So.. the question started to circle in my head of who really am I? What family puzzle do I fit in? How many pieces are we missing? So.. when Mary and I connected, she began to use the data I had collected from Ancestry.com and 23andme. There was a free kit she had received for another DNA test so once she mailed it to me, I went ahead and did my third (and final) saliva DNA testing. While we were waiting for this last one to come in, Mary started to already see some closer matches. The first was a potential 1st or 2nd cousin or Half Great Uncle from the Kirkland family. She also found a possible 2nd cousin or half 1st cousin once removed from the Bennett family. From this initial data she began to build the ancestry trees to see how they and me were related. There was another genetic piece to the puzzle that still needed to be uncovered and neither the Kirklands nor the Bennetts seemed to have any relationship. It appeared that this was the other side of my family but at this point she wasn’t sure which was the mother’s or the father’s.
September 29, 2017 – this was day Mary sent me a picture of who she thought might be my father. A quick google search uncovered he has passed away in 2015 with 4 children, a couple marriages, and if he was my father he would have been 9 years older than the supposed age (based on what my adopted parents were told) of my mother. And.. he was married at the time! So.. in my head was an older man taking advantage of an underage teen which, not going to lie, was slightly unnerving. A high school picture of him had some features resembling my youngest son but there were a lot of questions for both Mary and I if he was really my father. What this puzzle piece did start to do is help her focus on building my family tree as she identified great grandparents on both sides which was a really good step. Getting to the actual parents is definitely more difficult but these recent nuggets were encouraging.
On the 1st of November, Mary reached her contact who works in with the Texas vital statistics office to confirm if some parts of Texas had opened up their adoption records. If you were born in Dallas County this was like hitting the jackpot! Those courts had recently ordered the sealed adoption files to be open so an adoptee could send a letter requesting the judge open the sealed file and send the contents. Along with this is a court order that the Bureau of Vital Statistics send the original ‘unedited’ birth certificate. Wasting no time, I sent in my $10 money order to the District Clerk who then sent me a letter back the following week that the judge ordered the file opened AND for another $14 money order they will send me the contents in the file. On December 9th, the day my husband, youngest son and I were leaving to go to a ‘cut your own Christmas tree’ farm I received the documents. On the way, I called Mary to discuss the scanned and sent pages I emailed her on what I found.
‘Baby Girl Richey’ was on the one document that stated who my mother was (not by name only by her age), her overall health and who the alleged father was (only by age) and his overall health. Was this my legal last name was my question to Mary? Well, it was a court document so it must have been. Mary did not see at the time any ‘Richey’s’ to my ancestry tree but as we were speaking, she started to identify that perhaps there was a connection. Surprisingly there was no other health information which is a little unusual. There was another document identifying my adoptive parents, the home environment and recognition of the official adoption and a document about the agency, Catholic Charities who represented my adoptive parents. On the letter from the District County Clerk there was a sticky note stating that the same court order for the unedited birth certificate could be used with ‘Hope Cottage’ to get access to my file. Unclear where Hope Cottage came into the picture, I anticipated that this would be learned later.
So Mary’s final words to me were – “Let me go to work and I will get back to you”.
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