Searching and finding

After sharpening the skills I acquired as a journalist, and with tons of help and support from new cousins, former colleagues and good friends, I have found part of my family.

For someone who has spent most of her life feeling alone, out-of-place and orphaned, this is a weird and wonderful sensation. I have family — living and dead. I know the names of people who biologically belong to me and my daughter.

We have a heritage.

With 99.9999 percent certainty I know who one set of my grandparents are. Through DNA I am unquestionably linked to both of them. And they happened to be a couple, with offspring of prime childbearing age, who happened to be living in the city where I was born when I came into this world.

Here’s what I know so far:

Born into a large and prominent West Virginia family, as a young man my grandfather literally ran away with the circus. He retired from Ringling Brothers after 40 years in 1963 — the year I was born.

I am waiting for information the Ringling Brothers archives as to what exactly he did for them. After checking out two books about the circus from my local library, I have no evidence that he was part of a sideshow act and I know he wasn’t important enough to be an associate of John Ringling.

I take comfort in both of those facts because exploitation sucks.

Finding out that one of my great-grandfathers was a war hero who was buried in France in 1918 made my eyes swell with tears of pride and sorrow. I learned that he was killed in the line of duty while his wife back home in Wisconsin was pregnant. He never got to meet my grandmother.

My grandmother missed out on knowing her father. Just like me — through adoption I did have a dad, but never knew my father. Just like my daughter — abandoned by her father but who has a dad in Phil.

I really hope that my grandmother’s stepfather was a good dad to her, like Phil is to Laura, like Dave Coggins was to me.

Here’s her photo at around age 16 or 17, collaged with a photo of my daughter and me at roughly the same ages.

She looks like me. She looks like my daughter. The connection I feel to this photo from her high school yearbook is intense. Finding it forced the air from lungs.

After locating these two people, there is now a fresh load of unanswered questions. I thought the search would get easier as the generations are younger, fresher, and still possibly of this earth. Now I know I was sorely mistaken.

Apparently no one one worries about the privacy rights of ghosts.

From the union of my grandparents came two or three potential parents. The number of children the two of them had together is unclear because there was possibly a first wife before my grandmother.

He was in show business, after all. To quote Steve Perry of Journey, they say the road ain’t no place to start a family.

One of the potential parents passed away in 2014. From what I learned in the obituary, this person was a self-taught chef with a passion for cooking and grilling. Having something in common with a close relative would have been very cool.

I have a solid lead on the second potential parent but I had to reach out to that person via snail mail. The letter I wrote should have arrived in the mailbox late last week. As of today, there is no reply.

To quote Tom Petty, the waiting is the hardest part.

Last Thursday I found a possible lead on the third candidate. I have left a couple of voicemails that have not been returned. Perhaps this person hates voicemail as much as I do? That’s an inconvenient trait to have in common.

I know at least two of my grandparents’ children had children of their own, besides me of course, so hope continues that I will be able to connect with a few close relatives.

At the moment, however, attempts to “friend” my closest relatives on Facebook have been unsuccessful because apparently none of them are frequent Facebook users and, even if they were, who is this crazy woman from Ohio?

I know I hit the decline option and mumble “stranger danger” when I get requests from unknown weirdos so I assume that my attempts at online friendship are probably in their cyber trash bins at this point.

For now, however, two of my third cousins have become my great friends. They have been invaluable helping me sort out the details on this discovery mission. We spent a weekend together plotting the family tree and getting to know each other. Since then we text almost daily and are we are thinking about taking a girls trip this year.

Who needs siblings or first cousins when I have this crew? We may have only a handful of DNA centimorgans and strings in common, but we have forged a strong bond.

I would very much like to connect with more members of my found family, but I have to play the long game. It’s taken me years to work up the nerve to even look and then it took me months of searching to be sure I had found the right people.

It’s OK if it takes a minute for these folks to acclimate to the idea of a new branch on the family tree.

But damn, this waiting is tough.