The discovery that my biological mother was just 14 years old when she gave birth to me was a stunner.
The people I had gathered around the kitchen table to reveal the results of my search for her — my wife, Debi; my sister, Jennifer; and my dad — sat for several minutes in stunned silence upon learning Lynette’s age. I could feel a lump forming in my throat, my stomach knotting and my eyes welling. None of us knew quite what to say.
So for a long while, we said nothing.
I slid the birth certificate back into its envelope and began scanning the other documents that had been mailed along with it by the Ohio Department of Health. One was a letter from the Clark County Children Services Board dated Oct. 29, 1969. It recorded my placement in Mom and Dad’s home and was stapled to a notarized Probate Court decree dated 1971, which made my adoption final. Beneath that document was the certificate of adoption itself.
We pored over the papers, passing them around the table until an hour had passed. We stood to stretch, refilled our drinking glasses, then turned our attention to the computer, which had long since fallen into sleep mode.
If my birth mother was looking for me, too, there was a chance she would have submitted DNA to 23andMe or Ancestry just like I did. Maybe I was a mere mouse click or two from direct contact. But given the troubled tidings from the birth certificate, I had deep doubts.
And indeed, had I leaned solely on DNA results to find my birth mother, my task would have been much more difficult.
No Lynette Rigel — no Lynette anyone — was listed among my DNA match results by either service. Ancestry at least listed two close relatives with that surname — one likely a first cousin with whom I shared 12 percent of my DNA, the other likely a first cousin once removed with whom I shared 6 percent. Neither had a linked, public tree associated with their results, however, meaning the only way I would track down my birth mother through them would be by messaging them directly. I was loath to do that.
I did not want to risk traumatizing them or scandalizing her.
However, the birth certificate gave me a name, an approximate birth year and a place of residence for Lynette. And that wasn’t nothing. I entered her information into an Ancestry tree to see what additional data its algorithm might fetch for me.
Meanwhile, Debi booted up her laptop to search Google and comb social media. She also purchased a three-month subscription to BeenVerified, a service that scrapes all sorts of public information from the internet and compiles it into a report containing possible contact information, criminal and financial histories, and likely friends and family. Within minutes, information poured into our browsers.
And much of it was downright heartbreaking.
Ancestry provided a trove of official records and newspaper obituaries, the latter handy for divining the familial relations of people who are still living. (As a privacy consideration, it is convention among genealogists and policy among genealogical websites to conceal much information about the living. For similar reasons, the National Archives releases census records only 72 years after census day, roughly approximating Americans’ life expectancy when Congress passed the federal law establishing the waiting period in 1978.)
Ancestry cleverly alerts you that it has discovered potential new information about someone in your virtual tree by attaching a gyrating leaf to the person’s entry. Upon reading the first of the record hints for Lynette, I discovered she had two older brothers — Steven and Timothy. Under another shaking leaf, I found an obituary for her father, Gerald Arthur Rigel, who died in a Dayton, Ohio, hospital at age 38 in 1963, though it was not clear from the article exactly how he passed.
Lynette would have been only 8.
The obit also listed “Carol Rigel” as Gerald’s widow. More leaves budded in Ancestry as I added newly discovered family members to my tree. One revealed that Lynette had a third sibling — sister Terry Sue — who died at age 1, before Lynette was born and while the family was living in Iowa. Terry Sue’s death certificate indicated poisoning was the immediate cause of her death and, eerily, contained a single word in the “due to” space that followed: “Prestone.”
The death of her first-born daughter was one in a long string of tragedies for Lynette’s bereaved mother. She was born Carolyn Addie Brooks in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1923, according to the Hawkeye State’s birth registry. She went by “Carol” and lost her mother to a long illness when she was just 4, according to a 1927 newspaper obituary. That tragedy compounded when two of her cousins died in a car accident en route to the funeral, where they were to be pallbearers.
Another news clipping indicated that, one year later, Carolyn’s father was killed at age 25 when a train struck his car. The accident left her and her three siblings orphaned.
Carolyn reappears in the public record in 1942, when her sister Phyllis died of an unclarified illness at age 16. This came just weeks after the death of the maternal grandmother who had raised the sisters.
