Shortly before Christmas, I traveled back home to visit with my parents and family for a week and a half in Philadelphia.

At the time, the news was still pretty fresh, with minimal opportunities to process.  Starting a new job had been VERY busy, especially since it began mid-school-year (the person who previously held the position left fairly suddenly mid-year, so I had a lot to catch up on in short order).  That left very little time for thinking about myself or my identity.

My brother, James, was staying at my parents’ house while I was there, so we got to do a good bit of catching up.  Naturally, figuring out our “womb-story” became a hot topic of discussion.

James mentioned that he was interested in getting tested, too.  After all, two sets of tested genes are better than one!  After doing a bit of homework on the topic, we decided that it would make the most sense to order a Y-DNA test, since it seemed that this would yield the best chance of narrowing down our paternal line.  It turns out that, of the “Big Three” genetic testing companies (AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe), only FamilyTreeDNA currently offers a Y-DNA test.  And it ain’t cheap.  The least expensive version, the “37-marker” test, is $169, the next level up (67-markers) is $268, and the 111-marker test is $359.

We ultimately opted for the 67-marker test, which is heralded as the lowest level test to accurately yield surname paternity clues.  The order was placed on New Years Eve, 2015.  It arrived at our parents’ house shortly thereafter (and they were none too pleased to learn of the additional test this way).  After following the simple directions and shipping back, FamilyTreeDNA received my brother’s sample in their lab on February 7th, 2016.

By this point in time, with two DNA tests under my belt, I was keenly aware that a sizable waiting game had just begun.  Soon, I would be able to largely toss the test to the back of my mind as I waited, filling my thoughts with other aspects of my life–mostly work, making time for friends (if I was lucky), going on a date or two, and my penchant for absorbing copious amounts of online television.

Before getting to this stage, while it was fresh on our minds and we were both still home for the holidays, my brother and I traded wild ideas on our how our biological paternity came to be.

Part of me still couldn’t fully accept that my Dad was not my biological father, and entertained the idea that, perhaps, he was adopted.  To this day, it is still a (slight) possibility, given that he has not yet been tested.  After all, even if my parents DID use a donor, given that my parents were still being intimate, there WAS still a possibility–however small.

One night, in the kitchen, I shared this thought with my brother. His eyes lit up, and he told me he had something to show me.  He ran upstairs to retrieve something, then came back down bearing an old photo album.  It was my paternal Grandmother’s.  After flipping through the pages, he landed on a picture of a man I’d never seen before–but it felt like I had.  James asked “who does that look like?”

I swear to God, the man looked just like my Father.

We both marveled for a minute, then continued to fervidly discuss.  He then flipped to another set of pages, showing me a particular set of pictures featuring my Father with his two brothers as young men (at one of their weddings).  I was immediately struck by how similar my uncles looked to one another, yet how different my father looked from them.  As a reminder, my Dad’s side of the family is Jewish.  In these pictures, the traditional Jewish features (almost middle eastern, even) appeared to be quite pronounced in his brothers, but remarkably muted in my Father.  His complexion was significantly lighter, and, despite his dark hair and eyes, he had a much more “European aristocrat” look to him.  His nose, while admittedly on the longer side, was perfectly straight, and the remainder of his features soft.  Notably, he looked eerily similar to the photo of the man my brother had shown me just minutes before.

We continued to flip through the photo album, searching for a clue as to who this man may have been, and for other clues.  We didn’t find anything else about the man, but I did notice something else interesting–while there had been photos of my Grandmother while she was pregnant with her first two sons, there was not a single photo of her pregnant with my Father.  I asked my brother, who over time had essentially become our family’s master “keeper of photos” (and had painstakingly been digitizing them over the years), whether or not he had come across any photos of my Grandmother pregnant with our Father.  Given his incredible long-term memory for details–sometimes encyclopedic in nature–I trusted that he would remember if so.  He hadn’t.

