Tangled Webs--DNA connection challenges

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 they know?) or the names on that tree meant very little. Yes, there were matches to my tree but we already knew those links. But this match was to a guy who is, according to the DNA, first cousin to her mother, my daughter.

This was stunning to me because the family name for this man who is my daughter's age was indeed my daughter's father’s family name. Here was the first physical “proof” that [] was indeed my daughter's  father. I felt vindicated although in breaking up, [] had never intimated that he thought my daughter wasn’t his child. It was just that it didn’t matter to him since he'd decided he didn't want anything more to do with us going forward. And the fact that he lived in the UK and I lived in Canada made it all so easy.

Still, the irony wasn’t lost on me that as someone who has made so many connections of her own on cousins from grandparents and parents, and for actual strangers in my family history work, this was a very BIG personal connection, with a lot of fairly recent (in genealogical terms) hurt.

During Wednesday, as she popped on and off Messages my granddaughter and I looked at the guy-with-the-DNA's family tree—she in Tucson on her computer and me here on mine—and with the information on it I was able to work back several generations on ancestry.com. []'s family on his mother’s side is quite historical—his grandmother came from the West Indies where her family had been wealthy plantation owners. Yep, slave owners. But the family has continued to be “famous” there, intermarried and their name is part of the foundation of that country's modern government. Descendants have even made public apologies, and restitution, for their slave owning past. Fascinating in itself. And then this grandmother married someone—somehow she was in India at that time—with very strong ties to the British government in India during the 19th and 20th centuries. There’s even someone on that side of the tree who was knighted for his service to the Crown. And, if a person on ancestry.com has done her genealogical sleuthing correctly, there are links way back in the early 19th century to Earl Grey of tea fame. All wonderful from a historical point of view, for a historian, for someone who doesn't have any family "baggage". My granddaughter said that, prior to this whole side of the family tree, she had come to the conclusion that her ancestors were ordinary Irish and Scots farmers, nothing noteworthy, everything quite ordinary. And now history has come alive for her: the British Raj in India, plantations in the West Indies. And in modern times, living relatives who are filmmakers and medical workers.

For her it's all quite clinical, like studying a history book. But for my daughter and myself, it's a lot more "real" and stirs up memories of rejection and secrecy. Not that I object to learning about []'s family nowadays. I've come to terms with what happened 40-odd years ago and although the memory of the rejection, the acrimony, still stings a little bit, I know that my life now is just fine. 

For my daughter it might be different though. When my granddaughter suggested that she wanted to message the fellow who had posted his DNA, I said that was fine but my daughter was so-so. Again, I think it's memories of the rejection, the long silence, never hearing a word ever again. It's coincidental but the very same night I was watching an episode of the old "Cagney & Lacey" series where Lacey gets very upset when her son contacts Lacey's father, who had abandoned her and her mother many years earlier. Watching it was surreal; wow, so much like my dilemma might be, except I am one further generation removed. And I understand what my daughter might perhaps be feeling although she isn't as vocal about it as Lacey was.

So yesterday, my granddaughter and I had a back and forth text messaging thing where she said she wanted to contact this guy-with-the-DNA to see if there’s any interest in sharing information. She had first checked with her mother who said she didn't want to be involved but granddaughter could go ahead. But granddaughter has never done anything like that, whereas I am an old hand at writing genealogy inquiries. But never anything this close, this part of my own history, my own actions of 45-odd years ago. Still I agreed I was probably the best person to do the contacting so last night I wrote a very neutral, I believe, gentle Message explaining the DNA match and asking if he had an uncle so and so. In hindsight I probably could have been more general and just asked about DNA connections. But it is what it is, the message is out there in the ether. I reassured him that we didn't want to bother the family, we were mainly interested in genealogical/ancestral stuff. Granddaughter is also interested in any genetic info they might have though because of the hereditary condition she has. But I wasn't going to put that up front and center. 

I sent it before I went to sleep last night and barely slept at all. There’s been no response as yet and who knows? When I contacted my father’s nephew in Australia all those years ago explaining how my father was his mother’s half brother, it took a couple of weeks to reply because it was snail mail. And that turned out very, very well because the nephew had known about the family and had been really hoping to connect. I even went to Australia, met him and his family, all very friendly. But there’d been no real secret on the nephew’s side, only on my dad’s. They were glad for me to come and connect the dots on what they didn’t know about the grandparents and great grandparents.

This is a very different situation, almost shoe on the other foot. This time we’re the ones asking the other family to connect dots. I know that []'s brother, this man's father, did know about us, he actually met us that Christmas so long ago. He was the only one of the family who did know up until the time that [] dropped us. But did he keep []'s secret? 

And there's a slight concern about another rejection and that is probably on my daughter's mind. Will they be suspicious of our motives, like part of my Irish relations were years ago, and not want to be in contact? Will they think we are after money? I guess there’s no point guessing about it, will just have to wait to see if he does respond. It’s not going to affect our day to day lives, it’s a piece of the puzzle that now fits a space in the family tree but that's all it might remain, a branch on the family tree, as unknown as a lot of my distant cousins are.

So what do I feel from all of this? Why is it worth writing about? Well, it has brought to the fore a part of my life that I had basically locked away, like an old journal. Feeling around it, like we might after the dentist has extracted a tooth, I ask myself "Does it still hurt? Do I miss what might have been?" And the honest answer is, no, it really doesn't. In a way it's a cautionary tale. I am so thankful I told my daughter and granddaughter the truth of what happened back then. Although there might be a kind of "recollections may be vary" on the part of my daughter's father, there won't be any big divergence. But I have read enough books and seen enough movies, TV series to know that many people lie about things like this.

The lesson is that DNA IS a huge breakthrough and DNA results can indeed open up incidents and conversations that were considered closed or forever secret.