Carolyn married Gerald when she was 18. According to census records and public directories, the couple hopped from Iowa to Missouri to California, back to Iowa again, and then to Ohio. Gerald spent some of that time in the U.S. Navy. From military burial records, I discovered he was laid to rest in Ferncliffe Cemetery in Springfield — a large, beautiful graveyard and arboretum. I remembered it from childhood because it was along the route from our house on East Madison to my paternal grandparents’, who moved to Springfield from Kentucky in the early 1970s.
Yet another obituary informed me that, just 10 months after Lynette’s father died, her paternal grandparents were killed in a single-car accident while driving from their home in Iowa to a fishing trip in Wisconsin.
According to Ohio marriage records, Carolyn remarried in 1965 and remained in Springfield. At the time of my birth, Carolyn lived in a home at 2115 Parr Drive, along with her new husband, who was widowed in 1964, and his three children.
I imagined the chaos of a home with six children, each trying to blend into a mixed family in the wake of wrenching losses. It was while living in that environment that Lynette became pregnant with me.
Ancestry produced one more bit of high interest: A high school yearbook photo of Lynette from 1971, two years after my birth. From it, you would never guess she was already a mother and in the midst of a troubled childhood. She had a subtle, unforced smile, a dimpled chin, and a sweet face that bore only a slight resemblance to mine.
“She’s pretty,” Dad remarked, adding that he thought I had her nose.
All of this I learned in about two hours of internet sleuthing that fleshed out my birth mother’s early experiences in remarkable detail. But Ancestry didn’t help me address the most critical question: Where is Lynette now? How would I find her?
For that, we turned to Debi’s browser.
While I was building out an Ancestry tree, Debi searched Google and Facebook for clues about Lynette’s current circumstances. Having thankfully found no obituary for her on Ancestry, we assumed she was still alive. A search engine query for “Lynette Rigel” was topped by links to the website for Lynette M. Hedrick, author of the international bestseller “The Rigel Affair.”
Nope. Not her.
Figuring it was likely that my birth mother married at some point and now went by another last name, Debi turned to Facebook, where women commonly include their maiden names in their profiles, making it easier for long, lost, pre-nuptial friends to find them.
“Jeff, I think I’ve got her!” Debi said an hour into her browsing.
The top result was for the account of “Lynette M. Amato (Rigel),” who lived in Springfield. We compared her profile photo to the yearbook picture and agreed this was almost certainly the same person. Facebook provided a new trove of clues and welcomed relief from the pall cast by Ancestry. Lynette looked happy, which made me happy. We discovered she had a second home in Fort Myers, Fla., and had downsized her home in Springfield that past August.
She listed herself as self-employed in her profile, but the caption of a photo of her and three others sipping cocktails on a palm-encircled deck indicated she had recently retired. We saw pictures of her smiling, reveling in her family’s company, raising a toast with friends, lounging in a pool, riding in a golf cart. A photo of her standing beside her husband, Vincent, made clear the source of my Napoleonic stature — Lynette was tiny, probably less than 5 feet tall.
In another photo, she is smiling sweetly and standing over a seated man about my age. Hovering the cursor over his face, no ID popped up, but from the comments, we surmised his name is Cain Baugh.
Was he my brother?
Debi opened a new browser tab and navigated to BeenVerified. We fed the online records scraper with a new tranche of basic information from Facebook. It spit back yet more information. Joshua Cain Baugh was almost certainly Lynette’s son by her first husband and almost certainly my half-brother.
Lynette also appeared to have stepchildren by her second husband, Vincent, whose mother lived with the couple in their Springfield home before her death. Lynette apparently owned an accounting and tax company. Except for a speeding ticket in 1992, she had no criminal record. Scrolling down the page, we came upon the information I coveted most: phone numbers and street and email addresses. I now had a way to get in touch with her.
And we found it all so fast!
My chief mission for the day achieved, Jen went home and Dad retired to his living room chair to eat a bowl of ice cream and watch television. Debi and I joined him there, but we kept pecking away at our laptops. I wanted to tie up a few loose ends.
But over the next several hours, I wound up opening more loops than I closed.
For of all the people we uncovered that day, I bore the closest resemblance and shared the most DNA with someone who did not seem to be related to Lynette at all. And I would go to bed that night with her face, not my mother’s, most prominent in my thoughts.
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