Strength and Courage - The experience and discovery of my birth parents and family

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”.

Want more?  See my next post!

 

 

I am adopted.  I have known this since I could read a book called ‘Why I am adopted.’  Never really thought much about this as I had a typical childhood or so I thought with my brother David who was adopted two years after me. As a teenager I started to air my independence making mistakes, learning from them but beginning to struggle to find the right connection with my adoptive parents.  My brother and I have always had a bond, still do today and for this I am eternally grateful – he is such a love!

Fast forward to March 2012 – the year I was still in my 40’s but due to years of high impact exercise including running, triathlons, gymnastics, competitive twirling, etc. I needed a hip replacement.  This was an amazing month where the temperature in the suburbs of Chicago hovered almost daily in the 70’s and 80’s so sitting outside while recuperating was inevitable.  A book about Steve Jobs was recently released at the same time the first iPad so being a new Apple fan, this was my book of choice.  For many of you who may have also read his book, there were several times in the book where the biographer mentioned the ‘gap’ that Steve felt in his life because he was also adopted. For me, I didn’t sense this same ‘gap’ that Steve felt.  My life after college and a few years into the working world started to be filled by my incredible husband, our four children and my amazing in-laws.  So at the time as I am reading his book, his feelings of being rejected by being adopted just didn’t connect with me.

In October of 2014, I met a couple at a local fundraiser who shared their experience with 23andme, a DNA genetic testing site where you use a home collection kit to submit your DNA sample.  This sounded quite interesting especially about getting FDA approval for different medical reports. My overall health was pretty good – the question was how long will it last?  So in late 2015 after sending in my home kit saliva test, I started to receive the health reports, more insight on where my ancestors were from – both Irish and English it seems, and how much DNA that I shared with others who took the test.  It also tells you how much of your history can be traced back to the Neanderthals – the joke from my husband is the .0001% is good enough to say I am from these ancient humans – I don’t think so!  haha!  Overall the 23andme got me to around 2nd to 3rd cousin.  By doing this and allowing others to see my DNA info, I began to receive a few messages asking me about my history of which I had nothing to share at this point. I suppose this is what prompted me to continue my ancestor search.  So I took advantage of a special by Ancestry.com mid-2016 to see if there was any more info that I wasn’t seeing from 23andme and what I found was a similar DNA match but even farther out – more like 3rd to 5th cousin.   As many of you reading this blog, you realize that life takes many twists and turns – many of which you have no idea what is coming but you try to prepare as best you can.  There is nothing better to me than an investigative challenge, but to do this part time I knew I wasn’t going to get very far.  So I had resigned myself to continue reading those medical reports to see if I have traces in my DNA for late onset Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease and every so often reading the messages that I get from others asking if I can share any history.

If my story has you wondering what is next, please read my next post…