Blog Post Fifteen

Photo by Laura Fuhrman

Secrets: Part 2

Matches and Solving Mysteries

Reaching out to your DNA matches can be difficult to wrap your head around. What do I say? How do I say it? You never know what someone’s feelings about certain family members are or if they will even believe you when you tell them you’re related. Sure, the DNA results are there but, have they looked at it? There are a lot of variables at play when you send messages to matches and being sensitive to those possibilities requires some consideration.

Is there a through-line you can offer them that may make sense to them? I took a shot in the dark and mentioned a physical trait that my grandmother shared with her father and her uncle: flat feet. My hope was that someone in her immediate family had flat feet so that she would take me seriously because this was the only lead I had, and I didn’t want to lose it. I asked and it turned out, someone had flat feet, and they could never figure out where it came from. BINGO. We compared more notes and, after several months, agreed: my grandmother was her mother’s mother. I had another aunt, a half-aunt, and she lived close to us, and we had no idea.

It took a moment for the details to sink in: my grandmother had a daughter when she was fifteen years old. Up to this point, I had a huge decade-long gap in my grandmother’s timeline. I knew where she was when she was nine years old and that she married my grandfather when she was nineteen. What about those ten years in between? According to family lore, I knew about a stint in an orphanage, but I didn’t know where it was, what it was called, and how long this stint lasted.

With genealogy, finding answers breeds more questions. Who was the father? What was the context? How did they know each other? My newly met half-first cousin said her mother had always wondered where she came from and had tried to get as much information as she could, but then she got sick. Much to my disappointment, she passed away about one year before my grandmother died.

My half-first cousin had managed to find her mother’s non-identifying adoption information that her mother was able to obtain back when the adoption records were still closed in the province of Ontario. For those not familiar with adoption records there are two types: identifying information names everyone involved in an adoption and their family details, while non-identifying information only includes family details and excludes names, except for the name the baby was given at birth. In Ontario, if both the birth mother and adoptee are deceased, the identifying information is not obtainable by anyone. Such a law is outdated and needs to be changed to allow for descendants to access the records.

Basic details like ages of the birth parents and socio-economic status are included, and sometimes relationship details and reasons for the adoption are provided. When it came to the description of the birth mother, the birth year matched my grandmother’s birth year and mentions foster care which was completely plausible to me. I re-read the non-identifying information several times and, if I had any shred of doubt that I could be wrong about the whole thing, it was erased when I read one detail. It stated that the birth mother’s father wanted her to bring her baby home to him so he could raise her but that the birth mother didn’t like the idea and that he had housekeepers care for his children. This was true of my grandmother’s family; my great-grandfather paid housekeepers to clean his house and care for his kids, and some of those housekeepers were abusive to the kids which he was unaware of for a long time. This, and a couple of very small details had me 100% certain this was my grandmother’s baby, and this was my grandmother’s story.

Back to my remaining questions. Who was the birth father? The information about the birth father was minimal; it said he was twenty-three when the baby was born, so he was an adult and fathered a child with a child. This was unexpected and quite upsetting, and I wish I could say this was the most upsetting part of my grandmother’s history.

Did my great-grandfather become enraged at this adult man for coercing his daughter? I doubt that very much. I zeroed in on a detail and learned a substantial amount of information about the shame culture of the 1930s ‘40s, ‘50s, and onward. I don’t think my great-grandfather was angry at the adult man that fathered a child with his daughter because girls were blamed for everything; it was always the fault of the female for getting pregnant because obviously it doesn’t take two to make a baby, right?

In the next installment, the shame culture of maternity homes and the maternity home that shaped my grandmother for the rest of her life.

The inspiration for telling this story came from listening to every episode of author Dani Shapiro’s podcast Family Secrets. It’s the most riveting collection of stories from people who either kept the secrets or were on the receiving end of a family secret, several of which were like mine. You can find Family Secrets anywhere you listen to podcasts.