My husband had wondered about his biological parents, as any adopted child would. He loved his "mother" though, and never wanted to upset her, especially because his "father" was tragically killed when he was 9 years old. It wasn't until his "mother" passed away in 2002 that he finally felt open to pursuing some answers. These answers were not easily come by, however, because closed adoption records are a tricky thing, and Catholic Charity adoptions are even trickier. He looked into hiring a private investigator that specialized in this sort of thing, but it was very cost prohibitive. He placed himself on a registry (date of birth, place adopted out of... etc) of children looking for their biological parents, hoping that if anyone had been looking for him, they would know he was there.
Fast forward to 2015.
I decided to launch my own investigation, and I began with the Catholic Charities. We thought that somehow the Catholic Charities had been involved in the brokerage of his adoption, because that was who his parents had used for the adoption of his other two siblings. He had already tried to contact the hospital he had been adopted out of, but "conveniently" all those records had burned in a fire. So with the only lead remaining, I began to read through dozens of entries on the Catholic Charities adoption forums. There were hundreds of testimonies from the once young unwed mothers and what they went through, plus there were hundreds of stories from the children looking for their mothers, sharing their stories of stone walling and deceptiveness they experienced in their search for answers. In all cases, the Catholic Charities methods of adoption during this time period made it almost impossible for anyone to reunite (records were purposefully altered so that they could stay hidden). Sadly, I had stumbled upon a long sad tale of baby selling for church profit, and it was something they did not want to answer for anymore. Every letter of inquiry I wrote and every phone call I made to any existing Catholic Charity, the response was the same: they denounced anything to do with adoptions, and claimed ignorance of this past practice.
Long story short, by the end of a frustrating year I finally found a promising lead. It was an agency that handled closed adoption records from this era that could provide access to non-personal information. I contacted the agency with his information, and they confirmed that they did have access to my husband's records. However, they could only disclose medical history that was provided at the time of the adoption, not personal history, and only for a FEE. So for Christmas that year, I asked my husband not to spend money on me, instead I wrote out a coupon in the price of this fee, wrapped it up in a box with the paperwork he needed to sign off on, and placed it under the tree for him.
Fast forward to summer of 2016.
As a dutiful wife, I was nagging him for never having signed off on the paperwork. His defense was that he felt that just getting medical information wasn't enough - it wouldn't really tell him anything. However, a couple months later he came to me saying he'd heard on the radio that some people had found success finding their adopted relatives through DNA results. He said he would you feel more comfortable putting his Christmas present money towards a DNA test, so I immediately went on to Ancestry.com and ordered a DNA kit. In October of 2016 we got back his results.
*2019 Ancestry.com updated their results and changed it to: 65% England, Wales, Northwestern Europe/ 12% European Jewish/ 11% France/ 5% Portugal/ 3% Ireland, Scotland/ 2% Baltic/ and 2% Sweden, Norway
Another feature of the DNA results is who you are matched with. Mind you, these are people who have family trees already created on Ancestry.com, or have taken the DNA test themselves. If you (the reader) don't already have a tree, you can take advantage of their free 14 day trial and create one, all it takes is entering what you know: yourself, your mother, your father, and your grandparents. Once you've done this, you will begin to see the number next to "shared ancestor hints" increase. These will be hints shared with the cousins that you've been matched with, and you will be able to see how you are related.
The world suddenly becomes a lot smaller when you realize how we are almost ALL related to each other in some small way.
As far as an adopted person goes, with no idea who your parents are, the DNA matching could seem pointless. You ask yourself, "How can I take 400+ cousin matches and figure out how I am related to these people without even knowing who I actually am?" My answer: scientifically, methodically, and with a great deal of patience.
My husband had no idea how to use Ancestry.com, but I did. I had been working with this site since 2011 digitizing my maternal grandmother's life's work, as well as doing my own research into my maternal grandfather's family history, and my father's entire family history. However, I was completely new to this DNA thing, and going at a family tree from this perspective was unknown territory.
*Question: what do you do when you don't know something?
*Answer: you start educating yourself on that subject one bit of information at a time.
*And what DO we know: that this is genetic matching, thus every clue is not speculation or coincidence but an actual fact.
*Step 1-3:
- See what information you can gather from the first cousin on the list by seeing how closely related this cousin is to you, and then figuring out what that means in terms of generations.
- Click on "view match" where you can make note of shared "surnames" that you have in common within your family trees.
- Click on "shared matches" to make note of who else this cousin is related to within your list. This will aid in the task of "grouping" (I will explain this in the following paragraphs).
- Repeat with each person on your list.
*Step 4:
- When you find the cousins who HAVE made family trees, and there are shared "surnames" listed, keep doing steps 1-3 until you start to see obvious patterns of names. Making your own visual aids or flow charts is helpful to keep it all straightened out. It can easily get confusing. Stay organized.
When all pathways are uncertain, you still have to start somewhere; you have to see where that path leads, and see what you learn. Then you take the next path, and see what you can find. In this case, each pathway was a cousin, and the patterns that emerged were common grandparent pairings. Although 400+ cousins are related to my husband, the cousins themselves are not ALL related to each other. I had to find the commonalities among the cousins and put them into groups. In most cases the relationship to my husband was a 4-6th cousin, which meant the closest common ancestor was a great-great-great grandparent (putting the birth dates of that couple in the early 1800's).
