Once the school year was finally complete, and my interim work obligation along with it, I threw myself into the search (and started this blog!)

I kept in pretty regular contact with Nicole, which was great to still have SOME “bonus” family on my side (as Nicole likes to call it–a fitting name!)

One night, I went down yet another rabbit role.  After having reached out to several other matches, some of whom responded and shared their family trees with me, I decided to try searching some of those matches’ surnames in Jessie’s tree to see where the connection might lie.  I ended up getting a hit for one of these (rather uncommon, at least to my ear) surnames!  From what I understood at the time, the “pathway” of names at the bottom of the search screen ended with the name of the relative on the tree whose line was directly connected to that surname search–and the last name on that list was Minnow.

I was dumbfounded and immediately nauseous.  This was the wife of “Ryan” Reilly.  That must be the point of intersection of the two trees, and they only had two sons.

I feverishly began messaging Nicole, trying to explain the situation, then suggested we hop on a Google Hangout since it would be easier to go over my line of evidence via Screenshare.

She was so excited for me!  I asked her advice on what next steps to take and her thoughts on the best way to make contact.

Sometime over the course of the conversation, she asked if I had talked to Jessie at all about this.  I explained to her the last message threads I had with Jessie, and how she hadn’t replied in over a month, which wasn’t like her.  A while back, Nicole and I had found several of the Reilly clan on facebook, and I sent a bunch of them friend requests, along with a generic sort of “Hey, just found out via AncestryDNA that we’re cousins on the Reilly side! Just saying hello and I’d love to chat at some point”.  Only one ever responded, but just by granting my friend request.  I explained this to Nicole.

She sighed, and mentioned how in a previous conversation she had with Jessie, she had seemed reluctant to help me…out of concern that she might be overstepping and that it might not be what the rest of her family wanted.

What the rest of her family wanted.

Only this was also MY family–one I’ve been deprived of knowing my whole life!  How does ONE family member, my donor/biological father, get to decide my relationship to the rest of my biological family for the rest of my life?!  He may have signed away that right, but I never had!  Besides, what if his parents, my biological Grandparents, never even knew what he had done, that they had 3 more (at least) grandchildren out there?  I can’t imagine knowing that your son bore children, and not wanting to know who they are.

The realization hit me that I was possibly being stonewalled by the very family I was desperately hoping to gain a connection to.  But I was an innocent party.  I never asked for any of this, never agreed to anonymity and signing the right to know my family away.  Jesus, I have other aunts, uncles, grandparents, possibly even half-siblings out there that share my flesh and blood who I may never get the chance to know.  I felt not only deeply isolated, but possibly even shut out by my own relatives, and it HURT.

I tried my best to keep the waves of emotion inside–it was the first time Nicole and I were seeing each other, although virtually via a screen, but the flood was just too much to bear.  I stopped talking and cried–so deeply shaken that I could barely speak without breaking into a fresh sob.  It wasn’t the introduction I wanted.

How could they shut me out like this??  I’m a good person!  They don’t even know me!  It felt like their silence was a statement of my worth.  It just felt so unfair–I understood that many donors only donated due to the anonymity that they were promised, and that, if their family HAD heard about me through Jessie, that their silence was probably out of respect for that family member’s privacy.  But that didn’t make it hurt any less–it made me feel like an illegitimate child, dirty…just a stranger–not a “real” member of their family.  Perhaps I was just an item–a life-bearing cell–to be sold, not a person.

Yet there I was, their flesh and blood, and possibly being denied my right to know who I am and connect with my own God damn blood family just because my birth father decided to jack off into a cup and make a little extra money when he was young.  Yes, I’m grateful to be alive, but this still stings.  Maybe they weren’t trying to keep me out, but if they were, as I’ve heard of with some other donor conceived people, it felt like more than I could bear.

Feeling rejected before you were even born is a funny thing.  In just about all other cases of fathers who opt out of being a part of their child’s life, they’re still at least recognized by society as the birth father, and are even obliged to support their child. Granted, financial support is in NO way what I want or in any way would ever expect in a situation like this, but the point is that, in all other situations, when a man fathers a child, he is still seen as being in some way, shape or form, bound to that child.  He may still walk out, and he may end up being a shitty Dad from afar, but at the end of the day, that’s still his child.  Another man may step in and raise the child, also becoming it’s Dad, but no one would deny that the biological father’s family is also that child’s family as well.