Could it be possible?  I already knew that my Grandmother was a remarkable woman, born far ahead of her time, and with the largest, fullest heart I had ever encountered.  4/7 of her grandchildren are not biologically related to her, and yet she NEVER for a second treated any of us any differently–I even distinctly remember her telling each one of us (unbeknownst to the rest) that we were her “favorite” grandchild (and not to tell the others!).  She made us each feel incredibly special and loved, and we adored her for it.  She was also incredibly strong-willed and independent–for 20 years after her husband died, she lived on her own on the 15th floor of an apartment complex in New York City (traveling to Florida in the winters)…shopping, cooking, and cleaning for herself–fully unassisted.  I distinctly remember a conversation I had with her in New York when she was telling me a bit about her life as a young woman…she mentioned that from a young age, she always knew that she had wanted to have children, but she also knew that she WOULD have them–at any cost–even if she couldn’t find a husband.  For a woman born in 1919, she was tremendously progressive!

I also knew that she had a miscarriage after her second child, but before my Father was born.  Could she have wanted another child, but couldn’t handle the possibility of another miscarriage, and decided to adopt?  Or was she having trouble conceiving with my Grandfather, and possibly had an affair in order to have their last son?  She was a feisty one, after all!  (I say this, of course, with tremendous love and respect)  From my understanding, my Grandparents loved each other, but things were not always rosy between them…

This was one set of theories we held.  Even if it were true, it certainly wouldn’t guarantee that my Dad is my biological Dad…but the more and more I explore the world of genealogy and DNA, the more common the world of “non-parental events” becomes.

There was another theory that my brother held, too.  This one I was far less convinced of, but it’s not ENTIRELY without merit.  I won’t give too many details, out of respect for our family’s anonymity and some particularly sensitive natures of the situation, so forgive me for being a bit vague.

A while later, James told me he wanted to show me another picture.  He pulled up a picture of our other brother, Adam, playing the guitar–“who is this?”  “Adam”, I replied.  But it wasn’t my brother.  James corrected me–it was another member of the family, related by marriage, who had passed about 10 years before (we’ll call him “David”), when he was around our age.  My eyes grew wide as I looked again, then hurriedly compared the photo to pictures on facebook of Adam–I hated to admit it, because it made no sense to me for a thousand reasons, but he was right–the resemblance was uncanny.

I was quick to resort to denial and disbelief…this was someone who was very close family (although, again, via marriage), close enough that it would in no way make sense for my parents to have chosen him without his spouse (our blood family)’s consent–and she sure as HELL didn’t know about this (we even discussed it later, and I trust her willingness to tell me the truth with my life).  Plus, he would have been only about 18-19 years old at the time, and NOT married into the family yet–two more reasons for this to be an incredibly implausible choice, even though he did have a good relationship with my parents (at that point in time he had only known them for a few years).  I also explained to my brother that the volume of relative matches I had online seemed exceptionally high, much more so than would be expected from a one-time donor, AND this man had known Native American ancestry–which appeared nowhere in my results.

That said, I did concede that it was possible that the three of us, or some combination thereof, had different donors (which is possible, even with triplets).  Since my Mother had been on fertility drugs that caused her to release multiple eggs within the same cycle, rather than just one, it was POSSIBLE that if she were inseminated more than once during that same cycle with different sperm samples (say, to increase the chances that at least ONE of the samples would work), the different eggs could have been fertilized with different sperm.  Hell, in that case scenario, it was even possible that my Dad “got lucky” with one of our eggs, and the donor (or donors) got lucky with the others.

And so the conspiracy theories continue…

Several months later, at a July 4th celebration with my Mother’s side of the family at my Aunt’s house, a family friend (who had been the best friend of this man before he passed) approached James and I, exclaiming how when he first saw Adam crossing the lawn, he couldn’t believe his eyes because had been convinced that he was seeing his friend David.  James and I quietly laughed it off, and while I still didn’t (and don’t) believe the connection could possibly be–it’s far too extreme of a scenario–it was, admittedly, an unsettling resurgance of the “what if?” feeling.

