gkvela1@yahoo.com.

By Tom Staszewski

January 15, 2022 marked the second anniversary of the enactment of New York State’s Clean Bill of Adoptee Rights law allowing adoptees over the age of 18 unrestricted access to their sealed birth certificates. With that legislation, New York State became the tenth state in the US to allow open birth records.

When I first read about this new “open records adoption law,” little did I know it would have a direct impact on me. As I read the details about the legislation, I remember thinking it was rightfully so, that adult adoptees should have the same equal access to their birth records as non-adoptees. There should be no difference between treating one class of person differently than another based solely and entirely on the circumstances and events of their birth.

I certainly realize adoption is a complicated issue. Whether or not to place a child up for adoption is a difficult decision and a situation that often has no right or wrong answers. But it’s a topic that has been on my mind ever since 1970—the year my daughter, Victoria, was born.

Ever since she was adopted, and throughout all of those years since my high school days, I thought about her regularly and hoped and prayed she was alive and well. I always wondered if she was having a good life.

New York State open records law enabled Victoria to obtain her original birth certificate (OBC) and to then find her birth mother, who then subsequently gave her information that led her to find me as well. May 15, 2020 was a very happy day for me. I was surprised to find in my mailbox a letter postmarked from New York City.  “Hello, I’m your daughter,” it said. As I read her letter, I was elated to learn that she was well, healthy, accomplished, successful and physically fit. She’d completed nine marathons, including the prestigious NYC Marathon. She also works out at a boxing gym with full contact sparring. And she’s earned a master’s degree. After I read all of the details about her life, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It was a blessing that she was able to find me and for me to finally know that she’d had a good life.

I’ve long believed that a college degree is a passport to a better life and opens more doors of opportunity throughout one’s life, so I was extremely pleased to learn about Victoria’s level of higher education.

Unlike some adoption searches that lead to rejection, I was ecstatic to be identified, located and contacted.  I fully recognize and acknowledge the role of her adoptive parents, now deceased and I’m thankful for their outstanding and exemplary job in raising her. Through their hard work, she developed into a very accomplished adult and a productive contributing member of society.

On the other hand, I readily admit, that as a foolish, silly, goofy, immature kid back in 1970, there was nothing I could have provided her. I had no job skills, no talents, no credentials. An awkward teenager, I didn’t realize the importance of personal responsibility and accountability. In addition to being an irresponsible kid, I lacked empathy, social gifts, and concern for others.  I finally learned, acquired, and implemented those important empath type skills, traits, characteristics, and effective social skills when I was in my mid-20s. Therefore, I am so glad and thankful that her adoptive parents had the resources to provide a solid and stable life for her.

I was also very glad to see the letter’s origin was from Brooklyn, NY. I love NYC having visited there more than 25 times. It’s a much better location to visit rather than, say, Wyoming (with no disrespect meant toward that fine state). It’s just that I’ve always loved and am very comfortable being in large densely populated major urban cities.  And my wife, Linda, and I have a longstanding tradition of going to Manhattan during the December holiday season. So I began to think of now being able to visit Victoria in NYC in just seven months. But of course, in December 2020 we had to cast aside our tradition because of the COVID shutdown.

After I read all of the details about her life and breathed a huge sigh of relief, I couldn’t help but also notice that her letter was well crafted. She expressed a strong command of the English language and had an exceptional vocabulary. Her writing was clear, concise, and coherent.

Please don’t misinterpret my positive critique of my own daughter’s first correspondence to me. As a career academician, I’ve read and graded thousands of graduate-level term papers, research papers, portfolios, and projects. It was only natural for me to notice her proficiency and the important skills displayed in Victoria’s first letter to me.

I responded by telephone, and since then we’ve communicated by, phone, and e-mail, and we’ve exchanged dozens of photographs from various stages of our lives. But more important, we finally met in Midtown Manhattan on December 4th, 2021—a very happy, momentous, and memorable day indeed!

Throughout my academic career, I’ve always been fascinated by the ongoing debate about heredity vs environment, nature or nurture, and genetics in general. As we got to know each other, I was intrigued to find that we have many similarities and have had mutual experiences. We both were raised as Catholics, had paper routes, played the accordion, worked at McDonalds’s as young kids, and while in high school worked in delis. We’re involved in local politics and registered to vote with the same political party. In school, math was (and is) a mutual weakness.

Ever since I was fifteen years old, I’ve had a passion for being physically fit, spending long hours each day exercising and working out in health clubs and gyms. So I was very impressed when I read that Victoria was a long-distance runner and completed nine marathons. The grit, determination, mental-toughness, persistence, and hard work she exhibits as a competitive long-distance runner are qualities and traits I’ve always admired and respected in others.  I was also impressed that she practiced boxing and full contact ring sparring. So maintaining health through physical fitness is yet another interest we share. In my estimation, our many similarities lend credence to the premise that human behavior, preferences, and tendencies are genetically determined.

According to the Adoptee Rights Law Center, Minn. MN (2022), many non-adopted people do not know that an original birth certificate (OBC) is the initial birth certificate created shortly after a person’s birth. For most people, it’s their only birth certificate. For persons born and adopted in the US, a new or “amended” birth certificate replaces the OBC once the adoption is final. I strongly believe other states should follow New York’s lead and pass legislation that would equalize the fundamental right of adults to access their own pre-adoption birth certificates.  To deny that access is unfair and unwarranted. Adult-aged adoptees should have the same right as non-adoptees to obtain their own birth records.  I applaud all of the New York state elected officials who rectified the unfair treatment of adoptees. Thanks to them, it’s an inequality that’s been righted.

Other state government entities should realize that the rights of adult adoptees to be treated the same is mainly an equality issue. The core issue behind open OBC legislation is not just about searches and reunions; it’s about the removal of a discriminatory barrier to a legal document. I believe that continuing to treat one class of persons differently than another based solely on the circumstances of their birth is not right and must be corrected…the sooner the better.

I realize the controversy associated with this issue and know that not every search results in such a positive outcome as it did in my situation. But I firmly believe the benefits outweigh the risks. Without that access, adopted people are unfairly left wondering about their identities and origins. It leaves them without valuable and factual information about their very existence. The law undoes decades of discrimination. That alone is justification for such legislation to occur.

I understand there may be privacy concerns after decades of secrecy. In previous decades, adoption records were routinely sealed as there was a prevalent societal norm of shame and scorn directed toward individuals who had teenage pregnancies. And in past generations, the commonly used negative and condescending label of illegitimate birth was the norm.

But, thankfully, societal attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions about the adoption process have shifted. Judgmental negative viewpoints are changing and the stigma is lessening.

Victoria is truly wonderful! She’s remarkable, accomplished, talented and beautiful. I’m so glad that I had an opportunity to finally be with her and hug her. I can’t wait to walk back md forth across the Brooklyn Bridge with my new daughter on my next visit to New York.Tom Staszewski, EdD, lives in Erie, PA with his wife, Linda. He retired in 2014 following a 35-year career in higher education administration. His doctorate in higher-education administration is from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Total Teaching: Your Passion Makes It Happen, published by Rowman & Littlefield.” Contact him at tomstasz@neo.rr.com.

By Pamela K. Bacon

Laurie, Randy, and Pam with their mother

For as long as I can remember, I felt different, as if I didn’t belong. I was the oldest of four children growing up in suburban Detroit. My teenage years were an emotional roller coaster full of the usual twists and turns of adolescence multiplied by my struggle to sort through the isolation of feeling like an outsider in my own family. It became clear to me that the father I lived with was not my father, so I tried very hard to keep those feelings buried away. Did I mention I hate secrets?

A few years ago, a good friend gave me a 23andMe test kit for my 62^nd birthday. I was a nurse, and she was a doctor, and as both of us were getting up in age, the topic of health topped our conversation during our daily walks. She’d done a test herself and was amazed at the health information she now had a window into. I prepared my test and sent it for analysis.

Little did I know that my results would open a whole other window of enlightenment. I received not only health information but also the names of DNA matches. Several close relatives showed up in my list of matches right below the siblings I grew up with. They were familiar names to anyone who grew up in the Detroit area back then, but not as a part of my family as I knew it growing up. The pieces were coming together, but my courage to complete the puzzle was still lacking.

