Finding Family

by Richard Hill

  The next day, Pat and I drove west to San Antonio. Joe’s wife had baked a batch of wonderful cookies to take with us. Pat tries to avoid sweets, but I love them. So I naturally indulged myself and Pat eventually gave in to temptation.

  We got a room on the famous San Antonio River Walk and became tourists for a day. While there, we toured a place I had wanted to visit since I was eight years old: the Alamo.

  I was that young when Walt Disney glued me to my family’s black-and-white television screen with his Davy Crockett series. The episode at the Alamo had a profound impact on my young mind. Unlike the heroes in my comic books and other childhood stories, the good guys lost this battle. Worse yet, they were all killed.

  In case Walt Disney’s version wasn’t memorable enough, Hollywood had retold the story many more times in the following decades. I absolutely had to see the Alamo.

  While browsing the museum shop, I found a book called Heroes of the Alamo and Goliad. Remembering that my second great-grand uncle had reportedly died at Goliad, I scanned the pages that listed the casualties. Sure enough, John Richards was listed among the Texas revolutionaries killed at Goliad.

  Proudly, I bought the book.

  We left San Antonio and drove north with two more big visits ahead of us: my brother, Doug, and my sister, Elaine.

  Once more, we noticed a dichotomy similar to the one in East Texas. Doug lived way out in the country with horses, dogs, and chickens, while Elaine’s address was in the suburbs of a small city.

  We visited Doug and his wife first and received a warm greeting. It was soon obvious that my brother and I were both quiet men who would wait patiently for our turn to talk. Our more outgoing wives liked each other immediately and seemed to carry 90 percent of the conversation. I wondered if Doug and I would ever get to speak one on one.

  The chance came at dinner when Doug took us and some of his extended family to a Mexican restaurant. As he and I sat at one end of a long table, Doug told me about our father and his life before and after Dann’s Tavern.

  Doug described Doc as a serial entrepreneur. In his lifetime, he was involved in more than forty diverse businesses. Bars and nightclubs were a big part of the story. But other ventures included a soft-serve ice cream franchise, a pig farm, a movie theater, and a collection of retail stores. Although some businesses were failures, Doc had enough successes to ultimately get into ranching.

  Doug was three years older than I was. Like his father before him, he was part businessman and part rancher. His home included a barn with horses and a pony for his grandchildren.

  His primary ranch was quite a distance from where he was currently living, so we did not get to see it on that trip. But like Cousin Dale, Doug obviously loved the land and the ranching life of his ancestors.

  When we returned from dinner, Doug called two of his adult children and had me speak to them on the phone. When he introduced me as their uncle, I knew I was accepted.

  With everyone else gone, the four of us talked long into the night about many things, including my long search and the DNA testing that had brought us together.

  In the morning, after a farm-fresh breakfast provided by their chickens, we said good-bye and drove north to meet my sister, Elaine.

  I had already found one brother, Mike, on my birth mother’s side. So I was completely at ease with having a second brother on my birth father’s side. But what would it be like to have a sister? I had no idea.

  During my teenage years, close relationships with girls my age meant dating. Since meeting Pat at age twenty, all my other close friends had been male. I had female coworkers, of course, but those relationships revolved around work.

  Elaine was excited to meet us. When we sat down in her living room, she began talking as if she had known us forever. She explained that this home was temporary. Recently divorced, she was having her former home remodeled to make it more saleable.

  This home didn’t look temporary to me. It was extensively decorated and unmistakably feminine. She noted that she had designed and decorated the other home to fit her unique taste.

  “I need to de-Elaine it,” she explained, “so more people will like it.”

  Elaine’s friendly, forthright manner made us comfortable and eased a lot of my concerns. Comparing birth dates, we discovered that my sister was just three months younger than I was—an odd circumstance made possible because of our different mothers.

  While Doug had filled me in on Doc’s business life, Elaine told us more about the man as a husband and father. Like everyone else, he was not perfect. But his overall temperament reminded me in some ways of myself.

  Elaine, Doc’s only daughter, had married young, ultimately bearing five daughters of her own. She was now thrilled to have grandchildren.

  Her youngest daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend were nearby, so we all met for lunch at a restaurant. Enjoying our time together, Pat and I hung around much longer than planned. But now we had to begin our long drive back to Michigan.

  Over the next two and a half days, Pat and I had plenty of time to reflect. We concluded that our journey to Texas had been the perfect capstone to the bigger journey of my search for biological roots.

  Twenty-six years earlier, I had begun my search, looking for a brother and the truth about my birth mother. Eventually, I discovered both.

  Neither Mike nor I had known much about our mother, due to her premature death and my adoption. But my search had taught both of us a lot about her.

  The product of two alcoholic parents and a broken home, Jackie had spent three years of her late childhood living in a Salvation Army home. From there, every year of her life was remarkably eventful.

  • At fifteen, she returned to her mother’s home, only to find a stepfather she couldn’t stand.