In the case of adoption, even closed adoptions, people tend to understand the grown adoptee’s desire to know and connect with his/her own biological family, their roots.  The biological parents, if found, might still opt out of having a relationship with their biological child, but often others in their family welcome their long-lost family member with open arms.

I felt powerless to know and connect with my own roots.  I thought of what I had learned so far about the Reilly clan, stretching back to Ireland and England, imagining my ancestors’ lives.  Those ancestors were mine every bit as much as they were anyone else’s in that family–they existed long before my birth father ever signed me away.  What right did he or the fertility industry have to take part of my family away from me?  And how could the present-day family rightfully shut me out, if indeed they are?  I did NOTHING wrong!  I just AM who I am.  How is that not enough?

We talked a bit more, and agreed that it shouldn’t be taken personally.  Besides, since messages received over Facebook from someone who isn’t already your “Facebook friend” go to an entirely separate (and hard to locate) mailbox, maybe most if not all of them never even realized they got it.  Maybe I was just projecting my fears and misinterpreting everything.  It’s hard not to do that when you already feel so alone and on the defensive about your equal humanity.

I had gone from being totally elated (albeit nauseous from being so overwhelmed and excited) to being incredibly deflated and despondent.

Nicole spoke words of encouragement and wished me luck as we signed off our call, and I quickly said hello to her kids and apologized for my teary, snotty appearance.  Yayyy for first impressionssss!

I decided to hold off on trying to contact anyone else in the Reilly family for the time being.  Also, I decided that I would more or less enter a state of “search moratorium” until I could write, catch up on, and process via my blog everything that had happened so far.  I would continue my search once I was up-to-date, and could finally start searching and writing in real-time.

This time, I needed a break from moving forward.

As it turned out, it was a good thing that I opted to pause before moving forward with contact, because in a few days time, I realized that I had made a mistake. Ugh.

Earlier, I had assumed that the pathway of names I was seeing at the bottom of my AncestryDNA tree search screen was showing me which ancestor branch contained the connection to the surname I had just searched.  However, after closer inspection, I found that this was not true–the pathway of names was actually just a listing of the last people in the tree that I had clicked on to investigate further, in order.

Needless to say, things weren’t going too well with my “I’m going to hold off on my search until I’ve caught up on all of my posts for my journey so far” internal plan.

I wasn’t exactly in full-throttle search mode though, either…I more so dabbled off and on.

Given my realization about how the search feature worked, I was feeling a bit discouraged, but I also wasn’t quite back to square one either. I still knew that the Reilly family was the key to my paternity (unless they somehow happened to be maternal matches that I just hadn’t been able to place yet on my Mom’s portion of my family tree…yet still unlikely given the proximity of the matches to Jessie, Nicole, and Brandon), and I had already knocked out several lines.

However, I just wasn’t seeing anything clear-cut.  Given the number of dead ends I had been experiencing, I decided to look at the search a little more outside of the box.  I had joined the private online Facebook group, “DNA Detectives”, and while I wasn’t ready yet to submit my case to the masses (and to a potential “search angel”), I was learning a lot.  One thing I was noticing as a theme was that “non-parental events” were far more common than I ever realized…especially for generations above me.  Whether it was wartime babies born out-of-wedlock and adopted off (frequently without any family members ever knowing, since young unwed mothers were often sent away to special “homes” until the baby was born and given away) or just affairs (or, worse, instances of rape) that were successfully hid by a lack in prevalence of DNA testing, I saw story after story of folks finding out that they had a different biological family than they always thought.  Many of these folks, like me, took a DNA test for other reasons, and were shocked to find their identities didn’t match up to who they thought they were.

As a result, I had to look at the tree I was working with, and my long list of matches, with new eyes.  Virginia Reilly’s “line” was back on the table.  As a Catholic woman who never married but was also, as far as I could tell, not a nun…her story left me wondering if maybe there was more to it than what met the eye.  I also noticed that she had a record for having traveled (alone, as far as I could tell) via plane from Luxembourg to NYC in 1951…the flight records had no other Reillys listed.  What was she doing in Luxembourg, as a single woman traveling alone?  Could she have been sent away by her family to Europe as an unwed mother to have a baby, and given it up for adoption?  At the time, she was 32 years old.  Maybe she was just a really badass lady–which certainly seemed to be the case given what I was able to ascertain about her work history, but regardless a solo trip like that would have been quite unusual for a single female in 1951.