In 1984, a few years after my first child was born, the father who raised me died at 53 of a sudden heart attack. In the hectic days of planning and having his memorial service, my siblings and I had time to share memories as we looked through the paperwork and gathered documents for insurance and Social Security and took care of other details that needed attention after an unexpected death. In February, while sorting through our family’s important papers, we discovered a discrepancy between the year on my birth certificate and the year listed on our parent’s marriage license. I was born in 1955, and my parents were married in 1956. That seemed strange, but there was a funeral to be held, so we moved on.

Not too long after my father’s death, I got a big boost of courage and decided to confront my suspicions head on. I was a mother myself then in my late twenties with a young son. The desire to learn the truth was still burning inside of me. I’d never seen a picture of my dad with me when I was a baby. Come to think of it, I don’t remember any pictures of me as a toddler or a young child. I don’t think there were any. My mom seemed surprised the morning I asked her if dad was my “real” father. She asked me to get something from the silver file box that held our family’s important papers.

A homemade card caught my eye—a birth announcement that proudly stated “A King is Born.” I remember my initial feelings of joy to think that maybe I had been wrong about feeling different all these years. My joy was short-lived though as I opened the card to discover it wasn’t celebrating my birth. The new King referred to my sister Laurie, who was born 22 months after me. No one does that for their second child I remember thinking to myself, I was not a King.

I returned to the kitchen table wiping away a few tears as I approached mom clutching the birth announcement in my hand. “How did you know” my mother asked. I told her that I had always felt that something was not quite right and that I hadn’t felt close to dad most of my childhood. It was something I’d kept to myself about because I was afraid of the consequences of what I might discover. “What can you tell me about my father” I muttered. She hesitatingly opened the window a bit for me that afternoon.

Mom grew up in Detroit as the oldest of six kids. She dropped out of Cooley High School in Detroit to help the family with bills while working the counter at the nearby Sanders Confectionary and Ice Cream Shop. After work, she loved to escape to the dance halls scattered around downtown Detroit to listen to the all the great entertainers that passed through. It was the winter of 1954, and she was 19 years old.

Mom said that she had a friend named Mario who frequented the neighborhood bar and pizza place. He was a boxer with a contagious personality—a friend to everyone he met. Mario looked out for my mom as a big brother would. One evening when they were hanging out, he introduced her to his buddy Mike, a nice-looking guy a bit older than she who played minor league baseball.

Mario, who was Italian, thought it was funny that Mike, who was obviously not Italian, was obsessed with pizza. “All he wanted to do was learn to make pizza” Mario later told me, so much so that he spent the off season from baseball perfecting his craft. “Your father’s name is Mike, the pizza man” my mom blurted out. That pronouncement landed like a lead balloon on my heart. All these years of wondering who I was and then this. A name. Mom didn’t really want to talk about it anymore, and I decided to leave it at that.

The birth of my first grandchild in 2015 brought back all those childhood memories of feeling that I didn’t know myself completely. My mother had passed away two years earlier, but I still had a desire to fill in the blanks. I had a strong desire to tell my son a bit more about the family secret that I had kept hidden from my own family all these years. Later, when my DNA test results revealed names that matched what my mom had told me, I mustered the courage to take another step in the discovery process.

At a family gathering in northern Michigan, I pulled my brother Randy aside. As we sat on the beach overlooking Lake Huron that summer afternoon, I shared my story and DNA test results. He was shocked at first but said that he had always thought I had been treated differently by our dad. We joked as kids that we didn’t really look like each other, and Randy had maintained that his father was probably the Twin Pines Milk Man who always seemed to linger at our house when mom was around! He never suspected that I was the one with a different father.

Randy had been doing genealogy research for quite some time on our family and was certain he could help put all the pieces together. He explained that there were multiple matches that were considered “close” relatives to me that were not common to his results. The decision to finally share with him what I had hidden away and struggled alone with all these years would connect the dots on the secrets that my mother and I had danced around for more than 60 years.

Armed with my DNA records from Ancestry and 23andMe, my brother dug into the research while I reached out to some of the higher cM number matches at the top of my list. Our goal was to confirm the identity of my biological father and gain medical and family history for me, my son, and future generations. He shared with me each discovery along the way as the picture became clearer.

Our first stop after reaching our conclusion that Mike was my father was to reach out to The DNA Detectives, created by CeCe Moore, an expert genetic genealogist who’s consulted on and appeared in many DNA specials including the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots and more recently helped solve cold cases using genetic genealogy on the ABC series The Genetic Detective. Randy shared the information with her team, hoping her search angels could confirm our conclusion. They were incredibly helpful in building out my tree on my birth father’s side using the science of DNA results, which clearly confirmed our suspicions. Professional genealogists from Ancestry and Legacy Tree Genealogists independently came up with the same results.

I also heard back from a DNA match not long after I had initially reached out to her via email. I was hoping she could shed some light on her family and how I might fit in based on our match. She replied enthusiastically, which was a bit of a relief. She was a first cousin once removed on my father’s side, and she proclaimed “we might even have to throw you a party” in her note, saying that she had a wonderful family. I tried not to let myself get too hopeful at how welcoming and open she was, so I let some time pass before reaching out again, although I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I shared my conversation with my brother, who was thrilled that I’d made contact and that I’d found a relative on my birth father’s side. He urged me to stay engaged with her and reminded me that I had waited all these years to open myself up to this journey, so there was no need to tiptoe around anymore. “This is your personal history, and you deserve to know” he repeated each time we spoke about it.

I called again and was relieved to get that same affirming response from her. We talked for an hour and determined that another match who listed at the highest number of cMs was her uncle and my first cousin. She confirmed that her grandfather had a brother named Michael. Mike the pizza man! I’d gotten my DNA confirmation, and now I had a new family member who confirmed my connection to the family name.

Mike was a legendary favored son in Detroit and he and several of his children were public figures with a well-known story that matched what my mom had alluded to years before. Unfortunately, he’d passed away a few years earlier in 2017, but I was able to read quite a bit about him and his accomplishments. In November 2019, I reached out to one of my newly discovered half-sisters, and we had a few good conversations via phone and text. We even talked about meeting sometime, but then she fell silent. Months passed with no response. I eventually reached out formally via a mediator who specialized in these matters and received word back that the family did not have any interest in me or my story.

Although this was not the reaction I’d hoped for from the family, I finally knew the rest of my story. My family tree was complete for me, my son, my grandchildren, and generations to follow. I’d pictured how this might turn out. I’ve seen and read so many stories of reunions with happy endings after DNA surprises, such as that of the Duck Dynasty patriarch who acknowledged and met with his adult daughter discovered through a DNA test or the GMA story of an Army general and colonel who recently reunited with their half-siblings after 50 years. I hope that someday I, too, might be acknowledged by my half-siblings. It’s a basic human need to know where you came from and to be able to tell your story. There are constant reminders of that missing piece of my heart each time I pass by one of the family restaurants or read another news story about the family.

For my parents and those from earlier generations, there was shame associated with a child born to a single mother. My mother had talked about being hidden away by her family while she was pregnant with me and how difficult it was for her during that time. Although my mother and Mike had done nothing wrong—neither was married—my mother was forced to go to the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in downtown Detroit, where I was born in August of 1955.

The social stigma surrounding a child born out of wedlock has diminished over the years as generations have evolved, but it still exists. There are many like me who get rejected. We are left to feel as if we have done something wrong or that we should be ashamed of our history. I am still in contact with a few family members on my half-uncle’s side who have acknowledged me. And from all that I’ve read about my birthfather, I’m certain he would have welcomed me with open arms if only I’d discovered him in time. That’s what his public persona was—kind, giving, and people first. It’s not the Hollywood happy ending I envisioned over the years, but I hope that my half-siblings and I might still have the opportunity to get acquainted.Pamela King Bacon is a registered nurse from Portage, Michigan, and a proud grandmother of two grandchildren. She and her brother, Randy King, are working on a documentary about her story and their mother. You can reach her at pikbacon@icloud.com.

By Sherrie L. KappaMy biological mother met my biological father in Alexandria, Virginia. I was told she met him after she had locked her keys in her car and he was a local fireman who came to help her.

