First Contact
At the age of 67, I figured there were several things I would likely get at least one more time—things like a new couch, a new car (I want another Subaru, a red one), a colonoscopy, a new passport, a chance to use a new passport, a toothache, another hay delivery, a speeding ticket….
And there are things I figured I would never get—another full-time teaching job, a full-time job of any sort, another Martin guitar, another VCR, tickets for a rock concert, an STD, dentures, another tractor, a toupee’, another motorcycle, a new brother or sister….
Then late last October, I got an email from someone named Ruth Ann. She lives in a small town in southern Illinois, and she had gotten my name and contact information from Jim K-, a first-cousin on my father’s side of the family. Ruth Ann wrote that she’d had her DNA tested by both Ancestry.com and 23andMe, and that the results showed she, too, was a first-cousin of Jim. She explained further that the tests indicated she was related to other cousins and second cousins of mine, all on my dad’s side, and she thought we might be related, but since neither I nor any of my siblings had done a DNA test, she couldn’t be sure.
In order for this to make sense, I have to explain my father’s side of the family. My paternal grandparents were born in the 1880s, got married in the early 1900s and had four daughters between 1906 and 1912. Memories of those four aunts (Noma, Mabel, Frankie, and Jessie) are burned into my brain. They were like Greek goddesses, and someday I want to write about them. My father came along in 1926, when Noma, the oldest, was 20, and Jessie, the youngest, was 15. So, growing up, my father basically had five mothers, which explains a lot about my father.
But back to Ruth Ann’s email. If she was a first cousin to Jim and other of my cousins on my dad’s side, there are only so many ways that could have happened. The word “dalliance” comes to mind. Since my four aunts (Noma, Mabel, Frankie, and Jessie) lived within 10 miles of each other and my grandparents for practically their entire lives, and since Ruth Ann was born in 1955, when Aunt Jessie would have been in her early 40s and Aunt Noma was approaching 50, it’s highly unlikely that any of them would have had a baby on the sly. The simple process of elimination, therefore, leaves my dad.
I read carefully through Ruth Ann’s email as well as a Facebook message she’d sent a few days before, but which I had not seen, looking for signs that she was crazy. After all, it was 2020, and we’d all been through months of craziness, but there were no signs that she was looney. I looked for signs of being scammed—a mention of treasures awaiting in some foreign bank account if only I would send my login and password—but I found no red flags there either. In fact, Ruth Ann’s email and her earlier Facebook message were polite, considerate, to-the-point, grammatically correct, and punctuated well within acceptable parameters for email. She even offered to pay for the DNA test.
If she’s looking for money, I thought, she sure picked the wrong family.
Still, I didn’t respond on that day. It was Halloween.
Initial Follow Up
I wrote back the next day. In my response, I gave Ruth Ann a thumbnail sketch of our family—how my parents got married in 1950, had six children between 1951 and 1964 (seven really, but one, Mary Louise, died in infancy in December, 1954, when I was eleven months old), moved from southern Illinois to Rolla, Missouri, in the winter of 1962, and lived in the same house from 1962 until Dad died in August, 2007. I explained that my Mom had passed away last January. (Coincidently, Mom died on Wednesday, January 22, the day the first case of COVID 19 was reported in the U.S. I remember that I had the first meeting of my Introduction to Film class that night. We met as scheduled. It was that kind of year.)
Ruth Ann and I started emailing back and forth. She told me about her life in rural southern Illinois, about going to cosmetology school and getting her license but never practicing because she was too shy. “I think I have since changed,” she wrote. She worked as a pharmacy tech in the 1980s, and when the pharmacy closed, she got a job in a factory. “I never thought I could do the factory thing, but I loved it and the people were so nice, just like family.”
She described her family. She had been married 35 years when her husband died from complications related to a stroke a few years ago. She has three children and three grandchildren. She told me about her parents and her sister, about growing up in a small town in southern Illinois close to where our family is from, and where much of our extended family still live. Her dad, she said, was a quiet man. He didn’t talk much, but was a great father. She wrote that she never met anyone from his side of the family until 2003, when he was dying of cancer.
I found that detail interesting, partly because when we lived near family it seemed that everyone was in everyone else’s business all the time, to the point of eaves-dropping on telephone calls on party lines. I have sometimes wondered if that’s one of the reasons my parents moved to Missouri. On the other hand, Ruth Ann described her mother’s family as being much more like what I had known: big and busy, lots of aunts and uncles, piles of cousins, everyone close, constant action and interaction, some a little wild, not being afraid of much.
Somewhere in there, I told her I would get a DNA test. I signed up for Ancentry.com, spit into a tube, and sent it off.
Digging into the Past
Ruth Ann started this journey several years ago, when she and her husband took a DNA test. The test results showed she matched with an aunt and uncle on her mother’s side of the family, but no-one on her father’s side. At the time she was mostly interested in her ethnicity, she wrote, not in family relations, so even though the report listed names she had never heard of, she wasn’t too concerned about it. Then a couple of years ago, she started digging deeper into genealogy and DNA testing (and by this time, I’m sure the databases were much larger and more complete). That’s when she discovered she was related to my cousin, Jim. She originally thought Jim was just someone from her father’s side of the family whom she had never met. She was correct about that, but not in the way she thought.
She asked her sister to take a DNA test, and when the results came back, they showed that her sister was really her half-sister. Ruth Ann wrote that the news, “Broke my heart in pieces. Even though we are nothing alike it still shook me up. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, as I had to get it right in my head before I could explain it all to her.” It was not until she told her sister that Ruth Ann felt comfortable reaching out to me and my siblings.
