(Editor’s note: All events described in this post took place as described, but some names have been changed in deference to the privacy of others.)
Before I opened my adoption records and delved into my DNA, my biological parents could be anyone I fancied. Royalty one day, desperadoes the next and movie stars the day after that — my imagination was their only limitation.
But after a few hours poring over online records in February 2022, my birth mother was no longer my plaything. She was a real woman with a real mother, both of whom had suffered real, heart-rending tragedies. The image of Lynette now firmly fixed in my mind was that of a 13-year-old girl, navigating a life full of chaos while carrying a tummy full of me.
And I longed to meet her more than ever before.
True, earlier that afternoon, I had assured my father and sister that I simply wanted to say thank you to my birth mother and that if I could convey my message without meeting her in person, that would be fine with me. I meant it when I said it, but this was now fiction.
And Lynette wasn’t the only blood relative to pique my curiosity.
Few of the surnames I uncovered while researching her genealogy matched names from DNA results on Ancestry or 23andMe. The few that did were distant relations, no closer than second cousins.
With one exception.
A woman named Melissa shared 25 percent of my DNA and lived in Columbus, Ohio, about an hour’s drive from Springfield, where I lived until age 7. Ancestry predicted that we were either first cousins or half-siblings.
I examined her Ancestry profile photo. We bore a resemblance. Her parents were not named in her public DNA tree, suggesting to me they were still alive. However, Melissa listed her maternal and paternal grandparents, along with the years of their births and deaths. No one in her tree had last names matching those in the tree I was building around Lynette. And since they did not share a last name, I was almost certain Melissa was not Lynette’s daughter or niece. If I was correct, Melissa was a half-relative on my father’s side, most likely my half-sister.
I had a second half sibling!
As evening gave way to night and Dad went to bed, I found accounts for Melissa on Facebook and Twitter. I saw no mention of a husband, but I could see that she had three sons. None of her other public photos seemed to show family members, however. I was vexed.
And, suddenly, I was exhausted, too. So Debi and I followed Dad to bed.
Yet, even as my head hit the pillow, it still spun. I wondered if I should contact Melissa and whether that would even be up to me. The next time she checked in on her Ancestry account, she would likely notice I had popped up on her list of matches. We shared so much DNA, she would surely wonder who the hell I am.
Nonetheless, I was hesitant to reach out first. If she knew nothing of me, I did not want to upset her. Also, connecting with her might also thrust me into a decision about contacting our biological father, who, to that point, had roused in me only ambivalence.
But whatever my uncertainty about meeting my father, I awoke the next morning determined to at least identify him.
I poured myself a mug of the lightly tinctured water that Dad calls coffee, sat again at his kitchen table and continued work on my Ancestry DNA tree. I added the information about Melissa’s paternal grandparents I found the night before, hoping to use the same technique to identify my father that I used to flesh out Lynette’s lineage — focus on known relatives in an earlier generation and hope an obituary lists their living descendants.
It worked.
Within a few minutes, I discovered Melissa’s paternal grandfather — our paternal grandfather, I supposed — had seven children, all sons, by two different women. None shared Melissa's last name, but that did not throw me — I figured she was using her married name in her Ancestry profile, even though I had yet to uncover evidence of a husband.
Of our grandparents’ seven sons, I focused on the two who were within six years of Lynette’s age. The one with the birthday closest to hers was William, born in 1953. That would have made him two years older than Lynette. However, upon closer inspection, I discovered he died at age 1, before Lynette was born.
That left the second son, Robert. I read his birthdate — 1950.
My chest tightened. He would have been 18 when I was conceived, and their relations would almost certainly have constituted statutory rape.
I pushed away my coffee. Though weak, it suddenly sat hard on my churning stomach.
I hastily raked up as much new information from Ancestry’s quivering leaves and dumped them into a BeenVerified query. Nothing I found settled my stomach.
Besides Melissa, Robert appeared to have three children — and three ex-wives and three divorces, too. Lynette was not among them. Two of his former spouses were substantially younger than him, including his most recent, with whom he parted in 2005. She was just two years older than me.
The BeenVerified results also indicated Robert had a criminal history. Through a Google search, I found him listed among Darke County, Ohio’s most wanted criminals, for failure to appear in court to answer for a charge of heroin possession. A heroin charge? At age 62? Crap!
Then, I found his death certificate and a short article about his demise. In 2014, he was the passenger in a car involved in a two-vehicle crash. The driver of the other car died at the scene, and Robert succumbed in a hospital two days later. The driver of Robert's vehicle — a co-worker also named in his drug-arrest warrant two years earlier — perished about two weeks after the accident. I scurried back to the Most Wanted list and scrolled down until I found Robert's photo. I was about to see my biological father for the first time … in a police mug shot.
A-a-a-a-and … dammit: Looking at his photo was like peering simultaneously into a mirror and a crystal ball. This was me in 20 years.
I had no idea what to make of Robert, but his history seemed rife with portend.
Obviously, his life was no smooth cruise. I wondered how his brushes with the law and marital discord affected his children and whether he had managed to maintain relationships with them. I wondered if they would want to meet me and if they had any idea I existed.
I was even more troubled about how these revelations regarding my biological father might affect my aspiration to meet my birth mother. After all, if I was conceived by statutory rape and if I looked that much like my biological father, my mere appearance might be revolting to Lynette.
The big reveal had brought a torrent of information, much of it piteous or unsavory, and Debi and I tried to sort through it during the drive home. When we left Beaufort on Saturday morning, I knew almost nothing about my birth mother. By the time we pulled back into our driveway, I not only knew her name, but half her life story.
I also knew I had at least two half-siblings and possibly three more. I was 90 percent sure Robert was my father and 100 percent sure that, if this were true, I was the byproduct of an outrage.
I took one comfort home with me: Though sorry about his death, I would be spared awkward interaction with my troubled biological father.
Or so I thought.
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