I was born in 1961 in West Virginia and adopted by a family that had a 9-year-old biological daughter. My adoptive father was a coal miner and a pastor of a church, and my adoptive mother did not work.

They had not planned to disclose my adoption to me, but I learned about it by accident when I was 13 years old and  found a letter my adoptive mother had written to another pastor’s wife in which she stated she had two adopted children—a teen daughter and a young son. My best friend was there with me and she confirmed that I was adopted and that everyone knew but me. Too scared to ask my often abusive, narcissistic mother, I waited until my father came home from work. He verified that it was true. He was a sweet man and hated lies. I think it was a relief to him.

That weekend he took me to meet my biological mother. He said he’d met her when she was only a few months pregnant. She was a waitress in a bar, and he was at the bar, he said, trying to save souls. He told her that she should be taking better care of herself, and she told him that she didn’t want the child and that he could have it when it was born. He gave her his phone number. In September of that year, she called and told him I had come early and was sick. I’d been diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, and the doctors transfused my blood. My biological mother signed the forms to relinquish me for adoption and left the hospital before my adoptive parents arrived to pay the hospital bill and bring me home.

Several months after I found out about being adopted, I ran away to my biological mother’s home and met three half siblings. I learned that she’d also relinquished a 6-year-old son the same year I was born. My birthmother called my adoptive father to come pick me up and also called police to scare me into not coming back. Needless to say, I did not have any further contact with my birthmother until my older brother came looking for me when I was 16.

My adoptive father had a heart attack and died that same year, after which my adoptive mother decided I needed to work to pay rent, so I attended high school during the day and worked a full-time job at night at the local hospital. On my days off, I cleaned for her. She took my entire check every month. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, unless you’ve lived through it. She informed me that I would not be going to college; she wasn’t going to pay for a child that was not her blood.

I graduated high school when I was 17, immediately married my brother’s best friend, and got out. About six months later, we moved to the same town in which my biological mother and her family lived. My biological mother adored my husband, and this paved the way for me to try to be a part of her life. I lived right up the street from her house for four years, and although she never once visited me, I was invited to her home on the rare occasion. I believe I valued those visits much more than she did

I asked my birthmother who my father was. She said his name was Bennie H., he lived in Mockingbird, Texas, and worked for Bekins Transportation. She said he had blue eyes and his wife was Chinese, but she didn’t know much else. She’d  told him she was pregnant, and he took off. For many years I tried to find Bennie H. I called Bekins. I found out there is no Mockingbird, Texas, so called Information for towns all over the state. Most of the operators were kind; they would give me five numbers and five addresses at a time. I wrote nearly 100 letters. And when I had the money, I called as many numbers as I could.

In the early 1980s, along came the Internet, and I wrote or called every Bennie H. I could find, without luck. Lots of Google searches, lots of Yahoo searches. I couldn’t find any Bennie H. in Texas.

My life often interrupted my search, but I never gave up. I worked full time, divorced, re-married, and raised a son. I went back to school to obtain a degree, often working two jobs.

Along came Facebook. Same searches. Nothing new.

In 2016, my best friend and I discussed her search. She was looking for a grandfather, and she suggested I join a Facebook group for people using DNA to search for family; she also suggested several DNA testing sites that she was using. I sent my test to Ancestry and found a group on Facebook that had “search angels.” They pointed me toward several adoption registries, and I signed up with all of them.

About three days later, I got an email that one of the Angels had found a Bennie H. in an old 1961 Dallas city registry.  And there he was, listed as living on Mockingbird Lane. As it turned out, this was actually the address of Bekins, his employer. He lied to my mother so she wouldn’t track him down. The “angel” also gave me information on a Bennie in Kansas and one in North Carolina.

I called the number in North Carolina. It was the right one. I talked with his brother, and Bennie had been there all along, about a three-hour drive from my front door. He had died just eight months before my call. I talked to an aunt and uncle who told me about two sisters on the east coast and two in Texas, but they didn’t want to give me any other information. But I stalked, and within two days I had the married names and the telephone number of all four sisters.

I called and I wrote to each of them. We talked and texted and became friends. A few months later, I met two of them and the uncle on the east coast, and we made plans for all five sisters to get together. They shared pictures of Bennie, and although he didn’t look like me, I tried really hard in my head to make my blue eyes look just like his. And the curl in my hair to match his. And in my mind, his father, my grandfather, looked so much like my son.

I obtained his military records and learned that he has O+ blood, which I’m pretty sure my biological mother has as well. I am A negative—slightly rare, though not enormously so. So I called my maternal half-sister and asked if she thought our mother has type A blood. “Oh sure”, she says, “she does.”

I’d been asking the eldest paternal sister to do take an Ancestry DNA test so I could see “sister” come up on my computer screen. While waiting on my own DNA test results, I built an extensive Ancestry tree, tracing Bennie all the way back to 1040, to the original “H.”

Nine months into this journey, the eldest sister finally took the test.

In the middle of this madness, I received my DNA test results and saw those Hs. Among my matches was a second cousin, Leslie, who contacted me. She wasn’t from the H family, she said. “We’re the C family and you are my cousin.” We puzzled back and forth about this for several months, but we couldn’t seem to agree on how we were related so I let it go.

When my new paternal sister’s DNA results came in, they showed that we are not a match. They were Bennie’s children. I was not his child. We share cousins approximately six to eight generations back. We connect to the same H ancestors I observed among the 1,500 or so DNA matches. I cried. My new “not my sisters” cried. I have been looking for these girls all my life. I’d become attached. I loved them.

But they don’t belong to me at all. They are not family. They told me it didn’t matter, but oh boy, it sure does.

My mother at that point was old and sick so I didn’t call her directly to ask again who my biological father was. Instead, I called my maternal half-sister. She asked my mother, and my mother once again lied, insisting that Bennie H. was my father. She said the DNA was wrong and I was lying. I upset my mother, and my sister told me never to contact them again—any of them. A few cousins still talk to me on Facebook, but I won’t be getting any invitations to the family reunions.

After crying on the phone to an Ancestry representative for nearly an hour, asking if my DNA results could somehow be wrong, the representative explained to me that DNA does not lie. With her help, I started over with my Ancestry DNA tree. My new tree had only two leaves—one for me and one for my biological mother. Within a day, new half-sister, Lisa, turned up in my matches. I contacted her, and she said it was possible that we were sisters, that her father had many extramarital affairs. But, she said, he was mean, an alcoholic, and a pedophile, and the four living siblings didn’t want anything to do with me. I cried more. My new family didn’t want to talk to me at all. They were ashamed that I was alive. Two others are already dead and don’t get an opinion. She gave me that one day in which to ask questions, which she answered, and then she blocked me on Ancestry and on Facebook, as did all her (my) other siblings and their children.

I pull up my bootstraps and keep going on in this mad world.

But I have my father’s name—the real one—William C. And pictures shared on Ancestry. In them is my face, my son’s face. There’s no denying this DNA. By gosh, I actually look like someone.

I am one of 12 children between these two biological parents, and none other than my younger maternal half-brother wants me. He tries, but he has his own very full life with not a lot of time for a sister four hours away. He doesn’t want to get in between all the madness of my relationship with my maternal siblings and my biological mother, who don’t want me in their lives, but he and I do talk, and he is my one and only lifeline.

My adoptive siblings, a brother and a sister, now no longer talk to me either. They told me years ago that I should not have tried looking for biological family, that I should have been happy with the one I had. They say that they know I never wanted to be in their family. (They’re most certainly right about that one.) So I’ve had to let them go as well.

As for my friends and cousins, I wish they’d stop saying, “But at least you had a good family to raise you.” They only see what I have allowed them to see. I’ve gone through the gamut of emotions over this: anger—lots and lots of anger; grief over of losing someone I never met, over losing someone I looked for 40 years, over losing sisters that were not my sisters. I feel disconnected every single day.

I’m not putting all this out here so anyone will feel sorry for me. My story is much nicer than that of many I have read. I now know my truth. I have a wonderful husband. He works hard, he loves me, and is my best friend. I have the very best son. He’s much like his dad—he works hard and he loves his momma. He has a hard time with relationships though; he’s had no family around him growing up—no aunts, uncles, cousins, or siblings. No one. Much like me. All alone, always. He doesn’t want children. And his aloneness makes me saddest of all.Sherrie L. Kappa lives in North Carolina with her husband and fur baby. She’s a medical staff professional and volunteers with a DNA research group. To date, she’s helped 34 individuals find and connect with their biological family.

