Last year, my brother Galen wanted some help in finding his birth father so he asked me to submit a DNA sample to Ancestry for analysis. He had already done one and wanted a way to eliminate some of the many, many, matches he had been given. It took me way too long to get my DNA kit sent in & processed but eventually, we had a list of common matches and uncommon matches. It was, and still is, a very long list (we're talking 400+ pages, each with more than forty entries) but narrowing it down by eliminating our shared matches helped immensely.
I don't know if you have ever done research on your family tree but it can get really confusing, really fast and that's when you have solid information to work back from. When you're trying to build a tree without knowing anything about anyone who is in the tree, you're essentially building a puzzle while blindfolded...Luckily, Galen had two matches fairly close to him that weren't shared by me so that's where I started.
Galen had reviewed some the matches he had been given and had reached out to a few of the closest connections but was still having trouble figuring how to put all the information together and how to use it to find his dad. Ancestry's relationship predictor has a habit of calling everyone cousins, even though the degrees of separation could constitute an aunt/uncle relationship; they offer charts with varying degrees of separations to help explain the distance and show possible common ancestors, which helps when you have literally nothing to go one. I started with the two closest connections; a father and a son whom Ancestry predicted to be 2nd & 3rd cousins to Galen. I copied down the tree they belonged to then I checked to see if these two connections shared any other connections with Galen. They did.
That was it. My curiosity was piqued. I dove in head first & wholeheartedly. This was a mystery I was going to solve.
I grabbed a notebook and again started copying down trees, tracing them back until I could find a common ancestor, every common ancestor adding strength to the connection. I wanted to 'practice' my new-found tree building skills some more so I went back to our shared matches and started building a tree of shared matches, gaining confidence in my investigative skills along the way. I contacted a few matches, shared our story and asked questions; I copied down more trees, traced back more shared matches, found more common ancestors, contacted more people; I had my mom submit a DNA test and added all three of our profiles to another DNA analysis site called GEDmatch.com.
Turns out, Galen's father wasn't the only mystery I was going to solve.
My mom, our mom, is also adopted.
Born in 1949, she doesn't have any of the information about her parents that Galen had about her. Her adoption wasn't done through an agency; it was more of a black market baby-buying kind of deal. A nurse at the hospital where my mom was born knew my adopted grandparents, knew they wanted to have a family but couldn't have their our children and she knew my mother was going to be put up for adoption so she tipped my grandparents off to my mom. They hired a lawyer, drew up adoption papers and walked out with my mom. My mom has never requested her original, pre-adoption, birth certificate so her parentage has remained a total mystery.
Until this hunt began...
One thing about DNA: it might be confusing and difficult to understand but IT DOES NOT LIE. If you share DNA with someone, guess what, you are related. So now with shared matches for all three of us & our varying degrees of connection to them, we had a pretty clear picture of who was who, how we were related and a list of 'suspects'. Excluding our connections to each other, the closest connection for each of us, was a cousin; three in total. As it turns out, each cousin belong to a different side of the family: one on each side of my mom's family and one on my brother's father's side. And that father/son connection of Galen's? We determined the father is his great uncle and the son would be his 2nd cousin, which was a prediction Ancestry did give as a possible relationship. I talked with cousins on both of my mom's sides and eventually found my mom's uncle on her mother's side; I exchanged numerous emails, confirmed secret pregnancies and adoptions, revealed the existence of unknown children & siblings and got two more DNA samples submitted (results are still pending!)
Confident I was now on target, I searched and scoured for every bit & scrap of information I could find on the man I believed was Galen's father and took it to him. I told him I wasn't positive but I had a few leads for him if he wanted to pursue them: three names, children of the man I thought could be his father, and a place of death for him, in Texas. He Googled the names & city and found an address that had two of the names plus three more and a couple Facebook profiles so he took a chance and sent out a message with his phone number. There hadn't been any activity on the profile in a while so he wasn't sure he would hear back. When my phone rang later that same day and his number popped up, I answered right away.
"We found him."
