An update to my last blog: Granddaughter and I did hear from the guy in the UK, the guy who matched to daughter's DNA. The nephew of the man who, well, blew my life apart in so many ways 45-43 years ago. At first the nephew responded quite positively about the match but once he heard what the connection was, how close it was, he pulled back slightly and said that he needed to consult with "the other members" of the family to see who had known what--he hadn't known anything about a first cousin--and to talk with them about his contacting us. Side note: this man is 43 years old, married with his own daughter. So, not a very young person but not an older person of, say, my generation either. I wrote last time that I had come to terms with it all and, consciously, as I move around my day, get things done, read, interact, yeah, the whole thing is something at the back of my mind. Except when I am speaking with daughter or granddaughter. Then it moves to the fore and I t
Note: I am not naming any names in this post. It's not my wish to co-opt someone else's story or cause embarrassment for specific people. So I will be as vague as I can be although friends will probably know who I am referring to. I write this because it's very close to my heart and brings up a perspective for honesty is the best policy. Wednesday morning I woke up to a text message from my granddaughter that she’d had notification from a genealogy website that her DNA had matched to a guy in the UK. A few years ago she had asked for a DNA kit for Christmas; at the time she was fascinated with family history given that her mother's father was out of the picture and her father was adopted. For the first few years, the matches haven't shown anything too helpful to her, lots of names that really couldn't be linked because either the person hadn't created a tree (how is it that people will do the Ancestry DNA thing and then NOT create a tree with the information