Think of this DNA thing like a mountain range that runs for hundreds of miles, and at the top of the mountain range are lakes. Each lake is not related to the other lakes, as they are separated from each other by miles, but a river runs from each lake down the mountain, and all the rivers converge into a singular reservoir. We are the genetic result of 16 sets of great-great-great grandparents (that is the equivalent of 32 lakes with 32 rivers merging into 16 pairs, then 8 pairs, then 4 pairs, then just a set of 2 draining finally into the single reservoir).
At the end of this "grouping" exercise, I had to remind myself that if this group has a set of great-great-great grandparents in common that means they are definitely my husband's great-great-great grandparents as well! So I input that couples' information into the tree maker, as well as all the information for each cousin that was related to them, and started creating his family in reverse by following each river down the mountain.
The Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker algorithms work quickly, and by inputting the tiniest bits of what you do know it will help you fill in the blanks of what you did not know. The advice I gave myself daily: follow the clues, confirm the information as best you can, and fill in all the blanks (the whole family group, including husband and wives of the brothers and sisters to the relative you are matched with), eventually all the rivers will lead to the reservoir.
We were fortunate with his results because four people turned up as 2nd cousins. Of the four, however, only two had family trees that I could look at. I attempted to contact all four of them through Ancestry.com. One cousin got back to us eventually. I had made some progress in finding a connection from information off of her partial family tree, but with her help I was able to narrow down this family connection to a possible parent. Not everything can be gleaned from Ancestry.com, especially if you are looking into records for individuals who are still alive. Thus, contact with a real person who was willing to answer questions and help us figure out how she was related to my husband, was an invaluable source of information in the detective work. Together we finally worked out that one of her two male cousins was indeed my husband's father. This was backed up with the DNA results from other cousins.
All the pieces of the puzzle fell into place when I had mentioned to her that we'd heard the father could possibly be Portuguese. It turns out that the brothers' grandmother WAS indeed from the Azores Islands, Portugal.
Her family had come to America in 1888.As you can see by the charts on the right, when you click on the individual ethnicity it breaks it down in more detail. Turns out that the 3% northern African encompasses Portugal, as well as the 19% Italian/Greek.
After that huge breakthrough, I was able to put aside all the cousins that had anything to do with this side of the family, and concentrate on the others that had NOT fit into place yet. I had to assume that these other great-great grandparents would be his mother's side of the family.
What I knew: 1) where he had been adopted; 2) who his father's family was and where they lived during that time; 3) that the mother had been around 16 (what he'd heard from his adopted sibling), and 4) that the mother would have had to have been living in the same town as the father during this time, if not going to the same high school.
I continued to follow all the rivers down the mountain... day after day... dead end after dead end... until one week I had narrowed it down to a single family group: two brothers with two possible sets of daughters. The four young women were the right age, and they were in the right place. I focused all my attention on just this family, until I was able to eliminated one brother and his daughters out of the equation.
It was the 23rd of December when my husband came home from work and I mentioned these two remaining women as candidates for his mother. As I was rambling on about everything I learned, I mentioned a name. I said this person is either your sister or your first cousin. He repeated the name out loud questioningly, and then said "I know her! She is on my Facebook friends list! I went to high school with her!" I was absolutely dumbfounded, flabbergasted, astonished, blown away (insert all other synonyms here)! I excitedly urged him to contact her. "Go online right now", I said, "and ask her if her mother or her aunt knew these brothers!"
Over the course of the rest of the evening, via Facebook messenger, he discovered that not only was this woman that he had gone to high school with his sister, but that the whole time he had lived in that area, his biological family had been there also. He may have passed them by at the grocery store on a daily basis and never knew. It also turns out that the sisters and mom had been searching for him for awhile. It was a very emotional evening, but even more so over the next couple days as all the relatives from this family fell out of the woodwork and welcomed him lovingly into their lives. Friend request after friend request blew up his profile, and his phone never stopped beeping notifications or ringing. It was a very Merry Christmas!
Another coincidence is that we all migrated to the same neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. The adoption had been out of central California. The city where he lived and went to high school was a very separate location from where he was adopted, yet they were all there at the same time. Then decades later everyone moved north. They ended up living only an hour north of us. On New Year's Day we all gathered at his biological mother's house for the first meeting. He met his mother, his step-father, one of his two sisters, a brother, their significant others, three of five nieces and two of three nephews. Suddenly his life was very full.
As for his father, we got confirmation from his mother as to which of the two brothers was his father. The cousin we had made contact with took it upon herself to contact the father on behalf of my husband, and told him everything. As one could imagine, the father was quite overwhelmed. He knew there had been a child put up for adoption, but he had never known if it was a boy or girl. He said he'd need some time to process it, and wasn't sure how to respond. We've respected his privacy.
*2019 update: in August he finally met his father and uncle. They had a great visit.
For my husband he just needed to know where he came from and what made him who he was. He had questions, as did all the family involved, and now everyone has the answers they needed to find closure, and if needed, start a healing process so they can move forward in their lives. Along with a roller coaster of emotions, it has been a very introspective time of pondering the "what ifs", and the theory of nature vs. nurture.
The long winding twisted branches of the world family tree have shown one thing... we are all related. When researching my mother's family I discovered that my 9th great grandmother (born in the mid 1600's - from the Netherlands) had a sister who is also my 9th great grandmother. Turns out one sister's line is my father's family, and the other sister's line is my mother's family, making them cousins.
I ALSO discovered through this process that my 6th great-grandmother on my father's side is my husband's 6th great-aunt, thus making us cousins as well.
It's a small world.