I also had pretty much accepted the fact that the fertility doctor might not have been completely honest regarding the donor’s occupation–or, at least, may not have conducted thorough background checks to ensure that he was, in fact, a doctor as claimed.  The more I read up about the regulation practices (or lack thereof) of the donor conception industry, the more I learned how very UNregulated it truly was–and even is today.  Of course, it was even less regulated back in the early 80sthan it is right now .  Doctors rarely conducted any meaningful background checks, and weren’t in any way legally obligated to do so. Whatever the willing donors put on paper was treated as truth, and people just trusted their doctors.  At the time, there wasn’t even any central regulation around how frequently the same man could donate, how many couples his samples could be used to fertilize, or how (if at all) the records would be kept and maintained.  According to my mother (and the doctor’s office when I called), all “records” pertaining to a given fertilization were destroyed–not even a donor number would remain (which is what is traditionally provided to both the parents and donor, and is often used by donor conceived people to locate half-siblings).

All this to say, folks in the Reilly clan who I had previously “ruled out” for not having gone to med school, and being too old to have been a “med student” at the time of my conception, were back “in” as possibilities.  I also had to entertain the possibility that rather than Jessie and Nicole being 1st cousin once removed (1C1R) and second cousins (2C), respectively, they may actually be one of the other possibilities in their respective categories.  It very well may be the case that my donor had his own non-parental event (NPE) somewhere up the line, and was adopted himself, in which case he wouldn’t even show up on Jessie’s tree.

Oy vey.

Shortly after my call with Nicole, I called my Mom to ask her again for the name of her fertility doctor, and any additional information she could give me.  At the time, we had a lot of other significant and challenging family matters going on, and she was STRESSED.  My question sent her over the edge of her breaking point.  She gave me her doctor’s name, but insisted that there was nothing her doctor would be able to tell me anyway, and that she wanted absolutely no part in my search beyond this…

I was devastated, and feeling hurt that she was making no effort to understand where I was coming from, and how badly I needed to know who I was.  It struck me that the very desire for a genetic connection to her offspring that led her to donor conception rather than adoption was the very same connection she was denying me to my own biological parent.  How could she not see this?  And how did a parent’s choice about whether or not to have biological children in their life rightfully outweigh that of their adult children–for life?  Why don’t I get to have a say?  I’m no longer a child, after all.

Despite feeling shamed and guilty (although I don’t entirely blame my Mother for this–I think it’s hard for her to understand my perspective, and she did have a lot going on), I decided to suck it all up and give her doctor (who was still practicing) a call anyway.  Maybe, just maybe, she would have more answers and take pity on me.

Upon dialing, I reached her receptionist.  The woman sounded genuinely shocked to hear from me, and it was certainly an awkward conversation!  She refused to put me through to the doctor, since I was “not a patient”, just my Mother was, however she said she’d leave a message for the doctor to get back to me.  The next day, after hearing nothing, I called again.  Same story.  Finally, the third day, I got a call back–but it was from the receptionist.  She simply said that all she could tell me was that the doctor said they didn’t use a sperm bank, the doctor was probably a med student or resident, and that they didn’t keep any records.  I asked if the medical student/resident status of donors had been verified through a background check at the time, and the receptionist said she would speak with the doctor and get back to me.

She never did.  Through the entire process, I felt both powerless and furious.  All I could do was beg, for my OWN information.  I may not have been a patient, but that sperm wasn’t just my Mom’s as the patient, I AM the sperm!  It couldn’t be more mine–it IS me!

Yet, as a donor conceived person, at least at present, we have no rights.  We just have to be “grateful” that we even exist.

All we have to rely on now are the leaps and bounds of science, the ever-increasing power of DNA testing and internet searches to give us our identities and family connections back.

A lot has happened in my life since I more or less halted my search in order to write about and process my journey so far.

For one thing, I decided to take an official sabbatical from full-time work, knowing myself and my tendency to let business with work mask the truly harder work of dealing with issues in other core areas of my life.  So frequently I sweep things under the rug and keep going, and jump too quickly into another way to live my life that I don’t really want.  Now, I definitely recognize that taking a break like this is a tremendous privilege, but it’s also not one that I intend to waste.

