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):
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.