Finding Family

by Richard Hill

  An affair in 1945, however, would be an entirely different story. Gerry had trouble believing that the father she idolized could have been unfaithful to her mother that much earlier.

  “I have mixed feelings about this whole thing,” she wrote in an e-mail. “On one hand, I like the idea of you being a half brother, since I think you and Pat are a fantastic addition to the Richards family. On the other hand, I have to face that my Dad, who I thought at that time was a wonderful family man, did this to our happy little family.”

  Gerry even quoted Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

  As the reality began to sink in, however, Gerry began to cope with his apparent misconduct. “It probably was just a one-night fling,” she wrote. “We all make mistakes at one time or another.”

  Then Gerry flipped back into denial, arguing that Jackie, who was only nineteen at the time, could not have been interested in a man twice her age.

  On the other hand, I thought quietly to myself, a man of almost any age would have been attracted to a young woman as beautiful as Jackie was.

  We soon spoke again by phone.

  “I think she would have been more attracted to Joe,” stated Gerry flatly. “He was only twenty-three and a good-looking Marine.”

  “Remember,” I countered. “Joe had just been put on emergency leave due to battle fatigue. He probably wasn’t that much fun to be around in August 1945.”

  Gerry and I continued our correspondence. At one point, she wrote that she once again felt like she was a character in a soap opera.

  Fortunately, she still saw the bright side. “Oh well,” she wrote. “It makes my life interesting!”

  Eventually, we both reached the conclusion that our speculations were useless. We could not go back to 1945 and watch this soap opera unfold.

  We would have to wait for the results of Gerry’s DNA test.

  46

  CONFIRMATION

  Over the following weeks, Gerry and I stayed in touch as we awaited her DNA test results. I saw signs that she was preparing herself for what now seemed inevitable.

  “I will just have to accept whatever the outcome is,” she wrote. “I keep reassuring myself that the results of this test will not change the way I feel about him. He was a sensational father to me and that is what I have to keep in mind.”

  In mid February, I received an e-mail from Family Tree DNA that Gerry’s Family Finder test results were ready to view online. As I predicted, this high-tech comparison of her DNA with mine left no room for doubt.

  Gerry was clearly my half sibling.

  Family Tree DNA had recently added the capability to transfer DNA results from Relative Finder into Family Finder. Wanting to see everyone’s results in one place, I had immediately ordered the transfer for Vern.

  When Vern’s results appeared in Family Finder, everything became perfectly clear. Vern, Gerry, and I were all half siblings to each other and Elaine was a first cousin to each of us.

  No question about it. Vernie Fletcher Richards was my birth father.

  I then used Family Finder’s Chromosome Browser to see a graph of our common segments on individual chromosome pairs. This made the conclusion visually obvious.

  When I called Gerry with the complete results, she was actually excited.

  “I do not think you could have picked a better person than Vernie to be your dad,” she exclaimed. “He was the greatest person in my life and loved me unconditionally. Congratulations…little brother!”

  Gerry continued, “This has not changed my love and respect for my dad. As you know, we were extremely close and he was the most fantastic father and my hero.”

  “What I do feel bad about,” she continued, “is that our dad did not even have a clue about you. He would have been thrilled to have such a wonderful son.”

  I was both relieved and delighted by Gerry’s words. Now I felt that I had achieved both of my objectives. I had finally—and at long last—solved all the major mysteries surrounding my birth…and in the end, no one got seriously hurt.

  Even Gerry’s husband, who had once warned her about digging up old bones, was happy for Gerry and me. He had known Vernie as a great family man who took wonderful care of his family. He reminded Gerry that Vernie’s involvement with my mother was no reflection on us in any way.

  Gerry even complimented Jackie.

  “I have to give your mom credit for not blaming my dad and breaking up our happy home. She must have suffered a lot of stress and decided in the end to do what was best for you. It was a big sacrifice on her part.”

  Yes, I thought, Jackie did a wonderful thing for Gerry by keeping quiet about Vernie. And placing me with Harold and Thelma Hill had been Jackie’s ultimate gift to me.

  As for the circumstances of her relationship with Vernie, we will never know for sure. But in all my research, I never heard anyone express even a hint of an affair between them.

  The timing of my conception, just days after V-J Day, had always suggested a one-time celebratory encounter. Now, the good things I was hearing about Vernie as a family man certainly supported that theory.

  For Gerry, the excitement that followed V-J Day was actually her earliest childhood memory. Just four years old, she remembered being in her yard and clutching the family dog that was frightened by all the fireworks being shot off around them.

  Gerry and I were certain that Vernie never knew about me. On the other hand, we both had become convinced that Jackie knew Vernie had been my father.

  “In my mind,” she went on, “I think Jackie named you Gerald as a tie-in to Vernie.”

  Independently, I had reached the same conclusion. Concerned about losing custody of her son, Mike, over this encounter with a married man, Jackie had named a single man, Conrad, as my father.