By Kathleen Shea KirsteinAccording to a 2009 study published in a prominent psychology journal, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit. It also takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. I’ve been second-guessing every word that’s come out of my mouth for so long it’s as natural to me as breathing. I might say this obsession with doubting myself started when I first learned to talk. In school I was very quiet. In a yearbook I was described as quiet as a church mouse. I’ve always been this way—the heavy-set kid no one noticed.

One day in early February, when I was just a few days shy of my 50th birthday, I was working with the adoption coordinator of the Lund Family Center in Burlington, Vermont after only recently having learned I’d been adopted. For me it was painful to find out at 49 that I’d been adopted. And on top of the pain, there was the need to completely rebuild my identity from scratch. The foundation of my world had completely crumbled in those moments after this discovery. Rebuilding one’s identity is a never-ending roller coaster ride—exhilarating one moment and totally exhausting the next.

At the adoption coordinator’s urging, I’d received non-identifying information about my birth parents, so I knew the basics. My mother, who was of French-Canadian descent, was 32 when I was born. She was in good health, worked outside the home, and loved to knit. The file also noted that she was very helpful to the younger girls in the maternity home. I learned that my father, who was of Scottish descent, was also in good health, graduated from high school, and was an engineer.

I knew I had to ask my mother’s permission to search for biological family members. I called her and said, “ Mom, you know I always do what I am told. Leslie, the adoption coordinator, says I should ask for identifying information. I want your blessing. I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I take these next steps.” I can’t remember if I said this out loud or only thought about it: “It won’t change anything in our relationship.” Since she and my father confirmed that I’d been adopted, I’d been very careful not to give them even a hint that I was rejecting them. Mom assured me that it would be fine with her. And poor Dad. If mom said yes, he’d tag along, but he’d never actually been consulted.

I called the adoption coordinator and set the process in motion. I was required to write a letter to the probate judge for Burlington, Vermont, Chittenden County, requesting identifying information about my birthparents. Once the probate court denied my request, which is typical, Leslie would attempt to locate my birth mother. If she was successful and if my mother agreed to permit contact, then I would be asked to write her a letter. Once she responded, we would determine whether she was willing to meet me.

Talk about second-guessing! It felt as if there were so many places this could go wrong. My mother could resist being be found. She could decide that since I have been out of her life for 50 years, why let me back in now? She would be in her 80s. She could be dead. That would be so sad. What would it feel like, I wondered, to have all hope of contact gone. All hope of learning what she is like, what her family is like, who I look like? It’s an understatement to say it would feel like the rug was just pulled out from under my feet. It would be painful. It’s weird to know that I would grieve for someone I don’t know, except we were a team for almost nine full months. I decided for the moment it was best not to think about it and to go about my activities of daily living.

Leslie’s call came when I was at work. She wanted to tell me she found my mother, who lived in Florida. Then she called back to say whoops, she found the wrong mother. The first name and age were correct, but the Social Security number was off by one digit. I reminded myself to just breathe—that my job in that moment was just to take one breath after the other. A few days later on a Friday morning, Leslie called me again at work to tell me she’d found the correct birthmother. This time, everything checked out. My mother lived in Winooski, Vermont. Having never heard of it, I checked the map and found it was near Burlington. When we’d taken family trips to see my husband’s brother and his family in Rainbow Lake, New York, near Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, I loved when we’d go via Burlington. I never knew why I liked it so much, but it just drew me in and felt comfortable. After Leslie’s call, I knew why. I was born there. The roots of my ancestors grew in that Vermont soil.

Leslie advised me that it was time for me to write the letter to my birthmother, Helen. Her name is name is Helena, but everyone called her Helen. I only work a half day on Friday, so I spent all afternoon writing the letter. I sat at my computer and second-guessed every word as I typed. Should I tell my entire life story—49 years of information? Or should I just hit the highlights? What I said and how I said it would matter; this would be the first impression of me my birthmother will get. I wanted her to like me. But there was no one to guide me, to give words of support. Writing a letter doesn’t sound that hard, but for me—a champion second-guesser—it was very difficult. I wasn’t getting anywhere, erasing every word as soon as I typed it. Geez, what did you write that for? I asked myself. It sounds dumb. Don’t sound so full of yourself. Enough! I decided. I’d hit the highlights and let the rest go. But still, it took me eight hours to finish the letter. I imagine a person with less faulty thinking could have done it in two hours max.

At about the four-hour mark, my phone rang. It was my mother. “Hi Mom, sure pizza for my birthday supper sounds great,” I said. We chatted for a minute, but I have no memory of what we discussed because my brain had turned to mush. I managed to get myself back to my computer desk and into my chair. What had just happened? I could barely comprehend it. It felt surreal to be writing a letter to one mom and at the same time talking on the phone to the other mom. I thought my life could never be any stranger than it was in that moment. Wow, just wow. I had no other words. I couldn’t even think. I regained my composure, kicked my brain back into gear, and finished the letter. I took a moment to draw a red rose in a yellow vase in the Pointillist style. I hoped she’d like it. It seemed the right thing to do to personalize the computer paper.

The highlights only version of my life ended up taking three pages. Yes, Helena, your daughter is long-winded even when she’s trying to be concise. Too many words, like Mozart’s too many notes. If only I had equal talent.

Leslie called a few weeks later to say that my mother lived near her, so she actually dropped the letter off and read it to her. After time went by and no follow-up letter arrived, I asked Leslie if she could visit my mother and if I could tag along as Leslie’s associate. My mother didn’t have to know it was me. I just wanted to see what she looked like and who she was. The waiting was so hard. Leslie said I’d have to wait for the letter.

Finally, a card arrived in the mail. My mother told me my birthfather was tall and Italian. She hoped I was well, and she signed the card “Mama.” I just kept looking at the signature. I’d always called my mother Mom, so for Helen to sign it Mama seemed so right that all I could do was stare.

It was amazing for me to meet my biological mother and discover that we shared so many of the same traits. For her to cry was rare, and, similarly, I never cried. She has a great sense of humor, as do I. We share the same personality type. I am very much my biological mother’s daughter. That knowledge warms my heart.Kathleen Shea Kirstein was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire. She lives in Troy, New Hampshire. She’s a late-discovery adoptee, a mother of two boys, and a registered nurse.

By Bianca ButlerAs a young child, I didn’t know that my mother and her twin sister (now deceased) had been adopted in 1960. I found out in 2000, when, after nearly 40 years of silence, their biological mother wrote to the twins asking to reunite.

That year, when I was 12, we all met my biological grandmother for the first time at dinner in Old Town Sacramento—me, my mother, my aunt, my younger sister, and my adoptive grandmother. By meeting her biological mother, my mother learned her biological father’s identity and that she and her twin are of mixed-race ancestry: African American and white. Their biological mother had been a young African American college student at the University of California, Berkeley when she relinquished her twin daughters for adoption. They were born in a time in the United States when interracial unions were not only taboo but also illegal (Loving V Virginia) and when young unwed women were shamed and stigmatized—a time known as the Baby Scoop Era, from 1945 to 1973, before Roe V Wade in 1973.

My biological grandmother is a trailblazer. She was a college student and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority member at UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1962. She was the daughter of an educated Army chaplain, and her family deeply valued education. When she arrived at UC Berkeley in 1958 from Riverside, California, she was one of roughly 100 African American students on the campus. Berkeley, which she describes as having been bohemian at that time, was a different world to her than Riverside. There, she enjoyed ethnic foods along Telegraph Avenue and the poetry of the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

On campus in her freshman year, my grandmother met an artist from the Midwest who found her attractive and wanted her to sit for a painting. (She still has this painting today). They had a casual friendship, a brief affair, and an unplanned pregnancy. A few months after giving birth, she decided it would be best to relinquish her newborn girls for adoption due to social pressures and lack of support. She went on to graduate from Berkeley in 1962, earning a bachelor of arts in political science. The twins were adopted together in a closed adoption by a loving and devoted African American family in the Bay Area.