  • At sixteen, she quit school to marry her best friend’s older brother.

  • At seventeen, she gave birth to her first son, Mike.

  • At eighteen, having left her abusive husband, she placed Mike with his grandmother.

  • At nineteen, she got pregnant a few months before her divorce was final.

  • At twenty, she gave birth to her second son, giving me up for adoption.

  • At twenty-one, she and her younger sister died from the trauma of a Jeep accident.

  Jackie never gave up on her dream of getting Mike back and making a home for him. From the time she left Mike’s father to the day of her death, she always worked two jobs: a manufacturing job during the week and a waitressing job on the weekends.

  The exception was the last five months of her pregnancy when she lived with my adoptive parents in Lansing. Yet even then, she washed hair in Mom’s beauty shop.

  For the last two years of her life, Jackie took advantage of her good looks and popularity to date many guys and do a lot of partying. I’ll never know exactly why she got involved with a married man. Perhaps it was because most of the young, single men were off fighting a war.

  Now that I had met my new siblings, I felt my search was over. I was now enjoying the fruits of discovering another new family.

  “I’m a lucky man,” I said. “Most people are only blessed with two parents. I had four. Two of them created me from the DNA of my biological ancestors. And the other two molded me into the person I am today.”

  “And now you have four families in your life instead of two,” Pat added.

  “Yes,” I said. “Best of all, I don’t have to give up anybody in my adopted family. It’s not an either-or thing. I’m just adding on.”

  Pat’s next comment summarized my feelings exactly. “You can’t have too much family,” she said.

  Nearing home, we began to reminisce about the incredible maze I had passed through to get to this point, including all the false information and dead-end leads.

  “The one rumor that never made any sense,” I noted, “was the one about my mother being a nurse and my father being a Lansing doctor. I could never identify the source or explain how they got it
so wrong.”

  “Wasn’t the woman who put your parents in touch with your birth mother a nurse?” Pat asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I could see that part of the story getting distorted into my mother being a nurse. But why on earth would someone think my father was a doctor?”

  In an instant, some previously unrelated thoughts converged in my brain.

  “Wait a minute,” I exclaimed. “Even though my birth father’s given name was Douglas, those close to him called him Doc!”

  Jackie, who worked with him for months, could have known him by that name. And she lived with my adoptive parents for five whole months before I was born. Could she have slipped just one time and referred to her baby’s father as Doc?

  Perhaps Dad misconstrued her remark and proudly told a friend that I was the son of a doctor. Since my parents lived in Lansing, the rumor about my birth father being a Lansing doctor could have developed from there.

  This was only speculation, of course. Like other missing details, the source of that rumor would remain a mystery. But at least I had identified my birth father.

  Or so I thought.

  43

  MISSION

  My words to Dale that “there really isn’t much difference between a half brother and a cousin” proved to be an accurate assessment.

  Having gotten to know so many family members during the long, confusing wait for sibling test results, I felt just as close to my Richards cousins as I did my Richards siblings.

  As one would expect, actual face time proved to be more dependent on geography than our precise relationship. Pat and I saw more of cousins Gerry and David, who lived in Michigan, than family members a thousand miles away in Texas.

  We did make periodic return trips to the Lone Star state. And some of the Texas people, most reliably Dale, journeyed to Michigan for the annual Richards reunion.

  In 2010, Pat and I had the privilege of hosting the reunion at our home. More than anything else, that made us feel like part of the family.

  On my birth mother’s side, my brother, Mike, and I had now known each other almost half our lives. It did not seem possible. He was still in Tennessee, but we got together at his place or ours on a roughly annual basis.

  Aunt Lynn’s health declined steadily and she died early in 2010. Pat and I drove across the state to pay our respects and got to reconnect briefly with cousins on my maternal side.

  The older generation of my adoptive family had already passed away by the time I found both of my birth families. So I have no idea what they would have thought of my new relationships. But the cousins I had known all my life were intrigued and supportive.

  There’s no question that DNA testing played a huge role in my search. Yet I was surprised to discover that most adoptees and many genealogists were still unaware of genetic genealogy.

  By 2008, I decided that sharing what I had learned would be my personal mission. For more than thirty years, I had worked in marketing communications—writing about my clients’ technical products and services. So I felt well prepared to write about the world of DNA testing.

  That summer I began slowly to build a web site, which I registered as DNA-Testing-Adviser.com. I was still doing a lot of client work, so it was 2009 before I had sufficient content to attract even a small number of visitors.

  After learning that my biological father was a Richards, I had joined the Richards DNA Surname Project at Family Tree DNA. When the volunteer project administrator decided to step down in January 2009, she asked me to take over the project, which I did.

  Once I was on the administrator list, I learned that Family Tree DNA hosted an annual conference for project administrators in its headquarters city of Houston. Since my Richards family had lived just outside Houston since 1859, I thought this was an interesting coincidence.

