Person on the Page

An email alerted me that my DNA analysis report was ready to view. When I logged on to Ancestry.com and clicked on my DNA matches, there she was.

The first person on my list of matches surprised me.  I expected to see an aunt or cousin listed there—someone I knew. The first entry, however, was “Linda—Half-Sister—25% Shared DNA.”

I am an only child. If one of my parents had had another child from a previous relationship, they would have told me. Wouldn’t they? Surely, I would have known or at least heard of a half-sibling. What I saw on Ancestry had to be a mistake.

My first reaction was that I wasn’t impressed with this company’s product. Sloppy science, I thought.

When I decided to purchase a DNA analysis kit from Ancestry, I wasn’t looking for any long-lost relatives or anticipating any surprises. I was hoping to learn whether or not I was Irish.  I had been writing about my maternal grandmother, attributing some of her seemingly supernatural powers to Irish witchcraft. I wanted to be sure that I was correctly assuming that her ancestors were from the Emerald Isle. I wasn’t expecting Ancestry to botch my analysis and claim I had a sibling that I was I certain I did not.

Though I was sure it was a mistake, I had to look further. When I clicked on the name of this stranger, Linda, who was supposed to be my half-sister, I was given the option to view our shared matches: people with whom we had DNA in common.  A list of names appeared, some familiar. All of them were related to my father. 

My father.  That quiet man I had known as a child.  The man who never talked about himself, his past, his experiences in the Army during World War II. He never shared any details about the life he led before I was born. The man who died when I was twelve—over five decades ago.

I supposed it was possible. Dad could have fathered a child at some time, somewhere, either before or after he was married to my mother.  And given his reticence about communicating in general, he could have kept it a secret. 

When I looked at the family tree Linda was constructing on Ancestry, I saw that she had devoted considerable effort to tracking her father’s ancestry. 

Her father.  Was he who she thought he was?

If I contacted her and said something to the effect of, Hey, Linda, guess what? Your dad may not be your real dad, how would she respond?  Would she be intrigued by the possibility? Or would she wish I had never contacted her? Or, worse, would she tell me I was crazy?

And, I had to ask myself, did I want to contact her? I had always felt comfortable with the idea that I was an only child. Did I want to discover a sibling?  Was I ready for all of the emotional upheaval and challenges a discovery like that was sure to cause?  After all, Dad has been dead for a long time. Is it wise, after all these years, to pursue the possibility that he had another child?

I thought it over for a few days before I sent her a message.

Hello, Linda. My name is Georgia. I just had my DNA analyzed, and Ancestry tells me that you and I are half-sisters. Our shared DNA matches suggest that we are related through my dad. Is there any possibility that you and I have the same father?

The next day when I logged on to Ancestry, I saw that she had replied.

Nothing would surprise me. I find this very interesting.

Her response prompted me to try to piece together, as best I could, Dad’s story.

Her Mother, My Father: How Did It Happen?

Linda told me that she was born in 1954. My parents were married in 1955, and I was born in 1960.  How could I discover how Dad came to father a child with Linda’s mother just before marrying my mother? Were any details of their story out there to be found?

My search began with census records.  I learned that as young adults in the 1930s, Linda’s mother and my father lived in the same small town in West Virginia. The population was just over a thousand people, so it was conceivable—even likely—that they knew each other. 

By 1950, my father was single and still living in West Virginia, and Linda’s mother was married with two children and living in Ohio. The two lived about 120 miles apart. 

If they had known each other in the 1930s but gone on to lead separate lives many miles from each other, how did it happen that they conceived a child together in the 1950s?

Dates and numbers began to blur in my mind. Mere historical records—city directories, military draft and registration documents, census demographics—cannot tell the intimate story of a life. They do not capture the countless lived moments or the chaos of dreams and desires that make up a person’s existence. 

I could only imagine possible scenarios. Perhaps Dad and Linda’s mother met by chance, years after the time during which they knew each other in West Virginia. Maybe some mutual attraction—some snuffed adolescent fire—rekindled. Or perhaps they met as strangers for the first time around 1954 under who-knows-what circumstances and knew each other only briefly. Perhaps they met somehow and fell in love, or maybe my father thought at the time that the tryst between himself and a married woman was casual, meaningless.

The fact that it seemed I could not know the circumstances that led to the birth of my half-sister frustrated me. Beyond the frustration, though, it made me realize how little I knew about Dad. I wished more than anything that I could talk to him. I wished I could demand answers to my questions. 

Then, something happened.  An impulse, maybe, or an internal voice. Something in my mind said, Go look in that box.