He'd gotten a call back, just hours later, from his father's ex wife. She had met his father in Vegas, they'd been together 10 years, married for one, had two kids together. His father had also had another child with a third woman, gotten custody of the girl then taken ill and passed in 2011. The kids are now 23, 21, and 16 years old. The youngest two are daughters, living in Texas; the oldest, a son, is living in Missouri, I think. The youngest daughter was adopted by a family who attends the same church as the half sister & her mother so they are all pretty close, it seems. They were very excited to hear from him and are looking forward to building relationships.
I couldn't believe it. I cried of course. I hadn't realized during this process how much of myself I had put into it but I really put my entire heart and being into this project. I had neglected housework and spent literally days at a time on Ancestry, searching through documents, pouring over trees, filled all the blank pages of two different tablets with family trees and connection charts and started filling in pages of a third. It had become a bit of an obsession and while I knew the whole goal was to find the answer, I was still stunned that we actually had it.
I am sure enough to write this post that I have indeed found my mother's birth parents and my brother's father but I am still waiting on the DNA results from what would be one of my mom's half brother and the uncle on her mother's side, both of which will be definitive and leave absolutely no room for doubt. After completing this adventure, I would highly encourage anyone who is adopted and wanting to find birth families to submit a DNA kit to Ancestry for analysis. It could very well change your life.
A lesson for all of us here is this: talk to your family. Share stories and histories with each other; grandparent to grandchild, parent to child, with your nieces and nephews; get to know one another. Time is a very precious commodity and once the source of vital information, oral histories, is gone, all the information is lost. Both of my grandparents have already passed, as has my brother's father. My mother's uncle, her only remaining connection to her mother, is going to be 82 in March.
We need these wells of knowledge, these depositories of memories long forgotten, to connect us to the past we share so we don't unknowingly repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.
-- If you or someone you know would like help or information about using Ancestry DNA, finding your family or creating a family tree, please contact me --
Showing posts with label good news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good news. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Good-bye to another year...of school!
As I begin this post, I realize how many others I have started and never finished in the last few months.
This one will be different...
I really can't believe it's already here. Summer Vacation.
School is out, again, for another summer break. Another grade is completed and this time, it was a year full of good things. Both the boys had amazing years, made friends and met goals. I was thoroughly impressed with progress reports and IEP meetings but never found the time to shout from the hilltops, like I would have not-so-long ago.
I'll start with Phoenix.
At the beginning of the year, we were still about a year behind in some areas, with many of our goals from the previous year still "In Progress". When I met with his teacher for his IEP meeting, a wave of change had rolled through.
We had met goals and were making new ones.
Speech had improved, greatly.
Concepts were sinking in and being understood.
He was finding traction and gaining speed.
It felt good to hear that after such a long struggle, we were finally in a good place. We were finally getting him to where he needs to be for his age. Last week when I got his final progress report, I cried.
Goal after goal read "Met Standards" and while we may still be a year behind in a few places, quite a few of the standards met this year were second grade standards. SECOND GRADE STANDARDS.
It blows my mind how unphased he is, how persistent and determined he is. He gets discouraged, yes. His confidence is still less than I would like. He still struggles a lot in everyday life but we are getting somewhere. For that, I am beyond thankful & grateful.
I am in awe of this little being I have helped to create and mold. He has had so many challenges; even though they seem small, they have had a big impact on him and they still would be if nothing had been done to help him find his way. Karate has helped him blossom more and come out of his shell, almost as if he's becoming more comfortable in his own skin; almost as if he's beginning to learn to love himself.
It's incredible and wonderful and awesome.
Paxton, on the other hand, has never stopped blowing my mind.
I was so worried about him, convinced he was going to have the same problems Phoenix did. I got him evaluated and did speech therapy at Sac State for a semester, went to the school district and got him an IEP, got him into preschool with his IEP. He had pull-out speech services on campus twice a week and I thought about another semester at Sac State, then the baby cried and I was thrusted back to reality with the conclusion that maybe I wasn't capable of doing another semester at Sac State.