So, I’m essentially operating off of a loose “Three Phase Plan”:

• Phase 1: Figure out and process the shit out of “Who I Am”
  • This will primarily focus on discovering (or uncovering) my “new” roots, and figuring out what that means to me.  At the end of the day, I just “Am Who I Am”, and while this search doesn’t CHANGE that, it, along with my taking the time that I need to truly reflect on it, will hopefully allow me to understand, accept, and support it.
  • A secondary component of all of this will be digging in and reflecting on my natural strengths and areas for growth, what kinds of things I really like or would rather avoid, and where my foremost passions lie.  I’ve spent so much time in my life just hopping on the closest ship that was passing by–and working my ass off while I was on it–but not always being as intentional as I could be about picking the best-fit ship that I wanted, would make me happy, and could still support my life.  In order to choose the right ship for you, you need to really know and honor yourself, first.
• Phase 2: Figure out and process the shit out of “What Do I Want?”
  • This part is a little more self-explanatory, but I figure that if I simply ask myself what I want before really doing the work and knowing/honoring/respecting who I am (and getting to a healthy place about it) first, I may think that I want things that I really don’t.  I might be hiding certain aspects of myself and their own desires, or assume that I just want what everyone else wants (not realizing that it won’t actually make me happy), or even think that I want certain things without realizing that I might not actually be really good at what it takes to have them (i.e. if it’s certain job titles) or enjoy what those things bring (i.e. if I think I want to move to a certain city that, as it turns out, I would be miserable in because I didn’t take the time to ascertain what kinds of things I need in a living environment in order to be happy and feel successful). All of this is the kind of digging that I love helping other people with, but have really never sat down and done for myself.
• Phase 3: Go Get it

In order to give myself the time, space, and environment to do this, I decided to pack up and leave New Orleans, and come back home to the Philadelphia area.  While it’s highly doubtful to me that I’m going to choose this location long-term, processing these new aspects of my family and identity has brought out a strong desire in me to be with and near my own family unit while I do it.  I need the family I’ve had my whole life as a home base, as my safety and cornerstone, as I branch out in such vulnerable ways.  I also need my immediate family to understand that my search to uncover the rest of my roots changes nothing about the permanence of their status in my heart.  I’m not looking to replace them, and I’m not trying to run away either–I’m right here.  They are and always will be my rock and foundation…almost like a bonsai tree.  Ultimately, I wish that I could go on this journey WITH them,  complete with their blessing and knowledge that they’ll never be replaced…and maybe in time they’ll be willing to join me…but in the interim, I can at least journey in their presence.

Earlier this summer, I was able to attend our annual family reunion with my Dad’s side of the family–easily one of my favorite times of the year and something I’ve excitedly looked forward to throughout my childhood.  I thought it especially important that I be there this year.  None of them, with the exception of my Dad, brothers, and Mom, knew that I knew I didn’t share their same bloodline–in fact, only a handful of them ever knew at all.  But it was important to me that my Dad knew that I still claim them as my family ever bit as much as I did before–they are the family our hearts chose (and in my case even before I was ever born! even conceived!)  The trip was magical, yet also very sentimental for me.  All of my Grandmother’s generation had by then passed, but I could still feel them in the old family house and on the grounds.  The love that haunted those rooms and filled the air was unspeakably strong–unchanged–but also understood and at peace.

Several weeks later, I received a message from Nicole that the last of the Reilly siblings had just passed away, and probably my last chance at still having a living paternal grandparent along with her.  What secrets and answers to questions I’ll never be able to ask were silenced with her last breath?  I may never know.  If one of the Reilly siblings (at least on that tree) was indeed my paternal grandparent, any chance we had of ever getting to know each other was now extinguished.  It’s a different type of mourning–like mourning a ghost–but a real one all the same.  I couldn’t help but feel robbed of that relationship, and that they had been robbed, too.

Nothing is a “but” in this situation–only an “and”.  Nothing replaces each other.  Each grandparent exists and has their own meaning and place in my identity–humans are capable of so much more love than we’re given credit for.  Learning of my biological roots just opened up a secret chamber within an ever-expanding mansion.

My Dad drove with me (and my little kitty cat, Pumpkin) as I made the move/road trip from New Orleans back home to Philadelphia.

