The Beginning

In my (Steve’s) first post I summed up 56 years of experience in four paragraphs.  In this post the story speeds up and summarizes a couple of months’ experience.  I previously shared that my wife (Patty) has always been worried about not knowing my family health history.  She’d asked me often to take one of the DNA tests on the market.  Last August I acquiesced and sent in the test package.  That evening I offhandedly mentioned to my sons that the results might reveal a family member out there in the world.  But I did not take it that seriously at the time.

At noon on September 20th I received the email from the DNA test site saying my results were ready online.  In first scanning the results I was happy that finally I could answer my boys’ assertions that I’m eastern European.  (I’m not.  I’m 70% British/Irish and 30% French/German, and 1% other).  That was cool.  Then I clicked on the DNA relatives tab on the web page.  Clicking the button on a mouse is such an innocuous action but this click practically stopped my heart.

I was not prepared for the impact of the image shown here.  I sat for 30 minutes and just stared.  Thank God that Wallace registered on the test site using his full name.  If not then this is likely where the story would have ended.  Thank God also that he has such a distinctive name as looking for a “John Miller” may have been like looking for a needle in a haystack.   If seeing the DNA Connections screen here was exciting then what I found on Facebook next totally blew me away.  There are only two Wallace Woodmans on Facebook.  One who’s too old and lives on the east coast.  And, the second (our Wallace) who lived about 6 miles from where I grew up and who’s photo looks amazingly similar to to me (about 8 years ago).

For the next month I wrestled over what to do about this new information.  I had never known anything more than what the two pieces of paper about me described.  Now for the first time I was looking at someone that looked a lot like me.  I was looking at the Facebook photo of Cathie and all the aunts and uncles .  (Note: that at this point I felt that Terry was most likely my birth mother because of the half-brother connection.)  Additionally, I was able to search in Ancestory.com and found photos of a great uncle that could be my older son’s double in 50 years.  If I did my Ancestry.com family line correctly there was a possibility that I could trace my (our) origins back to 1640 with a great-grandfather landing in Boston Harbor.  (That’s only 20 years after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth Harbor on the Mayflower.  Not bad for a guy who just weeks earlier didn’t even know his own name.)  But, I still didn’t know what I was going to do about this information.  How do you reach out to some unsuspecting family and say “Hi, my name is Steve and I think you’re my half brother.”?  How will they take it?  Will my overture be welcomed? Will I stir up hurt?  Will I regret opening myself up to the unknown.  “Will this” and “will that” came up over and over in my imagination.  Finally, on October 17th, after about a month of investigating, learning and struggling with “what ifs” I wrote a message to Wallace using the 23andMe website where our DNA results had been matched up.  Here’s the text of what I wrote ….

“Hi Wallace,  Its been a couple of weeks since I first saw our ‘half brother’ relationship here. It was a shock and a surprise that I should have been prepared for. I was given up for adoption at birth and until now I’ve been unaware of any details related to my birth family. It shouldn’t have surprised me that I might learn of a half-sibling here. 🙂 I’ve always known of my adoption and have always wondered about where I came from. Reaching out like this is very scary. I’ve been very fortunate and have had a very good life and a great family. I think its that experience with my family that encourages me to ask you whether there’s any chance that we might meet? I know nothing of the circumstances of my birth and I’m deeply concerned that my contact with you not be the cause for pain for you or your family. If it is I will understand and will cease contact. If you are interested in any further contact I can be reached at the email below.  Sincerely, Steven”

Once I hit send I determined that I’d give Wallace a month to respond since that’s how long it took me to get up the nerve to do something myself.  So, the clock started ticking.  I’ll tell you what happened after that in my next post.

(postscript:  It’s really neat now to realize that my second line of contact after Wallace on the 23andMe DNA relatives list was Scott Simpson and to know how close he is with Cathie and how excited he’s been about this reunion experience.  I know that Cathie and me finding each other was meant to happen.)