Did Dad Lead Me to a Clue?

After my father died, my mother put a few of his belongings in a wooden box.  His wallet, his glasses, a few pieces of jewelry, newspaper clippings of his obituary and funeral announcement.  She kept the box in her dresser drawer until she died in 2015. Then, I inherited it.

I opened it once and saw Dad’s glasses. The last time I’d seen them, he was alive. To me as a child, they were part of what he looked like. They were part of his face. Looking at them as an adult so many years later, I was overwhelmed by memories and grief. Without going through its other contents, I closed the box and slid it to the back of my dresser drawer.

As I struggled to understand how Dad had fathered a daughter before me, something told me to look in the box. I hadn’t thought about it since hiding it away in the drawer.

When I opened it, among the items I found there were his military dog tags from World War II. I had never seen them before. I knew from having found his discharge records online that he had served in the Army from 1942 to 1946. The tags listed his name, serial number, blood type, religious affiliation, and a contact person. 

The contact person was Linda’s mother.

I felt as if I’d found a missing piece of a puzzle. As if Dad might have somehow led me to the box, as if he had saved the dog tags all those years ago as a clue for me to find. The information on them allowed me to locate records revealing that Dad and Linda’s mother were married to each other in 1940. They must have divorced shortly after he was discharged from the service, because by 1946 she was married to the man that Linda listed as her father on her Ancestry family tree.

These skeletal facts allow for several possible scenarios. Was this a love triangle that persisted for over a decade?  Did Dad’s relationship with his first wife continue long past their divorce until the time of Linda’s conception, and possibly beyond?

One question eclipsed all my others, though.  Did Dad know that he had another child?  Or had he lived and died, never knowing?

Gains and Losses: My Half-Sister and I Meet

Linda drove through last February’s snows from Pennsylvania to Michigan to meet me.  When I looked at her, I saw so much of Dad in her that any doubt about the veracity of the DNA match and the details of the historical records I’d found could be dismissed. Linda is Dad’s daughter.

And she is my half-sister. During our first meeting, we learned that we have many traits in common. Two light-skinned, blue-eyed, introverted women, we share a passion for the culinary arts and a love of gardening. We both speak softly and measure our words carefully.

Linda told me that she always knew something wasn’t right about her family. She didn’t look like her three siblings. They used to tease her, telling her that she must have been adopted. She knew something beyond just her physical appearance was different about her. Something was amiss.  Learning the identity of her real father, she says, has given her a measure of peace.

My half-sister and I will build a sibling relationship as well as we can given our ages, our different life experiences, and the physical distance between us. 

Sadly, whether or not Dad knew that his other daughter existed, he did not know her. Linda has no recollection of meeting him or of hearing any suggestion that her father was anyone other than the man by whom she was raised.

Dad never helped her with homework or played board games with her after dinner. She never helped him string lights on a Christmas tree or rake leaves in the yard. They never had breakfast at the same table. Never shared the seemingly endless march of moments that fathers and their children who live together inevitably do.

Dad and Linda were both cheated out of those experiences.  

Now, decades after his death, I’m left to represent Dad for the daughter who never knew him.  Sometimes I’m angry at him. But is he really to blame?  I’m embarrassed that he didn’t take responsibility for his child. But how could he have taken responsibility if he didn’t know she existed?

I feel sorry for him that he missed this important part of his life.  I feel sorry for her, too, that she didn’t know about him until long after he was gone. How do I, the child who grew up knowing the father, tell her, the child who never knew him, what he was like?  How can she know him through me?  Can she?

But mostly, I feel my father’s loss. Since I have come to know his firstborn daughter, I imagine that he would have loved her, and I recognize the things he would have liked about her.

Growing up, Linda was athletic. She loves sports. I look through the photos I have of Dad when he was a teenager. Pictures of him in his high school basketball, football, and baseball uniforms. I remember him calling me out into the backyard after he got home from work to play ball with him. I tried my best, but I was an indoor girl—wispy and delicate—not much good with a ball.  I can picture Dad and Linda enjoying playing ball together.

Linda went to culinary school. She owned a restaurant. Dad worked in food service management all of his adult life. Having his own restaurant was a dream he was about to pursue when he died. I believe he would have been proud of Linda’s accomplishments. I earned a PhD in English and pursued an academic career. What would a business-oriented man like Dad have thought of that? He would have been proud, surely, but how well would he have related to my love of language and literature?

Not through any budding late-life sibling rivalry, but joyfully and openly as one tiny bit of Dad that I can offer her, I tell my half-sister, “He would have liked you better.”

---

Cover Photo: Pixabay