It was March 16th, 2016 when the results came in.

I held my breath, expecting magic with its release.  Instead, I was greeted with more confusion.

First things first–the Y-DNA matchlist.

Upon navigating to the Y-DNA match screen, I was immediately greeted by a list of 10 new (to me, anyway) male family members.  Their names were entirely unfamiliar to me, as were all the other symbols associated with them, presented on the page.

What does a “genetic distance” of 3 mean?!  What does the “FF” symbol next to just some of their names indicate? Why doesn’t it just say how close the predicted relationship is like the other tests???

At the bottom of the page was also a note that said…

Additional possibilities for searching matches:

Your results have already been uploaded to YSearch.org. Your User ID is 6NGMW. Click below to go to YSearch.org

Ummm, what?! (By the way, I still don’t know what this means)

My eyes did light up right away after seeing the last name “O’Reilly”, which I knew was an alternate spelling of the last name “Reilly”, which had already been displaying prominently on my closest match on AncestryDNA’s tree (Jessie’s).

As excited as I was, I had no idea what to do with the information in front of me, aside from clicking around in vain, trying to figure out what this new test result could tell me.

The blue button appearing next to some of my matches’ names seemed to indicate that these were folks with family tree’s attached to their accounts, so I perused through those, looking for a link to a common Reilly ancestor.  Nothing was readily apparent.

After a bit of research, I was able to determine that a “genetic distance” of 3 or 4 actually meant that the “Most Recent Common Ancestor” (MRCA, for short), between my brother and these matches would have been quite a few generations back in time, so it generally made sense that I wasn’t readily seeing the connection between the little information I had on the Reilly portion of Jessie’s tree and these matches.  Also, of the 10 matches, only 4 had a family tree attached to their account, and of those, none of the trees were all that extensive.  Once again, I was feeling a bit stuck, but also somewhat hopeful since there was  messaging feature attached to each match’s account.

Before reaching out, I decided to check out the rest of my brother’s results, starting with the traditional “Family Finder” list of autosomal matches (the same type of list I had on my Family Tree account, that I obtained from importing my raw data from AncestryDNA to create a Family Tree DNA account).  These were matches that could be maternal OR paternal, but there wasn’t a clear way to immediately decipher which was which.  I was so curious to see if we would show up as full siblings or half-siblings, given the scenarios we had discussed months before.

Sure enough, there I was, with our “relationship range” listed as ” full siblings”.  Phew!  So that makes 2 out of 3 at least!

I then quickly scanned the list of remaining matches–or at least the first few pages (there were over 30 pages total, and over 1000 matches).  No quick-wins of “parent-child” matches or any half-siblings, but our Claypoole match (on my Mom’s side–this is the one that originally made clear to me that my own list of matches was indeed for my DNA and not any sort of mix-up, since this was a family member of my Mom’s who we were already aware of) was listed for James a well (as a 1st-3rd cousin “relationship range”).

After that, the relationship ranges were all “2nd-4th cousin” and further, with many repeats between my list of matches and his–although I noticed that there were quite a few matches that only one of us had, and not the other.

On to the regional breakdown list!  Would HE have any of our Dad’s countries listed somehow?

This is where things really got interesting.