  The 2009 conference was scheduled for March, just two months away. I tried to register and discovered that all the spaces had been filled. Determined to learn more about DNA testing directly from these experts, I wrote the company and reported my successful use of its Y-DNA test to uncover the surname of my birth father.

  They somehow made room for me and let me attend the conference.

  Even better, they asked if I could stop by their office and tell my story in front of a video camera. I did that and got to meet the company’s founder and president, Bennett Greenspan. The video that developed from that interview eventually was added to the Family Tree DNA web site.

  I had placed a feedback form on my own web site so people could contact me with questions and comments. A few weeks after the Houston conference, a science reporter from The Wall Street Journal used that form to contact me.

  He had heard about me from Bennett. After visiting my web site, he wanted to tell my story. He interviewed me several times by phone and on May 2, 2009, his article appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

  The newspaper included several photos that I had provided. Heavily edited to fit the space available, the final version got a few details wrong. Yet I was thrilled with the coverage. It also appeared in the online edition and my web site traffic took its first significant upward spike.

  A few weeks later, our local newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, asked for an interview. When I agreed, they sent a reporter and a photographer to our home. That article also received front-page coverage. Since both of my fathers were featured in the story, it was fitting that the article ran on Father’s Day.

  While the newspaper articles were lengthy, I knew that 90 percent of the story remained untold. The idea of writing a book began to percolate in my brain.

  Still, I knew I couldn’t recall the whole story without a laborious dive into my huge collection of notes, documents, and correspondence going back almost thirty years. I didn’t think I could find the time to even do that, let alone write an entire book.

  In 2010, the Great Recession—which hit Michigan especially hard—provided the opportunity.

  I had three consulting clients at the time and two of them slashed the marketing budgets that paid for my services. For the first time in my adult life, I suddenly had significant free time.

  I jumped into the book project.

  Meanwhile, I began receiving invitations to speak in front of genealogy and civic groups around Grand Rapids. I discovered that even people who were not adoptees or genealogists were fascinated by my story.

  I continued to follow advancements in genetic genealogy, taking additional DNA tests and writing about them on my web site.

  In late 2009, I learned about a new DNA test from a company called 23andMe. Although the company focused on health testing, it wanted genealogists to test a new feature called Relative Finder. I signed up to be a beta tester, which is someone a company uses to test a new product to find and work out any potential bugs.

  Like the sibling test I took in 2007, this test looked at the “autosomal” DNA passed down from both parents. But unlike the old sibling test, which only compared people on fifteen markers, this test checked hundreds of thousands of locations, looking for long strings of identical DNA.

  And unlike the Y-DNA test that told me my birth father’s surname, this test could be taken by women as well as men…and if two people match, the common ancestor could be from any branch of their family trees.

  My closest early match was with a woman predicted to be a third cousin. By contacting her and comparing our lines, I was able to pinpoint our common ancestor. She and I are actually third cousins once removed on my paternal side.

  This was extremely cool. Immediately, I could foresee male and female adoptees using this test to find biological relatives from their birth families.

  As time went on, however, it became clear that hosting this genealogy feature at a health-testing company was less than ideal.

  The presence of genetic health data requires extremely high privacy walls around each user. Furthermore, most 23andMe users are secretive as well, preferring to be anonymous on Relative Find
er. These factors create formidable barriers to communication.

  For example, you can only invite your matches to discuss your ancestral connections by going through an internal communication system that enforces the rigid privacy protections.

  In addition, you can only see the details of a match—i.e. where you match on individual chromosomes—if that person specifically agrees to share his or her genome with you.

  The company was marketing the test aggressively, so the number of matches I had kept growing. Yet most of my matches never responded to my inquiries. And those who did usually were not genealogists and had limited knowledge of their family trees.

  Fortunately, a few months after Relative Finder was introduced, Family Tree DNA launched a similar test called Family Finder. It employed the same basic technology that Relative Finder used. Yet it had one critically important difference: it neither collected nor analyzed any health data.

  So I became a beta tester for Family Finder, as well.

  Like other genetic genealogy tests at Family Tree DNA, Family Finder was created with genealogists in mind. Instead of operating within a medical system strangled by confidentiality, users interact in a far more open culture designed for easy sharing. Both DNA results and genealogical data can be readily compared.

  As soon as you get a match, you can see that person’s name and e-mail address. You can contact him or her at any time and even attach files related to your family tree.

  Plus, you can immediately explore the details of your matches with several people at a time through a clever tool called the Chromosome Browser. You don’t have to wait for people to accept your “sharing invitation.”

  Thoughtfully, Family Tree DNA also included other features in Family Finder to support the exploration of matches, such as automated surname matching and even the display of genealogical pedigrees.

  Without the added draw of health testing, Family Finder appeals to a more limited audience than Relative Finder. So you don’t get as many matches. But nearly all of my matches responded to my inquiries and had extensive family trees.