At this point, he's already doing better than Phoenix was at the same age and is flying through things that tripped Phoenix up like basic concepts, letter recognition and sounds, so I really don't feel all that guilty. Paxton also doesn't have the inner ear problem Phoenix does, so that has to help too (with my Mom-guilt and his progress in speech).
In just this first year of preschool he's made phenomenal progress and when I say my mind is blown, I'm not exaggerating. At the beginning of this year, he knew a few letters; like the letters to his name. When I went to his parent/teacher meeting in May, his teacher confided that he can identify all 26 letters, upper and lower case, and the sounds they make, that he can spell and, this blew her mind too, that he can read.
Oh yes. He can read.
He still has speech issues, to be clear. He jumbles words together when he's trying to speak in sentences (cluster reduction) or leaves the last sound of words off (final consonant deletion) but these are normal, common processing errors for kids learning to speak and he's not that far behind. Most speech processing errors correct themselves by age 4 and Paxton's fifth birthday is just a few months away so I'm fairly confident these processes will resolve themselves if we just keep doing speech therapy at school and working on speech at home.
It gives me hope that Korben might, possibly, not have any speech issues at all but that's a bridge I'll cross when I come to it. For now, I'm going to take the progress that's been made, the goals that have been met, the leaps and bounds that have been taken and enjoy them for what the are: signs that Jay & I are doing what we need to do for our boys, signs that our boys are healthy and happy and learning and growing and thriving. I'm going to sit back and look at my boys and be proud. Of them, for getting to where they are, and of myself, for helping to get them there.
Seeing them succeed is the greatest proof that I am not a complete and utter failure and that's something I'm clinging to desperately right now.
This one will be different...
I really can't believe it's already here. Summer Vacation.
School is out, again, for another summer break. Another grade is completed and this time, it was a year full of good things. Both the boys had amazing years, made friends and met goals. I was thoroughly impressed with progress reports and IEP meetings but never found the time to shout from the hilltops, like I would have not-so-long ago.
I'll start with Phoenix.
At the beginning of the year, we were still about a year behind in some areas, with many of our goals from the previous year still "In Progress". When I met with his teacher for his IEP meeting, a wave of change had rolled through.
We had met goals and were making new ones.
Speech had improved, greatly.
Concepts were sinking in and being understood.
He was finding traction and gaining speed.
It felt good to hear that after such a long struggle, we were finally in a good place. We were finally getting him to where he needs to be for his age. Last week when I got his final progress report, I cried.
Goal after goal read "Met Standards" and while we may still be a year behind in a few places, quite a few of the standards met this year were second grade standards. SECOND GRADE STANDARDS.
It blows my mind how unphased he is, how persistent and determined he is. He gets discouraged, yes. His confidence is still less than I would like. He still struggles a lot in everyday life but we are getting somewhere. For that, I am beyond thankful & grateful.
I am in awe of this little being I have helped to create and mold. He has had so many challenges; even though they seem small, they have had a big impact on him and they still would be if nothing had been done to help him find his way. Karate has helped him blossom more and come out of his shell, almost as if he's becoming more comfortable in his own skin; almost as if he's beginning to learn to love himself.
It's incredible and wonderful and awesome.
Paxton, on the other hand, has never stopped blowing my mind.
I was so worried about him, convinced he was going to have the same problems Phoenix did. I got him evaluated and did speech therapy at Sac State for a semester, went to the school district and got him an IEP, got him into preschool with his IEP. He had pull-out speech services on campus twice a week and I thought about another semester at Sac State, then the baby cried and I was thrusted back to reality with the conclusion that maybe I wasn't capable of doing another semester at Sac State.
At this point, he's already doing better than Phoenix was at the same age and is flying through things that tripped Phoenix up like basic concepts, letter recognition and sounds, so I really don't feel all that guilty. Paxton also doesn't have the inner ear problem Phoenix does, so that has to help too (with my Mom-guilt and his progress in speech).