As you might remember, my list (at least from FamilyTree DNA) gave me the following breakdown (which might actually be slightly different from what I gave you before, which was probably my AncestryDNA breakdown…none of it is a PERFECT science):

• British Isles: 72%
• Western & Central Europe: 18%
• Scandinavia: 11%

James’ results were as follows:

• British Isles: 92%
• Southern Europe: 6%
• Scandinavia: 2%

Wait, wait…SOUTHERN EUROPE?!  Where the heck did that come from?? And why hadn’t it shown up on my list?  And where was his “Western and Central Europe”???? (which is supposedly where much of my Mom’s family is from…in Germany, and the bits of French that ended up in the French-speaking portions of Canada)

At this point, I was questioning how reliable FTDNA’s relationship range of “full siblings” truly was.  Another “new” relative of mine, Natalie, had suggested that I join a private online Facebook group called “DNA Detectives”, which helps folks with questions like mine.  It’s filled with people working on their family trees, searching for birth family, and those who have become experts along the way (and some who already were).  I asked how my brother and I could have such disparate information, and even some instances of matches that didn’t overlap between our two lists.

Turns out, one of the most crucial ways of determining how close a genetic relationship is involves comparing what’s called your “shared centimorgans”.  They sent me charts and graphs that explained how to compare your numbers (provided by each of the “Big Three” DNA sites) with those of your matches, and infer the possible degrees of relatedness. Example below!

James and I, according to FTDNA’s results, share 2,632 centimorgans (CMs), so we fall a bit on the lower end of the “full sibling” range (which is between 2,300-3,900 CMs).  The thing I had to remind myself was that while each of us inherits 50% of each of our birth parents’ genes, we don’t inherit the exact SAME 50% from each–otherwise we’d be identical twins, not fraternal (or any other full siblings). As a result, some of the genes that he inherited but I didn’t were only inherited by certain other family members of ours (including matches), so while I am related to them as family, those folks aren’t going to show up on my DNA match list, just his, and vice versa.  Similarly, he inherited more of our birth parents’ “Southern European” genes, whereas the 50% that I got contained more “Western and Central European” and “Scandinavian” markers.  Our ancestors were the same, but we each picked up different combinations of their genes.

So, alas, we are still full siblings…and this raises the point that getting him tested, too, gives us even more clues to work with (and about our ancestral heritage).

Something else a bit interesting about his results was his list of “most common surnames” on his “Family Finder” autosomal match list.  His top hits (which may be paternal or maternal–we don’t yet know), listing the 3 most common surnames of his matches, contained the last name of the family-member-by-marriage that James suspected to be our or Adam’s birth father.  That said, this particular surname happens to be VERY common (just as common as the other two listed for us–“Johnson” and “Brown”, so it could just be a fluke.  Also, since then, I’ve done more work on my maternal family tree, and it looks like we do have some of that surname hidden in our tree anyway, so who knows.

Backtracking a bit but…

On February 7th, 2016, I received an email titled “Family Tree DNA Matches” from someone with the last name “Moore”.

Intrigued, I clicked it open.

I forwarded the email to James, then got busy with life.  I now realize that this last name matches a branch on Jessie’s family tree…to be continued!

For two months after receiving the Y-DNA results, I was basically on hiatus from searching for my birth paternal family.  Things were VERY hectic at work, and I was also traveling a bunch for weddings, conferences, etc.

Even in the midst of a circus, life goes on.

Receiving a message from another “new” cousin, this time on 23andMe, brought everything about this part of my life right back up to the surface.

It was May 5th, 2016.  Via 23andMe’s messaging platform, she simply wrote:

I was SO incredibly excited to have someone reaching out to ME for connection.  ALSO, I immediately recognized the birth mother’s last name–it was the same as Jessie’s!  Could this be a relative of hers?  Even if I couldn’t figure out my own puzzle yet, maybe I could help someone else out with theirs.

A few days later, I messaged back:

I figured that it would be easier to explain my situation via phone, and at this point was so desperate to REALLY connect with someone who was in the same boat, especially one who was ALSO family–finally.

Nicole must have felt the same way, because not even a full minute later, my phone was ringing.

As it turned out, my hunch about her being related to Jessie was right!  Only she had figured it out even before receiving my reply.  Apparently, she had also reached out to Jessie when she saw the match level and last name, and Jessie confirmed that she was Nicole’s aunt.  Apparently, her birth mother had been looking for her all her life.