In my late teens and college years, I became deeply curious about the origin story of my mother’s biological parents. Getting to know my grandmother, I was proud to discover we are at least three generations of college graduates. She, my mother, my younger sister, and I all have college degrees. My grandmother and my younger sister even have their master’s degrees. I’m extremely proud of that legacy. It’s one I want to pass on to the next generation.

Although I first learned about the identity of my mom’s biological father in 2000, I didn’t become interested in learning about him until I was in college and exploring my family history. To my surprise, I discovered that he’s an internationally known artist who lives near Central Park in Manhattan. He has a resume full of accolades and accomplishments in the art world spanning several decades.

I first tried to contact him in 2007, when I was in college. I wrote to him at the Manhattan studio address on his website, and when I received no response, I moved on. In 2018, I noticed he used an Instagram account to promote discounted custom portrait paintings of people and pets. I wanted him to do a painting of my mom, and I thought this would be a clever way to reach him. I sent a message on Instagram saying I was interested in a custom painting and asked how I could send him a photo. I was surprised that he responded quickly, and, as he instructed, I sent him two photos by email. But when it came time to make the $500.00 payment to him, I was hesitant to move forward, and he was upset because he’d already started the two portraits.

I finally gave in and sent him a sincere and heartfelt message revealing my identity as his biological granddaughter and the truth of why I had contacted him, and I included my phone number.  Within a couple hours, he called me back. He immediately said he’d received my first communication—the letter I sent him in 2007, when I was in college. The crazy thing is, he told me, he received an email message a week earlier from my mom with her photo and a short letter saying she wanted to meet him. I had no idea my mom had been trying to contact him too.

In our phone conversation, he said he remembered very clearly having had an affair with my grandmother during the Berkeley years but denied that he was the father of the twins. We spoke for about 30 minutes and later communicated briefly through email, during which I asked jokingly if he grew up eating lefse (a popular Norwegian flatbread) and if he liked the music of ABBA. He said lefse was a special holiday treat in his family, and he never heard of ABBA. Even though the contact was brief, it felt good to finally hear his voice and to be acknowledged. The contact ended and he sent me a letter for my mother, his artist biography, one of his essays, a photo from his 20s, and the two portraits he painted of my mom—free of charge. I decided it was finally time to do an Ancestry DNA test to help me get more facts about my racial identity and heritage. The Ancestry DNA test confirmed that I’m 31% Norwegian and, through the DNA matches, that I’m related to his cousins. I sent him the DNA results, but he’s still in denial and, sadly, not open to a relationship.

Finding biological family and taking a DNA test can bring great joy and excitement, but it can also bring rejection and disappointment. With millions of people taking DNA tests such as those offered by 23andMe and Ancestry to reveal their heritage and find long lost relatives, it can be important for people testing to consider having a support system or a therapist to help cope with the possible emotional fallout. It can be very emotional opening up old generational wounds that still haven’t been healed. It’s important to prioritize your mental health and self-care in this process. I found talking with a therapist and supportive friends as well as writing to be helpful. Also, some people don’t want to be found, especially when race and adoption are factors, and I’ve had to accept that reality. I would love to have a relationship with my grandfather and learn about his life and his lifelong passion for art. I’d love to visit art galleries and travel to NYC, but that may never happen. It may be wishful thinking.

On a positive note, through Ancestry DNA I was amazed to connect with a cousin on my mom’s paternal side who is close to my age and open to connecting. She moved to Sacramento from Minnesota last year for graduate school, and we plan to meet. From her own ancestry research, she was able to give me more information about our shared heritage and ancestral homeland in Fresvik, Norway, which, in addition to Oslo, I hope to visit.

Even though my mom doesn’t talk about her childhood or her feelings about being adopted, I know it must have affected her. It’s been a long journey, but it’s given me deeper understanding, pride, and appreciation of who I am and my unique family history. I don’t know what the future holds or whether I will ever meet my biological grandfather, but I appreciate the contact I did have with him and his custom paintings of my mom, and I remain optimistic.Bianca Butler is a SF Bay Area native raised in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. She’s a graduate of Mills College, an alumna of VONA, and a family historian. She enjoys non-fiction writing, digital storytelling, and public speaking. She plans to continue writing family stories about the legacy and lifelong impact of adoption. Butler dreams of doing ancestral homeland trips to West Africa and Norway and documenting the experience through writing and film. She lives in Sacramento, CA. Contact her at biancasoleil7@gmail.com.Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo, @iambiancasoleil

By Deborah DillsIt’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.

In the courts in France, Norma and Abe changed my birth name, Darlene Barbara, to Deborah Susan, or Devorah Shoshana in Hebrew—a name they deemed more appropriate for a Jewish girl and the daughter of a reform rabbi.
After learning about this, I began a search to find out all I could about my birthmother and took two DNA tests. I had a close match to a woman named Jeanette who happened to be a Jewish genealogist by profession and who said she’d do all she could to help me learn about my mother, Jenny Helene Levy. Jeanette had a friend in Belgium who spoke French, and she obtained my mother’s birth certificate in Strasbourg. It revealed that she’d been born in 1921 to Samuel Levy and Hedwig Jülich Levy, so I was able to know what my grandparents’ names were.

I also discovered that Jenny came into the US in 1958, but left in 1988 to emigrate to Israel. Through another DNA test I found another cousin in Paris who in turn found a relative in Israel who took care of my mother during her later years. They sent me a memoir she’d written late in life that told the story of having fled Nazi-occupied Europe on foot, walking with a guide across the Pyrenees Mountains from France to Spain with only a paper bag containing a banana and her underwear. She remained in Spain until the end of the war. Her father, Samuel, died of a heart attack in 1942, possibly due to having lost his shipping business in Strasbourg to the Nazi laws against Jews. Her mother, Hedwig, went into hiding. Around 1959, she joined her sister in the United States and later returned to Nancy, France and died there in 1973.

I learned that most of my Jewish birth family escaped Nazi Germany, but seven who did not perished in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, and Theresiendstadt.

I also found a first cousin with Jeanette’s help, the son of Jenny Levy’s brother—my uncle Joseph—who was born in Strasbourg in 1913. He told me his father had been a spy in the French military during the war, and after his escape to the US with his wife, Ginette, he changed his name so he could return to France and not be arrested for having abandoned his post. My cousin told me Jenny told his parents, who lived in the US, that she gave birth to a baby girl in Baumholder in 1957, but that that baby—me—had died of a disease. Other family members in Europe were told that I had died in a hot car.

My birthfather had not been listed on my birth certificate or my adoption papers. I turned to the Facebook group DNA Detectives for assistance, and a search angel helped me discover that my birthfather was an American GI. And that same day I found out I had a biological sister, Charlene, born after me in the US, but adopted by our birthfather’s sister and husband. Sadly, she died in 1989, so I was never able to reunite with her. I did, however, discover that I had a half sister who lives in Virginia, and we speak often.