  Yet even though Conrad recently had proposed to her, she did not take the easy way out and simply become his wife. She chose not to tell him about her pregnancy, instructed her friends not to tell him, and left town to live with my adoptive parents.

  I think she knew the baby she carried was not Conrad’s. And when I was born, she intended “Gerald” to be a tiny clue for me and my descendents.

  Yet even that clue was buried when my new parents rejected Gerald and re-named me Richard. If my search angel, Jeanette, had not uncovered Gerald as my original name and Gerry had not pointed out the similarity to Geraldine, I never would have caught the connection.

  Gerry and I promptly arranged our first meeting as brother and sister. We picked the East Lansing suburb of Okemos as a convenient halfway spot and I suggested a chain restaurant that offered a free Wi-Fi connection. That would allow me to show her our DNA test results online.

  Once this was set, I realized that we would be meeting less than a half mile from the restaurant where Conrad and I ate lunch after having our blood drawn for the DNA paternity test. That was more than twenty years ago! How time had flown.

  On the way to Okemos, I stopped and bought a bouquet of roses that I presented to Gerry. She in turn surprised me with two hand-tooled leather belts that had belonged to my birth father. The well-worn, everyday belt said “Jack” in the back and the still pristine belt he saved for dressing up said “Vernie.”

  After we ate lunch, I got out my laptop and took Gerry through the online accounts for the Relative Finder and Family Finder tests. I showed her exactly what I saw as I confirmed that Vernie was my birth father.

  Gerry presented me with more photos that I could scan and save. She then told me more about Vernie’s life and some of the good things he did for his extended family. That list included subsidizing his youngest brother, so Wayne could stay on the family ranch and take care of their aging parents.

  After Vernie arrived in Michigan, he became a beloved instructor and basketball coach at the Henry Ford Trade School. Sixteen years later, he began his stint in the bar business by purchasing the Joy Bar. After selling that bar, he took over the Good Tim
e Bar that he had originally purchased for his brother, Joe, to run.

  In the last twenty-five years of his life, Vernie was a breeder of horses and made a good living from harness racing. He helped turn Livonia into a city and was a longtime member of the Rotary Club, once serving as its president. One of his favorite projects was helping crippled children ride horses.

  Gerry also brought me a copy of an old audio tape where Vernie was practicing his speech for a reunion of Henry Ford Trade School alumni and staff.

  After returning home, I listened eagerly to the tape and was pleased to hear my birth father’s rich voice with a distinctive Texas drawl. He was a good speaker and delivered an inspiring, often humorous speech.

  Thinking back, I realized my quest for biological roots began in 1981—a full five years before Vernie died.

  Unfortunately, I never came close to meeting him. Thanks to lies, cover-ups, the sealed records, my personal distractions, and the misleading sibling test results, my search had lurched ahead and stalled repeatedly over thirty-one years.

  Looking back, I do not regret a minute of it. While frustrating at times, my search proved to be a rich and rewarding experience. I uncovered the truth about my birth parents, acquired wonderful new siblings and cousins, and built a family tree for my descendants.

  Along the way, I made many new friends and got to speak with people who knew and loved my birth parents. By learning so many details about them and their families, I felt like I really did travel back in time.

  In addition, I gained a deeper appreciation for my adoptive parents and the enormous role they played in my life.

  When people hear my story, they sometimes congratulate me for finding my “real” parents. I’m always quick to correct them.

  Yes, my birth parents played their biological role and left traces of themselves and their ancestors in my DNA.

  But my adoptive parents were the ones who were there for me day in and day out, year after year. They provided the love, support, encouragement, and endless patience I needed to become a fully functioning adult. Finding family taught me that my adoptive parents were just as much real parents as were my birth parents.

  The experts talk about nature versus nurture. Both are critically important in determining who we are. The inherent truth for adoptees, however, is that these two factors came from four different people.

  And many of us will never know peace until we know all the pieces.

  A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR

  My hopes for this book are simple.

  I want to inspire adoptees and others of unknown or uncertain parentage to try DNA testing. Use what you learned from my story and your path to success should be much shorter than mine.

  I’m also hoping that birth parents will be motivated to be tested too, making it easier for their never-forgotten children or maybe their grandchildren to learn about them someday.

  As genetic genealogy tests become ever more powerful and the databases get larger, the process of finding and reuniting lost families will only get easier.

  For current information and specific recommendations, visit my web site at DNA-Testing-Adviser.com. You can use the feedback form on my site to ask me questions, comment on this book, or arrange a presentation for your genealogy, adoption search, or civic group.

  If you, too, are looking for your genetic roots, I wish you great success in your search. I sincerely hope you have a happy ending similar to the one that I enjoyed.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I wish to thank my good friends, John Krueger and Bill Murphy. These excellent writers reviewed my drafts chapter by chapter. Their honest and insightful feedback made this a better book.