Nicole is about 10 years my senior, and had NO IDEA she was adopted until receiving her results back.  Like me, she hadn’t taken the DNA test because she suspected that she may have a different birth parent.  In fact, she had taken the test in order to get health information, since 23andMe is able to check your DNA for genetic predispositions to all sorts of different diseases and health indicators.  She suspected that her son may have inherited a particular disorder, but knew that getting a DNA test through their doctor’s office would cost thousands of dollars, whereas using 23andMe, or importing her raw data results into another platform called “Promethease” for $5, would get her the information she needed for far less.  Only she got a little more than she bargained for–she instead found out that she was adopted!

As was the case with me, Nicole had a lot to process, having just received this news–and while I felt for her, it was also nice to have someone else to talk to and process with together.  My parents weren’t really comfortable with me discussing this aspect of my life, and I felt uncomfortable burdening them.  My brothers didn’t really seem to express much interest either, and I didn’t want to force feelings on them that they might not have.  At this point, I knew literally no one else who had been donor conceived (not that Nicole had, either), or even anyone else who had found out about a “non-parental event” as they’re called, as a surprise via a DNA test.  There seemed to be almost no references to a situation like this in popular culture…TV shows, movies, popular books…no one I could relate to while going through this.  I had felt so isolated and alone, particularly as a donor conceived person.  Sharing the experience of learning that your biological and ancestral roots are not at all what you thought they were (especially as an adult!) with someone else was such a powerful experience.

I was so lucky, and am so lucky, that I found Nicole.

We probably talked for at least an hour, going over our experiences, comparing notes on what we’ve learned so far, and swapping tips.  We connected immediately–which I guess isn’t terribly surprising…despite all the mess and chaos of the situation, we are family after all.

Before hanging up, she promised me that she would email me some of the information she had shared over the phone.  True to her word, she did:

I finally had more family–one who understands first-hand!–in my search.

As Nicole recommended in her email, I quickly got to work by creating an account with Promethease in order to obtain my own health data report.  One thing a lot of people don’t realize is difficult for adopted/donor conceived folks (at least when the birth parents are anonymous) is that we’re kind of going in blind when it comes to our own health.  We have no idea what kinds of conditions run in “our family”, and thus don’t really have as many ways to prepare for them.  It also makes visits to the doctor interesting (my family history, doctor? well, wouldn’t we both like to know!), and diagnosing certain illnesses and conditions even more challenging.

Once again, I knew that by submitting my information and viewing my results, I could be in for more bad news.

Fortunately, on the whole, my results were generally pretty benign–although not without their own interesting twists.

After receiving my results, I gave Nicole a call–the whole process is a bit overwhelming, as was the formatting of the data.  Nicole walked through it with me as best she could, and together we walked through each of our results, comparing what was the same and different from what we had inherited.  We also discovered (although not through our results, but just over the course of the conversation), that hypermobility (a sub-type of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) affects both of our families.  In fact, as far as I knew up until then, I was the ONLY member of my family who had been impacted–but now I knew why, and that I wasn’t alone.

It was so interesting to swap inherited family trait notes with someone who was both a stranger and family, all at once.  Only the “stranger” component was quickly fading away as we learned more about each other (and ourselves) as people.

Later that same day that spoke with Nicole and signed up for Promethease, as she recommended, I also signed up for GedMatch.com.  Essentially, GedMatch acts as a landing page that transcends all of the “Big Three” genetics companies (AncestryDNA, FTDNA, and 23andMe).  A person who tested at any of these companies, as well as several others, can upload their data to this singular platform and find matches from all three sites in a one-stop-shop format.  Speaking of formatting, theirs certainly isn’t the prettiest, and has a steeper learning curve, but it comes highly recommended by the donor conceived, adoption, and general genealogical research communities for its usefulness.  Honestly, I’m still learning new things on how to use it, but overall I’ve found it to be a pretty helpful tool.  I uploaded both my DNA kit and James’.