To learn all this at age 57 rocked my world. The tragedy is that I never got to meet either of my birthparents or my sister, so my heart is broken in half. By the time I learned this, both my biological parents were deceased. The pain of this more than 50-year old secret remains with me today—not only the pain caused by my adoptive parents not telling me, but also from finding out all their relatives knew I had been adopted. Looking back, I see I didn’t fit it to their family. I didn’t get along with my adoptive mother and I continually ran away when I was a teenager, finally for good in 1979, when I joined the Navy to get away from her constant abuse. I ask myself every day, why? Why didn’t my parents tell me I was adopted? What were they afraid of? I often cry buckets of tears over the pain of my secret adoption story and feel so cheated at not knowing my birth relatives growing up. But I continue my search daily to find out more about my birth family which, at times, makes me smile.Deborah Dills lives in Humble, Texas with her two sons, Aaron and Brian; a dog named Stanley; and a Tuxedo cat named Roman. She served in the Navy on active duty from 1979 until 1991 and in the Naval Reserves. She spent time living in Israel on Kibbutz Ruhama in the Negev. She loves gardening, cooking, and decorating; works on genealogy research every day; and is overjoyed to have found relatives living in many countries beyond the US, including France, Germany, Switzerland, and Peru. Find her on Facebook.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Brad EwellI’m just not sure where to start. I’m dumbfounded by feeling your presence, knowing you left this world 19 years before I knew you existed. When she handed me the angel you made from a hymnal, she said she didn’t have anything that had been yours, but she had something you’d made. It was hard for her to give up because it was crafted by your hands. She said when she felt the impulse to release it, her first thought was “come on, not that.” But the impulse only grew stronger, so she gave in. When she handed the angel to me, I had an urge to open it right away and see what hymn it was folded to. I have no idea why I felt compelled, but I did it. I opened it. Immediately I lost my breath and bearings. There in front of my eyes was a clear message from you: “Waiting and Watching” in bold at the top of the page. It felt like if I just knew the right spot to look, I’d see you staring down at me smiling. I know what you had to do left a hole in your heart for the rest of your life. My hope is that for the past 20 years you’ve been able to watch me grow as a husband, father, and man. I hope you know it’s OK and there’s nothing I hold against you. All I could do was carry the angel back to my car, look up, and say thank you. I felt a peace come over me, like being wrapped in a warm blanket. I believe one day we’ll see each other again and finally be able to embrace—the hole in both of our hearts gone forever. Until then, please just keep waiting and watching.Brad Ewell lives in Texas with his wife and three children. In 2019 he became a late discovery adoptee after taking a home DNA test. He feels like he’s still very much in the middle of this journey and enjoys writing to help organize his thoughts and better understand his own story.   BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Brad EwellThere are many NPE/MPE (not parent expected/misattributed parent experience) stories with one if not multiple layers of abandonment. It seems as if for many in this community it’s a fairly common part of the experience. I don’t believe my story is different from many others, but I only recently realized how much it’s still affecting me.

A week ago, my wife and I were sitting in the living room talking about a problem I was having with my adoptive mom. My adoptive dad had passed away about six months ago, and my mom has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She’s still in the early stages, but she calls multiple times daily wanting me to come over and help with various things or just keep her company. When I tell her I can’t, I often hear her sad voice saying, “I just wish you could help me.” As I was telling my wife about the latest call, I said, “All I really want to say is, ‘do you mean how you helped me after I found out that y’all adopted me?’”

My wife looked up at me and asked, “Do you know how bitter that sounded?”

“Yes, because I’m still bitter about it.” But it really wasn’t until that moment that I realized how it’s been eating at me for the last few months.

About a year and a half ago, after having taken an Ancestry DNA test, I learned from a biological family member that I’d been adopted at birth. I reached for confirmation to my mom and dad, who only then I realized were my adoptive parents. When we met to  talk though my discovery, they offered the standard responses most of us have gotten at one time or another: “Nothing has changed; we’re still your parents; what mattered is how much we loved you; we didn’t tell you because we didn’t want you to be hurt”—all of the things NPEs/MPE’s love to hear. I told them as far as I was concerned they still were my parents because they were the only parents I’d ever known, but that literally everything had changed. We talked for a while longer but never moved past the “nothing has changed” point.

After this conversation, things took an unexpected turn. I left believing our talk had opened the door to the truth and that now we could talk about it openly. Looking back, I see this was naive on my part; my parents had been secret keepers most of their lives and they managed to keep a pretty big one for 48 years. My parents decided after I left that they’d had enough of that unpleasant conversation and we would not be talking about it again; the only catch was once again they’d forgotten to tell me.

A few weeks later I began communicating with some of my biological family through text and Facebook Messenger. I typically talked to my parents about once a week, and whenever adoption came up they changed the subject. I did my best to not bring the topic up, but discovering I’d been adopted had been a life-altering experience, and keeping these contacts secret from them made me feel as if I were being unfaithful or disrespectful to them. I wasn’t trying to replace them, but I was feeling the strong, inalienable pull of biology; I wanted to know where I came from. So in order to keep the peace while I continued on my journey, I continued avoid the topic when talking with my parents.

A month later I made arrangements to meet a half-brother I’d discovered. As I was on the way to see him, my dad called me and asked what I was up to. I told him I was driving to meet a friend for dinner. When he wanted to know what friend, I told him it was someone he didn’t know. When he asked again, I mistakenly thought he’d changed his mind and wanted to know things. So I told him the truth. There was a pause, and I waited for any questions he might have now that we were going to talk about things. But all he said was, “Man it sure was hot today.” That really stung. But I agreed it was hot and told my dad I was almost at my destination and had better get off the phone. I still had a ways to go, but I just wanted to end the conversation.

That was first time I felt abandoned in my adoption journey. It wasn’t when I’d learned that someone had given me up as a baby and wondered what led to that choice. I’d learned the complicated story of my conception, and at 48 years old I could see the logic of and necessity for the decision. Instead, I felt abandoned by my adoptive parents when they refused to have anything to do with helping me navigate the mess they’d created. I know many NPEs and MPEs have had their parents reject them or their biological parents refuse to acknowledge them when there was infidelity in the story, but I didn’t anticipate that type of abandonment in my case. My parents just adopted a baby. One of my closest friends growing up—our whole families were friends—was adopted, and his parents felt no reason to hide it. To this day I just don’t get why my parents did.

My wife was wonderful and continues to be my rock through this journey, while my parents—who did a great job raising me—completely bailed on me when I needed them most. The hardest part about this was that it left a dirty feeling every time I met a biological relative. Since my parents and I weren’t going to talk about it, each time it felt like I was sneaking around and betraying them. Then, when we would get together, it was the elephant in the room. For months, I carried the guilt along with all the other new feelings.

Fortunately, this story has a somewhat happy ending. About a week before my dad passed, he’d been in the hospital. My mom and I would alternate nights staying with him. Once he woke up in the middle of the night and told me he thought he was dying. I asked if he meant soon or now, and he said now. I asked what he wanted to do, and he said “let’s talk.” After we talked for a few minutes he asked, “So what ever happened with the whole adoption thing?” I was completely caught off guard and told him I thought he didn’t like talking about it so I did my best not to bring it up. But now he wanted to know everything. For the next hour, I told him stories of the meetings, showed him pictures, and answered his questions. He seemed genuinely pleased and at peace with the information. At one point, after I talked about meeting my biological dad, he said, “Well you finally got to meet your dad … that’s good.” Hearing that broke my heart a little, and I told him I would always consider him my dad. After a while, he became tired and dozed off.  After that, we never talked about it again, but I finally had what felt like his blessing to continue on my journey and I was relieved of the huge burden I’d been carrying for months.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Julianne Mangin

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 her 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 the 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.

In 2011, I retired from the Library of Congress. Around the same time, Mom, then a widow, went into assisted living. The unit was too small to accommodate her genealogy research, which was stored in boxes full of binders and file folders, pedigree charts and census sheets, certificates and photographs. All of that came to my house, where I stored it in my basement, intending to hang on to it until someone in the family expressed an interest in genealogy. But the librarian in me couldn’t resist peeking into the boxes and organizing what was there. I didn’t know at the time that I was on a slippery slope from being a reluctant genealogist to a relentless family historian.

There was something fishy about Mom’s research. For all the years that she’d worked on it, there were surprising gaps, especially regarding events from her childhood. There was nothing about Grandma’s time at the state hospital, except for its name: Norwich State Hospital. After a brief Internet search, I located the hospital records department at the State Archives at the Connecticut State Library and I requested Grandma’s patient record. After proving I was her descendant, I received not only her record, but those of three other women in the family who had been patients there. Following the clues in the records, I was able to upend some of Mom’s stories, especially the one about the delicatessen, the mental hospital, and the county home.

In Mom’s version of her family history, her parents had separated in 1922, not long after they married. However, her father returned, as she put it, “when he found out that I was on the way.” The truth was it was Grandma who had left Grandpa and went to live with her married aunt. They were separated for two years. In 1924, Grandma announced that she was pregnant. Her aunt’s husband—the uncle in Mom’s story—set her up to run a delicatessen where she and Grandpa could live together in the apartment over the deli. The family lore was that they had continued to see each other during their separation.

What I found in Grandma’s patient record was a different story. She told the hospital staff that her uncle by marriage had forced her into a sexual relationship. “He said it was nothing as we were relations and I felt it was the only way out.” The moment I read her statement, I suspected that the uncle might be my mother’s father rather than Grandpa. I surmised that my grandparents were probably set up in the delicatessen to deflect suspicion that anyone else might be Mom’s father.