Several days before he arrived in NOLA at my cousin’s house (where I had been crashing for a couple of weeks after my lease came up), my cousin, (we’ll call her Alicia) and I were sitting at her kitchen table, talking about what an incredible man my Dad is.  She confessed to me that she had always seen my Dad as a second father–he had always been so good to her and her siblings, looking out for them through thick and thin.  I teared up as she described different examples of ways in which he was really there for them, even though they were actually his family by marriage (on my Mom’s side).  She made sure I knew just how lucky I was to have such an amazing man as my father, and I felt so full of love and proud.  I never doubted it for a second, but I had never known her story.  My Dad had also stepped up big time over the last decade for my Mom’s sister’s family when their father unexpectedly passed.  It’s just the type of man he is–reliable, supportive, and full of love–no matter the obstacle.  It struck me that my Dad is more of a father than any typical man–he’s filled those shoes countless times, without any obligation by blood, and without ever any expectation of glory.  He is a father by choice, for love–true love, in a way that could never be denied.

The trip was wonderful–we stopped in Savannah, Charleston, and Richmond along the way, went on mini-adventures, took turns driving, and talked a bit about life along the way.  We didn’t talk much about my family research, believe it or not–but mentioned it a bit in passing.  As I mentioned how common I’m finding NPEs to be, he briefly wondered aloud if even he might be adopted.  Stranger things have happened.  I’m hopeful that we can get to a place where he feels that an invitation to join the gang and get tested, too–since I gave my Mom a kit for her birthday (we’re now waiting on the results) would be welcoming him to his own adventure, rather than feeling shut out from the world of DNA just because of my own discovery.  Whether with the family he grew up with or not, he has a history, too, that he can enjoy.

Regardless of the outcome of my soon-to-be-resumed search, and the storms I may whether along the way, I can rest assured that I remain the luckiest girl in the world, one who has been so incredibly blessed in life with the gift of my forever Father, my rock.

About a week or so ago now, I saw a post in one of the private facebook groups that I’m a part of (for donor conceived folks) where another donor conceived girl was offering her assistance in helping others find their biological families/roots.  She mentioned in her post that she had successfully helped several others recently, and now had time to take on some more cases.

I’d been waiting to pitch my “ask” to these groups for a “search angel”, as they’re called, until I was finally caught up on all of my writing…once I was able to start writing and searching again in “real-time”.  I wanted to be able to write about what was happening AS it was happening, rather than getting caught up in the search, and not taking the time to write/process it, and risking the possibility that I’d eventually become SO far removed that I wouldn’t remember exactly how I was feeling and details about what had happened by the time I decided to write about it.

Getting “caught up” took me a pretty long time to do.  I think a lot of that was because I’ve had other things going on in my life (taking side gigs, acting, etc. to pay the bills, plus moving cross-country), but I also think that some of it was because I might not have been FULLY ready to hit “resume” on the search.  I’m just not always a big fan of the unknown…it’s scary to me.  There’s so much potential for getting hurt, for not being in control, and for failure.  It’s just been so important to me that I AM able to, in the end, figure out this puzzle and feel reconnected, however that might look, that the prospect of that hope being snuffed out (by possibly running through all of my search resources and coming up empty), or, maybe worse, finding the rest of my biological roots but being rejected by this additional family…has been enough for me to not push quite as hard as I could to figure all of this out.

But I also know, deep down, to my core, that I NEED to do this.  Even if some in my biological family reject me, that might not be true of ALL of them, and regardless, I’ll have peace of mind that I know the truth.  I’ll know my ancestors, and they cannot reject me.  I don’t see why they ever would even if they could.  At the end of the day, I am their kin every bit as much as any more “traditionally planned” progeny are.  I am different, as is my story, but my biological connection to them is the same.  They are in me and they are me.