I’m not sure at this point how many matches I had when I originally created my account with GedMatch, but I do know that, as of today (November 30th, 2016), I have over 2000, and so does James.

To give you a sense of what the match screen looks like, I’ve pasted an image of it below (from James’ kit).  To the “lay” genealogist (or at least someone who is very new to all of this), it at first looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but at least it still gives you some of the same basics as AncestryDNA, FTDNA, and 23andMe’s match lists…things like the match’s name or username, email (if provided), and shared CMs.  Some people have indicated their maternal and/or paternal haplogroups, while others have not.

Once again–I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with the volume of information, and also a little sad that I didn’t see any closer matches.  I am the first match on the list, followed by Jessie, then Nicole, then the Claypoole maternal cousin that I mentioned earlier.  In looking at even just these results, I noticed several things.

For one thing, Jessie shares 495.2-585.6 CMs between me and James (respectively), and Nicole shares 218.9-280.7.

Given those ranges, compared with the chart above, that puts Jessie in range for the “First Cousin Once Removed (1C1R), Half First Cousin (1/2 1C), Half Great-Aunt/Uncle/Niece/Nephew” category.  Even though she’s high enough for the next category up when it comes to Jeff, I bump her down squarely into the category just described.

Looking at the same chart, and given her ranges compared to James and I, Nicole technically can fall in that same category, just at the VERY low end of it, but fits much more squarely in the “Second Cousin (2C), First Cousin Twice Removed (1C2R), Half First Cousin Once Removed (1/2 1C1R)” category.

Is your head spinning yet?  As I try to compare all of this to Jessie’s family tree, the pathways of possibilities for how we are related (and the different search methods that come with them) feel endless.  It’s like learning a new language and finding your way on its map at the same time.

I decided to email Jessie.

Fortunately, she replied the next day.

She explained how she has now been in contact with Nicole and that the two of them have been in contact with her sister. Then she told me that she’d been trying to ask around with different family members but hasn’t gotten any definitive responses.  The only med student in the family was female.  She wished that she could help me out more, but just had limited information to share.  Jessie did mention that at least we can be fairly certain that the connection is somewhere on her Mom’s side of the family.  She then wished me the best and said she’d be in touch if she heard anything more.

After thanking her, a few days later, she messaged me again, asking if I ever tried contacting a close mutual match of ours.

Little did she know at the time, but this little reminder sent me down QUITE the rabbit hole in the coming days.

I pulled up this match’s profile.  Jessie had mentioned earlier that she thought this was one of the Reilly siblings’ (which includes her mother and mother’s siblings) grandchildren.  She felt pretty confident that it was one of the grandchildren of “Ana” (name changed) Reilly Logan, the son of one of Ana’s sons.

With 196 shared CMs (and I can’t tell how many he shares with James, since this cousin, who I’ll henceforth refer to as “Brandon002”, only tested with AncestryDNA and is not on Gedmatch…whereas James only tested on FTDNA and you can’t transfer those results to AncesryDNA like you can in the opposite direction), the best I can figure when reviewing the DNA Detectives relationship chart again is that we are related by the following category (which is the same category as Nicole is to James and me):

Since he’s in the same relationship range to James and me as Nicole is to us, this means that Ana Reilly Logan’s family line, like Jessie/Nicole’s, is probably a dead-end.  If our donor were one of Ana’s children, or even grandchildren, then Brandon002 would have been a closer match to me than his DNA shows (unless he, one of his parents, or Ana also have their own “non-parental event” in their closet).

I did my best with illustrating this, below (*some names have been changed for privacy purposes):

Due to Jessie’s genetic distance to me and the age of her children, it’s most likely that she is my 1st cousin once removed (1C1R), in which case my donor would be one of her 1st cousins (the child of one of the Reilly siblings, who I circled in green in the image above). Given both Nicole and Brandon002’s genetic distances to me, both of their lines are pretty much immediately knocked out for containing my biological father/donor.