Mom was born in 1925 and spent her early years living at the delicatessen. During that time, Grandma began to exhibit the psychotic symptoms that eventually got her committed to the state hospital. She laughed and cried inappropriately, accused Grandpa of having sex with other women, and physically assaulted him. My heart went out to my mother—a toddler with a mother whose mind was spiraling out of control.

In 1931, the delicatessen failed. According to Mom, it was due to the Great Depression. Grandma told the hospital staff that after nine years she finally told her uncle she wouldn’t have sex with him anymore. His response? He threw Grandma and her family out of the delicatessen—including the daughter he must have suspected was his own.

Grandma continued to accuse Grandpa of cheating on her. Her delusions about his infidelity were perhaps symptoms of her paranoid schizophrenia. Grandpa, for his part, was a disabled World War I veteran who suffered from shell-shock (now known as PTSD). He didn’t know how to handle her rantings or his own violent impulses. Their marriage devolved into physical abuse. In 1933, Grandma told him about the relationship she’d had with her uncle, which meant the violence only got worse. Mom, eight years old at the time, probably witnessed many of their fights. I cringed the first time I realized that she may have heard Grandpa say that she wasn’t his child.

In 1935, her parents had a terrible fight, after which Grandma was sent to the state hospital. Mom was taken away to the county home for her own safety. Until the age of ten, Mom had lived in a household full of violence and secrets. As tragic as this story is, I was glad to learn the truth. Finally, the stories Mom told made sense. Of course she had to insist that Grandpa had been a wonderful father and that it wasn’t his fault that the state wouldn’t let him raise her. To think otherwise would have meant acknowledging the pain of having been abandoned by him. If she suspected that the uncle had been her father, she was dealing with a second fatherly abandonment and a great deal of shame as well. This might explain why she’d been so rigid about the details of her story. 

In July 2013, I sent a sample of my DNA to Ancestry.com to find out who Mom’s father was—Grandpa or the uncle. In April 2014, I got a DNA match that answered this question. Ancestry estimated that this match and I were 1st or 2nd cousins. When I looked at her tree, I saw that her great-grandparents were the parents of Grandma’s uncle-by-marriage. The only way we could be second cousins was if these were my great-grandparents, too.

In her book, The Secret Life of Families: Truth-telling, Privacy and Reconciliation in a Tell-all Society, Evan Imber-Black, PhD, says, “Living with a toxic secret can feel like living in a pressure cooker. The need to tell the secret can build and build until it explodes in an unplanned and hurtful way. Or the secret can leak out through seemingly inadvertent clues that force someone else to discover it.” In Mom’s case, the principal leak in her story was that whenever she talked about her childhood, she never failed to mention the uncle who had set Grandma up in the delicatessen. She never had anything else to say about this uncle. After researching the secret I found in Grandma’s patient record, I realized that the uncle didn’t just set her up in business and then walk away from it. As her boss, he would have been a weekly, if not daily, presence at the delicatessen. There would also have been the times he came to Grandma to demand sex from her. If Mom had found it necessary to erase him from the story of her childhood at the delicatessen, why hadn’t she erased him entirely?

Mom’s insistence on naming the uncle in her story calls to mind Chekhov’s famous advice to writers: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” Mom knew, consciously or not, that the uncle in her story held great significance. And because he was always mentioned, it was only natural that this uncle would be one of the relatives whose story I would verify once I set out to explore the family’s past. My research took the proverbial rifle off the wall, and by sharing what I learned, I fired it.

My mother, who passed away in 2017, endured a dysfunctional family and was separated from her parents at the age of ten. Still, she somehow managed to thrive. She earned two college degrees and had a 56-year marriage with the kind of stability that she’d never experienced as a child. It was no wonder Mom always emphasized the importance of education. It had been her ticket out of poverty and dependence on the state. 

However, she was not a warm or emotionally supportive mother. But now, when I look at her family history, I ask myself: What were her parental role models? She had a schizophrenic mother, an absent father, and surrogate parents she shared with dozens of children at the county home. I learned through Grandma’s patient record that she too had a mentally ill mother, a missing father, and had been sent away from the family home. I’m grateful that Mom managed not to repeat this pattern for my generation. She was the best mother she could have been under the circumstances. But there was often tension between Mom and me—tension that might have been alleviated if we’d been able to discuss the family trauma.

Julianne Mangin is a family history researcher, blogger, and former librarian and web developer at the Library of Congress.  Since her retirement in 2011, she’s been uncovering genealogical and local history mysteries. Mangin lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband Bob, an artist. For more information about Mangin, check out her blog. 

At Thanksgiving 2018, my cousin suggested we get our DNA tested so she could track our grandfather’s lineage. I hesitated. I was 51 and had never had a desire to do DNA testing. Because my parents, both deceased, had known their heritage, I already knew mine. After some pressure, I agreed to take the test. We ordered our kits and I didn’t pay attention to mine when it arrived. After about a month, I found it while cleaning. I spit into the tube and didn’t give it a second thought.

In February 2019, my test kit came back with a complete mixture of ethnicities. I was confused and assumed there’d been some sort of mix-up. My mother had been 100% Irish and my father 100% Italian. I grew up Italian—like Sunday-dinner-at-2-at-my-grandparents-that-lasted-until-6-with-20-relatives kind of Italian. I’m an incredible Italian cook and I use many of my grandparents’ recipes. But my DNA test showed I’m only 2% Italian. The rest is German, French, English, French Canadian. You name it, I’ve got it—a far cry from the 50-50 I thought I was all my life.

I reached out to a DNA cousin on my match list who was an amateur genealogist and who realized that our match meant that one of her two uncles had to be my biological father. That’s how I learned I’d been adopted. One uncle was a playboy and one dated the same woman from the time she was 14 years old, so my father had to be the playboy. I discovered later that had I tested at 23andMe instead of or in addition to Ancestry.com, I would have matched with my father and one of my biological brothers, who’d been given kits as Christmas presents by my biological mother.

I learned that my biological parents were 15 and 17 when they had me. Strangely enough, my mother and her mother were pregnant at the same time, but no one knew my mother was pregnant. Her mother delivered a baby first and was with her husband and the new baby at the doctor’s office when my mother went into labor at home alone. She went into the bathroom, locked the door and delivered me. When her parents came home, they knocked down the bathroom door and there I was.

Finding out at 51 that I’d been adopted was confusing and an enormous blow to my identity. I’d been very close to my parents and took care of them both in my home for years before they died. I felt I’d lost my identity and my family in one fell swoop. Not only wasn’t I Italian, but I wasn’t my parents’ biological child. In a small town like the one I grew up in, your identity is entirely linked to your parents until you’re past 40. My father was very well known in our community, and I’d always been known chiefly as his daughter. I felt lost and confused.

I needed as much information as quickly as possible to make sense of this. I tried calling adoption agencies, but wasn’t able to learn anything. I finally managed to get a file of non-identifying information that filled in some blanks. It turns out I didn’t come to live with my adoptive parents until after I was a year old. It appears I was in foster care during that time because I’d been born at home without prenatal care. I talked to my parents’ neighbors and they filled in some blanks. Over time I realized that many people I grew up with knew I’d been adopted but no one had told me. A cousin finally told me that my parents couldn’t have children after my brother was born, so they adopted me.

I connected with my biological family and learned that they’d continued their relationship, have been married for 48 years, and have 3 other children. It was almost too much to take. I was overwhelmed. They’d wondered about me all their lives, and once we were in touch, wanted to pick up where they “left off.” But I was suffering trauma. I had to go to a counselor to help me work through the emotions. The cousin who talked me into doing a DNA test went into therapy as well, feeling that she’d somehow ruined my life by encouraging me to take the test.

It’s been more than a year and I’ve gotten to know my biological family. I’ve discovered that this experience has been a blessing in an odd way. Few people, after their parents have passed way, have another opportunity to develop such a familial relationship. Few can go from an ending to a beginning.

Sometimes I’m alone, driving in my car, and I’m struck by a mixture of grief and astonishment. It’s taking a long time to process the grief, but each day gets a little better. My husband and adult children have been incredibly supportive and have accepted my biological family members into their lives.