In just this first year of preschool he's made phenomenal progress and when I say my mind is blown, I'm not exaggerating. At the beginning of this year, he knew a few letters; like the letters to his name. When I went to his parent/teacher meeting in May, his teacher confided that he can identify all 26 letters, upper and lower case, and the sounds they make, that he can spell and, this blew her mind too, that he can read.
Oh yes. He can read.
He still has speech issues, to be clear. He jumbles words together when he's trying to speak in sentences (cluster reduction) or leaves the last sound of words off (final consonant deletion) but these are normal, common processing errors for kids learning to speak and he's not that far behind. Most speech processing errors correct themselves by age 4 and Paxton's fifth birthday is just a few months away so I'm fairly confident these processes will resolve themselves if we just keep doing speech therapy at school and working on speech at home.
It gives me hope that Korben might, possibly, not have any speech issues at all but that's a bridge I'll cross when I come to it. For now, I'm going to take the progress that's been made, the goals that have been met, the leaps and bounds that have been taken and enjoy them for what the are: signs that Jay & I are doing what we need to do for our boys, signs that our boys are healthy and happy and learning and growing and thriving. I'm going to sit back and look at my boys and be proud. Of them, for getting to where they are, and of myself, for helping to get them there.
Seeing them succeed is the greatest proof that I am not a complete and utter failure and that's something I'm clinging to desperately right now.
Friday, July 27, 2012
All clear
Today, this very afternoon, we found out from the hearing specialist that Phoenix's hearing is NORMAL.
No fluid.
No conductive hearing loss.
PERFECT readings in both ears.
Check that off the list and now, all we have to do now is play 'catch-up' with his speech. Even with falling to the bottom of his Kindergarten class, he's come so far this last year.
So, so far.
He talks in complete sentences & you can understand most of what he says.
He starts conversations & volunteers answers.
He's got the craziest imagination (are those things hereditary??) and he tells some insane stories.
He still has some struggles to overcome; "Jay" sounds like "Shay" & 'bread' comes out as 'bled'; sometimes sentences grow extra words that don't belong; he still needs a lot of prompting & reminding to complete tasks but I have hope we can get through this part of the process much faster now that we know, beyond a doubt, that he is hearing what we say accurately.
We go back to Sac State for another semester this Fall and a CAPD evaluation was part of the game plan when we had our wrap-up session before summer break. He just finished his extended year program for speech with the school district and he's set to start first grade on August 16.
Holy moly, this has been a long, strange, horrifying trip but I think I'm better for it.
There's still so much more to come before we're done & the whole process now has to be repeated with Paxton. He's eligible for clinics at Sac State as soon as he turns three and I think that might be our starting point for him. His delay isn't as bad as Phoenix's and may be more of a learned behavior than an actual impairment but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Right now, I'm just doing a happy dance.
No fluid.
No conductive hearing loss.
PERFECT readings in both ears.
Check that off the list and now, all we have to do now is play 'catch-up' with his speech. Even with falling to the bottom of his Kindergarten class, he's come so far this last year.
So, so far.
He talks in complete sentences & you can understand most of what he says.
He starts conversations & volunteers answers.
He's got the craziest imagination (are those things hereditary??) and he tells some insane stories.
He still has some struggles to overcome; "Jay" sounds like "Shay" & 'bread' comes out as 'bled'; sometimes sentences grow extra words that don't belong; he still needs a lot of prompting & reminding to complete tasks but I have hope we can get through this part of the process much faster now that we know, beyond a doubt, that he is hearing what we say accurately.
We go back to Sac State for another semester this Fall and a CAPD evaluation was part of the game plan when we had our wrap-up session before summer break. He just finished his extended year program for speech with the school district and he's set to start first grade on August 16.
Holy moly, this has been a long, strange, horrifying trip but I think I'm better for it.
There's still so much more to come before we're done & the whole process now has to be repeated with Paxton. He's eligible for clinics at Sac State as soon as he turns three and I think that might be our starting point for him. His delay isn't as bad as Phoenix's and may be more of a learned behavior than an actual impairment but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Right now, I'm just doing a happy dance.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
LinkWithin