Given that, of the Reilly siblings “Peter” Reilly only lived to be about 13 before he passed, and “Tim” Reilly appears to have passed at only a few months old, those lines are also clearly “out”, hence my crossing them out in the tree image above.

From the looks of the tree, (which wasn’t completely filled out–you can’t assume that anyone’s tree is 100% complete), and as a result of my research, Virginia Mary Reilly never married and didn’t have any children, so I tentatively knocked her potential line out as well.

That left the following as possible parents of my donor (and thus an extra set of Grandparents for me):

• “Jacob” Reilly and Mary Neill
• “Ryan” Reilly and “Emily” Minnow
• “Joshua” Boyd and “Rachel” Reilly Boyd

So this was the path I followed down the rabbit hole all weekend.

Over that weekend, I plunged deep into my research of the 3 viable Reilly lines.  Between Jessie’s family tree information, google searches for obituaries (leading to names of surviving family members) and white pages (for current and past addresses, the names of others who have lived at those addresses since they are usually also family members, etc.), and countless other avenues provided by the good ole internet, I was up to my eyeballs in possible leads.  Unfortunately, I was also up ALL night, all weekend, barely eating and probably slightly crazed due to my lack of sleep.

A lot of the information and leads I turned up were helpful, in terms of identifying names/ages/relatedness of different family members and such.  However, I also followed a lead that, in hindsight, just didn’t make very much sense.

I had noticed that on one of “Jacob” Reilly’s records (without looking at it now, I’d guess it may have been a death record), his last name was spelled differently–harkening to my previous find on the Y-DNA match list of “Reilly” being spelled several other ways.

From what my Mom had told me, according to her doctor, our donor had been a med student in Philadelphia.  So, I decided to search “Jacob” Reilly’s full name, but with “Dr.” in front, along with “Philadelphia”.  A result came up for a Dr. “Jacob” Reilly at a practice nearby, for a doctor who had gone to medical school or did his residency starting around the same time that my mother had gotten pregnant.  This doctor had moved here just that year from Ireland, which excited me because I noticed that quite a few of my matches, including Y-DNA matches, were either Irish-American or were still living in Ireland.  I think I just totally lost my logical mind and thought that, somehow, this Dr. was still a Reilly sibling or relative that was also my birth father.  In looking at pictures of him, I was SURE that I saw a resemblance, particularly to me and James.  I also knew that the parents of the Reilly siblings had immigrated to America from England and Ireland, and that Robert Reily and Ethel Mary Kelly were 39 and 28 upon their marriage…I guess I figured anything was possible, including the possibility that one of them (or even them as a couple) had a child before marriage…who may have been given to another family member or up for adoption.

It was too big of a leap, and honestly, just didn’t make any sense.

I wrote an email to Jessie on May 13th explaining what I had found so far:

______

Hey [Jessie],

Since I’m related to both you and Nicole, I would pretty much have to be related to you through the Reilly side. The sperm donor would have to be a first cousin to you, so a male son of one of [Sally’s] siblings.

I researched each one of her siblings through a variety of searches (white pages online, googling, ancestry’s regular searches which sometimes link to the burial and obituary info, which lists their spouses and children, which allows me to do further of the searches I mentioned before plus LinkedIn/Facebook, etc.) Straight away, [“Tim”] Reilly was out due to being stillborn (or dying the same year he was born), [“Peter”] Reilly was out due to passing away as a child, and Virginia was out due to not having any children (or at least none publicly reported or mentioned in her obituary…she was buried sharing a tombstone with her mother, Ethel).

So that left [“Jacob”] Robert Reilly (referred to elsewhere as Reilly), [“Ana”] Reilly (married to [____] G. Logan), [“Ryan”] David Reilly (who through the same mechanisms I found was married to [“Emily”] Michele Reilly), or [“Rachel”] E. Reilly (who I found was married to [“Joshua”] E. Boyd).