I tore off the bandaid and responded to Gel, asking for her help.  She messaged me right away (even though she lives in Australia!) and was eager to jump right in.  By this point in the day, it was pretty late at night in Australia, so she told me that she would be going to bed soon, but that I should start by trying to make a “mirror tree”, then share it with her.  I had heard mirror trees before, in some of the conversations in these various support groups (primarily in “DNA Detectives”), but had been holding off on creating one of my own.  They sounded complicated and daunting.  Essentially, in order to make one (at least in AncestryDNA), you would more or less make your own copy of your closest (paternal, in this case) match’s family tree.  As you’re doing this, you want to a.) double-check the accuracy of that person’s work on their tree (because if it’s wrong, that might hold you back later on in the process) and b.) go as FAR back as possible in adding parents, grandparents, great-greatparents, etc. for each direct line.  The reason for this is that, ultimately, you will attach your DNA results electronically to different people (and, thus, ancestral lines) in the tree to see what other DNA/tree matches then pop up in your “hint” notifications that Ancestry sends, which will tell you who your most recent common ancestor was.  Doing the mirror tree also allows you to not have to rely upon other matches’ trees (and their relative fullness/thoroughness) to have access to the same information.  For a way better description of how mirror trees work, check this out.  Appropriately, the author is from New Orleans.  Ah, synchronicity.

Gel had been working on creating a resource guide for donor conceived people who are trying to find their biological families via DNA, so she sent me a copy of what she had so far to use as a guide.

I got to work for a few hours, and made the beginnings of my own mirror tree.  It felt kind of strange, but mostly empowering.  The process a long time to not even go all the far back in history, but that was because I was using painstaking care to be sure that anything I added was as accurate as possible.  I wasn’t willing to add another level of parents to any given branch of the tree if I didn’t have enough evidence to support the veracity of the connection…I figured that I’d consult other experts in the field (Gel included) if there were branches where I was getting stuck…where the branch seemed a bit too fragile.

Around 2 in the morning, I messaged Gel with my status so far, and gave her editing privileges on my tree for her review.  As she recommended, I set the tree to be private and unsearchable for now.

The next day, I awoke to about 50 over-night messages from Gel.  While I’d been sleeping, day broke in Australia and she had been busy!  She asked me a bunch of questions to aid in her research and sent me a ton of links to various family members she had found and added to different parts of the tree.

A search angel indeed!

Her last request was that I try connecting my DNA results to different “test” identities on her tree, so we could start cross referencing new DNA hints that AncestryDNA’s website would provide once it processed the combination of my results and wherever I pinned them on my tree.  Usually this takes about 12-48 hours to fully finish processing.

The next day, despite the fact that my tree hadn’t been built out all that much yet, I already had a few hints to review!

In addition to it recognizing the links with Nicole and Jessie in my tree, it came up with two other DNA matches of mine who also listed a certain shared common ancestor in their own AncestryDNA trees.

That common match was this man, Jedediah Hubbell:

My ancestor!  It was like figuring out a puzzle, solving a mystery, and revealing a prize all at once.  Revealing a root!

I looked within my mirror tree to see how exactly this man was related to the Reilly siblings (one of whom I suspect is my grandparent).

Jedediah (circled in yellow) traces back through Robert Edwin Reilly’s line (in blue); Robert Edwin Reilly has been my suspected great-grandfather.  Circled in green is one of the Reilly siblings.  While this doesn’t confirm exactly WHICH of the Reilly siblings is my grandparent, it DOES confirm that I AM a Reilly, and also a Clark, and every point in-between Jedediah Hubbell and Robert Edwin Reilly.

Warmer.  Real.  Here.

Oh, and literally the same day that I asked Gel for help, I received a facebook friend confirmation notification from one of the Reilly offspring I had tried to friend months before.

It was like the universe whispered softly to me “keep going”.

I know it’s been a little while since my last post…I guess that’s because there isn’t a whoooole ton to update you on, and I didn’t want to bore you with something that wasn’t all that significant.  However, right now (and moving forward) I’m giving myself permission to write as much or as little as I want to on any given post, and at any level of perceived “significance”.  This blog is primarily for me and my processing, so not everything I write has to be significant for other people in order to be significant to me in my healing (or even just interesting to me to report on in my journey).

As such, I’d like to report that as I’ve been doing more work on building out my mirror tree, I got so excited to discover new and far back surnames that I just had to share it with someone–and since he was around, I shared my mirror tree with my brother, my James.  His eyes lit up just as mine had–I felt giddy as a school girl.  The past!  History!  Science!  Us!