“I… always felt something was off as a young girl and I always tried to figure out why I had brown eyes and dark hair. Dad had dark hair but… hazel eyes. Mom had green eyes and my sister had blue.” When she met Jim, she realized why she didn’t resemble anyone in the family she had grown up with. “I cried for days and I looked on the internet…, scoured Facebook and came across Donna M- [another cousin of mine and Jim’s] and sat there in shock. I looked like her. I finally fit in.”
At some point during these email exchanges, my DNA test results came back, confirming what I already knew to be true.
Further Back into the Past
The DNA evidence as well as pictures showing a family resemblance point to the conclusion that my father and Ruth Ann’s mother spent some time together in January, 1955. Ruth Ann was born that October. The question is, how did they get together?
I remember my mom saying once that we had lived in a small town near where Ruth Ann is from for a short time when I was very young. I never thought much about it; we moved quite a bit back then. Dad worked in the oil fields, and Mom generally worked as a waitress. They were young—in their twenties—and trying to get established in their own lives, which really didn’t happen until much later, in 1962 when we moved to Missouri. My older brother, who would have been three at the time, seems to remember a period when mom and dad separated. That’s possible as well.
Dad was a part-time musician playing country dances at places like the V.F.W. and Moose Lodge for much of his life. He had a golden baritone voice and an innate sense of music. He could sing lead or harmony, and he could play various instruments from guitar to bass to piano to (years ago) trumpet. And he did so without being able read a single musical note; it was all in his bones. He could have very well been playing in a band back in the early fifties. So, it’s not an unreasonable guess for him to have met Ruth Ann’s mother at a place like the V.F.W.
The best Ruth Ann can piece the story together is that her mother had gotten married in spring of 1953 and moved to Virginia with her new husband, but “something happened” and her mother moved back to Illinois, alone, a few months later. Ruth Ann never got the full story about what happened, but clearly that marriage was over. Back then, of course, it took a while to get a divorce finalized, and during the waiting period her mother started seeing her dad. Her mother and father got married the day her mother’s divorce was final, and Ruth Ann’s mother always insisted that the man who raised her, the man Ruth Ann called a “great dad,” was her biological father. Ruth Ann wrote, “Anytime…I asked [mom] how long they had been married she always said ‘how old are you?’ and would always add a year….” After the DNA test showed that the quiet man, the great dad, who raised her was not her biological father, Ruth Ann set out to find her biological family, which led her to my cousin, Jim, and eventually to me and my siblings.
Ruth Ann’s mother is no longer living, so she asked an aunt about the events that took place back in the winter of 1955. At first, her aunt insisted, “Your dad is your dad.” Her aunt confirmed that by the time Ruth Ann was conceived, her mom’s first husband (the one from Virginia) was out of the picture completely. Ruth Ann wrote that she “kept pumping her [aunt] and she never changed her answer. Even after mentioning Eddie H-’s [my father’s] name, she never changed until I mentioned that he played in a band. Her face changed completely. She said, ‘I remember’.”
This is all speculation, of course. All the principal actors are beyond asking.
Back to the Future
Ruth Ann has spent a lot of time—countless hours, over months and, now, years—piecing all this together. (I have only relayed the broad outlines in this post.) From her perspective, I imagine that it must be like taking the deck of cards your life was dealt from and tossing it into the air. She has been generous, though, never blaming or judging her mother. “I couldn’t be upset, or I wouldn’t be able to get through this,” she wrote.
She’s also been generous in giving me and my siblings time to process all the information. It’s a big deal for us to find out at this point in life that we have a half-sister we never knew about, and we are each dealing with it in our own way. My youngest sister, Betty, has apparently struck up quite a relationship with Ruth Ann, and they call or text each other practically every day. But then, Betty’s young, only in her fifties, and still agile. My preference is to go a bit slower—an email every week or two—I don’t particularly like talking on the phone. Our other siblings are processing these events as they will. Ruth Ann wrote that she has known about us for over a year and a half, and I do appreciate that she waited until after Mom died to contact us. Regardless of whether mom knew about this or not, and I prefer to think she didn’t, there was no reason to clutter up the end of her life with it.
When I first got the information, my initial response was a little snarky (imagine that): “Well,” I said to Vanessa. “It doesn’t seem out of character. My dad had a lot of good qualities, but fidelity was not among them.” However, as I have thought about it for a couple of months, now, I’ve come to some different conclusions. In January, 1955, my parents had just lost an infant child, Mary Louise. I can’t imagine the pain that causes—the initial searing pain or all the quivers that come later. There weren’t any grief counsellors or self-help groups in rural southern Illinois at the time; people were largely left to work out their feelings on their own. American literature is strewn with characters in such situations. Read practically anything by Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner, pick a play by Tennessee Williams, any play. It’s possible that my parents were separated when this happened, which does make me wonder what my mother was going through at that point. It’s also possible they were living together, but separated by a grief that neither could come to grips with. They were young. They were struggling. They were in pain. It was January, for god’s sake.
Whatever happened in the past, however, is in the past, beyond recovery. We’ll never know the specific circumstances that lead to a relationship between my father and Ruth Ann’s mother, the nature of that relationship, or what it meant for either of them in the long term. About those things, we can only speculate. What’s before us now is the present and the future. We have a new sister, one who has a whole life ready to share, and one who doesn’t seem to want anything other than to share it in whatever way seems to work. Ruth Ann hasn’t asked for any money, at least not yet, and I don’t think she will, which is good because I’m saving for a new Subaru, a red one. Ruby red.