I first extensively researched [“Ana”] and [“Tom”]’s male children, especially since [“Ana”] died in NJ, and some of their children even went to college in PA (I was looking at [name removed] Reilly in particular, who has a striking resemblance and went to Drexel). I was also pretty interested in [“Rachel”] & [“Joshua”] Boyd’s children, who also bore striking resemblances and grew up in south jersey right outside of Philadelphia, some of whom still live there. That said, none of them were ever med students, at least based upon their schooling history, etc. I looked into [“Ryan”] David Reilly’s children, although the males overall seemed to be unlikely matches. Of all of these, I also pretty much ruled out males who were likely too young to have been the donor and/or who were not in the Philadelphia area at the time the donation would have occurred. There were several possibilities left, although, like I said, seemingly no med students.

I had originally mostly ruled out [“Jacob”] Robert Reilly since there wasn’t a TON of information about him and it wasn’t immediately clear that he was married based upon your tree–also because he was listed as being born in Canada, so I decided to search those closer to home first. However, after looking through all the rest, I decided I might as well leave no stone unturned. There was little information on him in his profile, although I noticed that his last name was listed slightly differently in different places (O’Reilly on his death certificate, for example…plus he died in south jersey). I also noticed that when you click on his burial information, and are taken to the page about “find a grave…”, on the right hand side (it’s still an ancestry page) is a button that says “make a connection”, then a link with “Find others who are researching [“Jacob”] R. OReilly in Public Member Trees” I noticed that several other families that claimed a link to him had slightly different information for him. I also knew that many of my genetic hits had parents who were first generation Irish, so I was wondering how that came into play–after researching Ethel and Robert Reilly more, I noticed that Ethel was from Ireland, and that Robert spent time there as well–he was born in Canada, but married Ethel in Ireland, and at various times after coming to America stopped back in Canada and Ireland as well.

Still, not much definitive, and I didn’t have a ton of information on [“Jacob”] from ancestry.com.

So, I googled his name, each of several ways. One of the first returns I got under “[“Jacob”] Robert O’Reilly” was for “[“Jacob”] O’Reilly, MD”, a psychiatrist in New Jersey. I clicked the link, and saw he had trained at the University of Pennsylvania during the time of the sperm donation. I also saw that he had gone to school in Ireland prior to that (the Irish connection!), had the very striking resemblance, and quite a few other things. I forget exactly where all else that I looked, but it does appear that this is very likely the match. I haven’t done any outreach at this point, and I’m not 100% on what I’ll do next, but I’d like to try to get a definitive confirmation somehow if possible.

Let me know when you’re free to chat more!

_____

Later that day, after a looooong nap, I returned to my research and realized that I was probably wrong.  Having my brain restored by sleep really does wonders.  I emailed Jessie back and told her that I wasn’t sure anymore about my previous line of logic, and that I was doing more research.

On the 16th, Jessie wrote back.  She explained her rationale for why certain lines were probably out, and who was also less likely.  She also tried to compare her research with surnames in my family tree and wasn’t seeing anything obvious, just like I wasn’t either.  From there, she mentioned how her Mother had passed away when she was young, and when her immediate family moved to California, they largely lost touch with the remaining Reilly branches.  Jessie thought it would be a good idea for me to reach out to more shared matches, and to keep her posted.

I spoke with Jessie on the phone a few days later–she had called while I was at work, so we didn’t get to talk for very long.  It was so nice to hear her voice and to have her support as we (briefly) compared notes.

We followed up via email once or twice about a month later (June, 2016), but I didn’t hear back from her after that.  Maybe she didn’t see my message or life got in the way.  I was a bit hurt, but also wasn’t sure if maybe life had just gotten busy for her, and she hadn’t had the time to log in again.

At this point, I pretty much knew I was wrong about this “Jacob” Reilly that I had found, so I doubled down some more on the remaining lines.