This post is impartial and un-sponsored. It's not a commercial for any company. It is simply a retelling of our methods in doing what seemed impossible. Hopefully it will help those with unanswered questions about their identities find renewed hope. Thanks for reading and please encourage someone today!
For the last two years my family has been on an epic genealogical journey. My husband's parents were both dead; at least, that's what we thought. Family is extremely important to both my husband and I and for as long as I can remember my husband has wondered about his father's family.
My husband had never met his father or his father's family. His mother was brutally killed when he was only 12 so he hadn't had the opportunity to ask many detailed questions. His mother never married so all he had to go on were her stories, a baby book he was given, and a few photos of the man who was said to be his father and a name. Sadly though, she said the man was dead. For a long time those stories sufficed. What he was given was certainly more than some are given and for years my husband didn't question the validity of those statements.
It wasn't until a few years ago that my husband wanted to reach out to the two half siblings his mother said he had that we began to both wonder. Although we had these details left by my husband's late mother, some of the details seemed - unreliable. When we began going over the statements and investigating facts we found things to be out of place. For instance, the man said to be his father appeared to have died before my husband could have been conceived. That's not something a 12 year old would pick up on. But to be sure, I investigated futher.
I have a hobby of finding people, so as a gift to my husband I set out to find family members of my husband's late "father".
It worked!
I found his two would-be siblings using several online databases and of course Facebook.
Problem: These two looked absolute NOTHING like my husband and I felt something wasn't right.
I decided that before we would contact these two siblings and turn their world upside down, we should take an autosomal DNA test to find out my husband's true admixture (ethnic makeup).
Although he is visibly bi-racial (sometimes he looks fully european to be honest), he was told his father was black as was his mother.
I surprised my husband with a AncestryDNA test (something he had long wanted to to take).
I was RIGHT!
My husband is nearly 60% European! His mother was certainly black; his father absolutely could not be not be. We needed this answer; if nothing else, to simply eliminate for sure the possibility of the long deceased man in the baby book.
My husband was not as excited as I thought he would be. Certainly the idea that he'd believed a lie for so long had to weigh heavily upon him. He had very mixed emotions. I, on the other hand was thrilled. Night and day I hoped and prayed his dad was still alive. I prayed he would get to meet him! Look at him face to face and finally see someone who looked like him.
AncestryDNA has an amazing feature that matches you with your biological cousins and family members. You can see and contact these family members. So we did. We told the closest cousins listed my husband's story. Some responded, some didn't. Some shared their family trees, some didn't. Nevertheless, I was determined.
While my husband was at work, I was prayerfully pouring through close matches looking for common surnames trying to find my husband's true last name - his father's family name. Keep in mind, I'm not a geneticist. I was learning all of this on the fly. You could say I was obsessed. Maybe I was. It was so important to me to find the family of the man I love. To give him the gift of connection - identity.
I found it!
It turns out that a 2nd cousin had tested herself and several other family members and AncestryDNA showed them as close matches.
This cousin tried to be helpful and suggested a few places to look. But she didn't tell us about the one man living in California in their family who could be my husband's father. She had good reason: an autosomal test cannot tell you which is the mother's side and which is the father's. It only gives total genetic make-up and can help you connect to people from both sides you are related to.
AncestryDNA's test gave us all the cousins and family members lumped into categories of closeness.
There was however one surname (of which we'd never seen or heard before) common among those cousins.
After testing my husband's maternal grandmother as well (in order to assign some of those cousins to a maternal or paternal side), I finally opted for the one test that could potentially tell us if my husband's father was descended from a person with the surname that had come up so often on Ancestry.com.
To be continued... PART 2 HERE
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