I showed him how I had built back the Robert Edwin Reilly line in particular, given that I had recently discovered some remote DNA matches who shared Jedediah Hubbell in common.  Hoping that I would get even more such hits by continuing to build those lines back, I plugged and chugged for several hours.  James was immediately interested in two surnames in particular, “Hubbell” and “Hickok” (the latter sometimes spelled differently), and wondered aloud if we were related to the fellow who invented the Hubbell telescope or “Wild Bill Hickok”.

I felt he was getting a little too giddy and ahead of himself–after all, just because you share a surname with someone, that doesn’t mean that you’re actually related.  The same surname could have cropped up in space and time independently, as is frequently known to be the case, especially when people emigrated to the US and their names were written down wrong or even changed.  About an hour later, James messaged me from across the house with articles on Edwin Powell Hubbell and Wild Bill Hickok.  I felt obliged to at least try to find out if, on some off-chance, we were somehow related.

Fast forward about an hour or so, because it actually didn’t take very long to find that were are, in fact, related to both!  Aha! In neither case are we direct descendants, but we do indeed share mutual common ancestors along the same family lines.  Thank God for people who work on and share public family trees for famous people (that you can then compare to your own trees).

It feels like a eureka moment to make a discovery like this.  We share genes with an awesome scientist/inventor as well as a badass of days past.  Immediately, I begin to wonder if the same penchant for curiosity, discovery, and science that caused Robert Edwin Reilly to be an avid inventor/patentee was born from his Hubbell family line.  In turn, I wondered if this same strength and interest of mine (as I’m constantly coming up with new concepts and tinkering with inventions in my head) was inherited from the same line.  Maybe it’s just in my blood.

As for Wild Bill Hickok, I don’t know if general badassery is in my blood, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if my love of exploration and adventure is.  From a young age (and certainly cultivated by my father’s bringing the family on vacations around the country and world), I’ve loved to see and experience new places, and have always wanted to try living in different parts of the world.  I was hell-bent on living in California for some time once I grew older (although some of that was in order to pursue acting).  Turns out, Wild Bill Hickok had a thing for acting, too.  Who knows if any of those penchants were actually passed down by the blood of common ancestors, but it certainly helps me feel closer to my roots to believe it might be so.

Can’t say I’m anywhere near as good as a card player, though.

James told me that I should watch Deadwood, since Wild Bill is a character on the show.  Since then, I started watching the series, and am now hooked.  His character, needless to say, is awesome.  Now, I fully realize that he is merely fictionalized on the show, but it’s even just cool to know that a relative of yours made it to the “big time” and is known/talked about to this day.  (And no, I don’t condone any of the bad things that he might have done–just relishing the positives of the situation is all).

I shared both of these pieces of information with my Dad, and he thought it was pretty neat.

Anyway, I went back as far as I could on those lines and made pretty decent progress (even going as far back as the 1500s for one) but eventually started to hit brick walls.  I’m planning on building out some of the other lines soon, but am giving myself a bit of a break since I’m also trying to focus on a couple other ventures this week (re: phase one).  It’s been a little while since I heard from my search angel…I hope she’s okay.  She probably is just really busy with other things, and the time difference between Philadelphia and wherever she’s at in Australia is not exactly making things easier.

As a side note, while researching Wild Bill Hickok a bit more, I came upon some images.  It struck me that there seemed to be a bit of a resemblance between him and my other brother, Adam.  Not super strong, but in my mind, there.  I see a lot of that same resemblance in Robert Edwin Reilly.  It made me wonder again what my biological father might look like, and where his features show up in my own.

Last night, both of my brothers and I were spending time together, I found myself reviewing their facial features when it struck me that I didn’t have just my own face to look to for cues, but my brothers’ as well.  My brothers look very different from one another, but I look a bit like each of them.  Regardless, somewhere, in looking into each of their faces, I see my biological father.  I can’t decipher where exactly yet, but he is there.  It’s a strange thought, but a good reminder that with my brothers, I’m not in this alone.  The unfamiliar becomes more familar in them.

I still struggle with venturing to use the term “biological father” rather than just “donor”.  Donor feels too impersonal for the relationship to me, to half of me, but any term that contains the word “father” within it seems to go much too far.  To me, he feels more like the distance of an uncle, but an uncle from whom I am directly descended.  He doesn’t hold the emotional seat of father, and neither would I ever want him to, but he isn’t insignificant to me–he is family, and he is my path to the rest of myself.  I’ll have to think more about how I want to refer to him.

And with that established–onward!