I look for opportunities to be grateful. I was raised by wonderful parents who loved and supported me my entire life. Now I have an opportunity to get to know my biological parents who also love me. Life is a journey, and sometimes the journey is truly an unknown adventure.—Anonymous

By Jonathan S. PollackI consider myself one of the fortunate ones.

I learned after taking a DNA test in January 2018 at age 41 that I was donor conceived. After corresponding with two half-siblings the day I received my test results and talking with my mother the next morning, it became painfully obvious my mother was a recipient of donor sperm and that my late father wasn’t the sperm donor. As part of the medical treatment for my parents’ infertility, my mother explained, doctors suggested mixing my father’s sperm with that of an anonymous donor—the only type available at the time of my conception. While these doctors didn’t advise my parents not to say anything about this to the child they would have, they didn’t encourage them to say anything either.

In an instant, I realized I wasn’t biologically related to my father or his entire side of the family I grew up with—grandparents, an aunt, and many cousins. To have this sudden realization in adulthood was traumatic. Learning about my truth changed nothing and everything in an instant. Learning I was donor-conceived had a sudden impact on my identity and will continue to affect me for the remainder of my life—in ways both good and bad.

I channeled my shock, grief, and anger into action. Within 24 hours of learning that my parents used an anonymous sperm donor to conceive, I used my DNA matches to identify my biological father. I shared that information with the half-siblings I’d been in contact with, and we all searched for photos online until we found the right picture, one of a present-day doctor who once was a medical student at a school affiliated with the hospital where we were conceived. I stared into the mirror, unsure of who was staring back at me as I searched the photo for physical similarities with this complete stranger who made up half of me. Within a week, I’d sent my biological father an email message to his workplace requesting contact about a personal matter. Impatiently, a few days later I sent another email to a different address I found, including details of what I’d learned and asking for confirmation that he had been an anonymous sperm donor.

While the months passed with no response, I discovered and connected with more half-siblings. (At this time, I’m one of eleven half-siblings.) I got involved in the online donor-conceived community by becoming a member, and eventually a co-administrator, of the Facebook group We Are Donor Conceived, and I reached out to distant family members for any information I could get about my immediate biological family. I believed my email messages hadn’t gotten through to my biological father or had been viewed as spam, so I sent a letter to his home address. While I waited to hear from him, I spent months building a family tree, researching his—my—family, learning what ailments family members died of and at what ages, gathering addresses and phone numbers, and trying to fit together these puzzle pieces to make sense of myself.

I didn’t choose to be a product of anonymous donor conception, and the choices made by others had a devastating effect on my sense of self as soon as I became aware of them. Family members suggested that my interest in my biological family and my perseverance in trying to learn about it had become unhealthy, but I did what I had to do to make sense of the situation I found myself in and to mend my newly fractured identity.

After three months of deliberation, my biological father still hadn’t responded. I contacted my half-brother Paul (not his real name)—the son my biological father and his wife raised. Well over the age of majority, he’d taken a DNA test before I had and was listed as a genetic match. When after several months Paul hadn’t responded, I reached out to his wife via Instagram, and she told him that I’d sent him a note. When Paul finally saw and returned my message, we set up a call and talked for hours. I told him what I knew, and he acknowledge that the shared DNA percentages demonstrated that we were half siblings and that his father was my parents’ anonymous sperm donor.

Within a week, Paul let me know that our father confirmed to him that he’d participated in the sperm donation program that led to my creation in the mid-1970s. Paul freely shared a family medical history and told me a bit about our father (or, as he likes to write, “my father/your father/our father”) and said he would ask him to contact me. Still, my letters to my biological father remained unanswered.

In March 2019, fourteen months after I first learned that I was donor conceived and about six months after talking with Paul, I drove eight hours to meet him and his wife. We ate and drank and talked for a solid twelve hours. Paul’s wife took the obligatory photo of me giving a noogie to my youngest half-brother. Late that night, Paul texted me to see if I would like our father and his wife to join us for brunch the next morning. I’m not privy to the conversations that took place behind the scenes, but I am grateful to everyone who helped my biological father overcome any hurdles he faced and be willing to meet.

I can’t adequately put into words the feeling of seeing, for the first time, someone who is half of me. I stared at my biological father and he stared back at me. My nerves—and, I imagine, his—were on edge. I look like him. His mannerisms are familiar. His dry sense of humor is mine. Our hands are the same size. We both have great memories. Our meeting was uncomfortable and amazing and surreal and revelatory all at the same time. We’ve since met once more, along with a few of my half-siblings who were also donor-conceived—his biological children. None of us expects or wants a parent-child relationship with our biological father. For me, that relationship is reserved for the father who raised me. For my biological father, that type of relationship is reserved for Paul, the son he raised. But I now have access to the person who gave me half of my DNA, which is what I sought; I can’t overstate how important that is to me.

Of all possible outcomes, mine is generally considered favorable by donor conceived people.

I’m fortunate that my relationship with my mother, strained for more than a year, is mended. I’ve come to understand her motivations and actions, and she understands mine.

I’m fortunate that my biological father’s wife and Paul were forces working to help him through this tricky business of unmasking anonymity. So many donor-conceived people are refused contact or cut off after initial contact by those close to their biological parents who fear contact will threaten their relationships. I will be forever grateful that my biological and extended family has been, and continues to be, so open to the possibilities.

I’m fortunate that I have half-siblings who are open to contact and to meeting, including Paul. We communicate regularly, and it’s strangely familiar and unforced. Our interests and personalities overlap in fascinating ways.

I’m fortunate that, despite anonymity intentionally separating me from my family and keeping me for so long unaware of my biological roots—and despite the difficult social situations that result from donor conception and the secrecy that can surround it—I’ve been able to meet and forge some kind of a curious relationship with my biological father. I look forward to seeing where it leads.Jonathan Pollack is a freelance photographer who specializes in food and restaurant photography as well as large life events. He uses his photography skills and computer science background to help his wife Stefani run Cupcake Project, her baking blog and social media destination. He and Stefani live in St. Louis, Missouri, with their wonderful son and egg-providing pet chickens. Pollack enjoys spending time with farm animals on photoshoots. 

Kara Rubinstein Deyerin learned about a year and a half ago that she’s an NPE (not parent expected). Listen to her story about loss, race, religion, and identity. Follow her on Twitter @UnexpectedlyJ and look for her blog, Unexpectedly Jewish in Seattle. 

By Deborah CollardIn 1991, my dad and I were sitting at the table talking about my uncle and his daughter, whom no one knew about until she was in her teens. I commented that my uncle never should have hidden her from family. Dad seemed a bit glum and said his brother made the best choice he could at the time. He looked at me and said, “Your Daddy isn’t perfect either.” He then told me this: “Before I met your Momma, there was a gal I was very much in love with and we got pregnant. Her father never approved of me and we didn’t think her parents would let us marry. We had a baby girl.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. “Where the hell is she?”

He didn’t know, but he thought she could be in North Carolina or Texas. The last time he saw her was at the hospital after she was born in Rome, Georgia. He carried a picture of her in his wallet until it fell apart.

I was so excited I felt as if I had ants crawling all over me. I was my mom’s only child, so the thought of having a sister out there . . . oh mercy! I piled on the questions, and he looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I insisted. “It’s my sister!”

He said her mother married someone else and probably didn’t even know about us. She had gone to school in Rome and her dad, who was in the military, probably wanted her to marry a military man. Before he met her, Dad had married his childhood sweetheart and had a son, with whom I’ve never been close. The son was raised by his grandparents after his mother, my dad’s wife, died at 19 after complications from surgery. Dad married my mother in January 1955 after only having met the Thanksgiving before. They were married 38 years when he died in 1993.

Dad never wanted to talk about my sister, but he told me I looked exactly like her when I was born. He died without giving me a name. He felt that she didn’t need to be bothered. I was raised an only child and this didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to find her. Each year since I found out she existed, I’ve devoted every December to searching for her — doing research, following up on leads, and looking for new clues. I check all my DNA sites daily for the match. It’s her month. But it’s not a success story and it may never be. I haven’t been able to find out a thing about her.

I’ve craved her existence in my life. I’ve grown to love her even though I’ve never looked into her eyes.Deborah Collard is the author of the “Haunted Southern Nights” book series and lives in Orange Beach, Alabama, where she and her husband, Greg, run a historic B&B.