A couple of weekends ago, I was feeling the need to get away…reflect and recharge.  I ended up going to the shore (yes, in the middle of winter) for a long weekend.  It was glorious.

At the time, I was dealing with yet another crazy situation in my life.  In the midst of it, I got a message from my search angel, Gel.  It had been a while since I’d last heard from her, and I was beginning to worry that she had lost interest in my case.  As it turned out, she had just been pretty sick over the past few weeks.  Also, she has other work during the week, so usually can only help out with searches on weekends.  I was just so grateful that she was still in it with me!

We chatted a bit, getting each other caught up.  She had made HUGE strides on fleshing out my mirror tree, following back and documenting family lines at least as far back as the 1700s.  This is no easy feat.  On top of that, she had built out the present-generation family lines of my Great-Great Grandparents’ descendents.  Traditionally, this is even HARDER to do because AncestryDNA’s privacy rules make it such that information on living people contained in member’s family trees are not publicly available.  Those family members appear as locked, unnamed entries on public trees (the only way you can see them is if it’s either a tree that YOU created or if the tree was individually shared with you).

As such, she had to do a TON of savvy, well planned internet searches (between googling folks names tied to obituaries, and skimming them to obtain names of surviving relatives, searching school yearbook websites, white pages, and other sources) in order to arrive at that information.

Of course, I had actually done a lot of that same research and came upon most of that same information at various points over the past several months, and didn’t realize she was planning on going so far.  I felt really badly that I may have wasted her time in that respect, but feel even more enormously grateful to her as a result.  She has clearly dedicated countless hours to the research she’s conducted so far–for me, a perfect stranger–for free.  This is how you know that you’re working with an incredible human being, one who has the heart of a gigantic sized mythical creature.  We still have a lot of work to do, and I’m already forever in her debt.

When I brought this up to her, she shrugged it off as nothing.  She, like me, sees other donor conceived folks as each others’ family in our own right, whether we’re related or not.  We’re in the same unique (and profoundly unjust) situation, and we get it–we can relate to each other in a way that most others couldn’t.  It’s an exceptional bond, and one that helps me feel less alone.  We’re in this fight together, and I couldn’t be more grateful to have finally found respite in this camaraderie.  It also happens to be a badass group of some seriously smart as hell folks–most of our donors were medical students or scientists, plus it takes a certain unconventional type of person to anonymously donate their sperm–and we didn’t get half of our genes from nowhere.

Aside from discussing my case, while we had our time-zone wakeful hours finally aligned, we were able to swap stories and commiserate with our common plight.  She told me about her situation, where she’s at with her search, and her own feelings/perspective in processing all of this, and I was able to share mine.  We were able to be compassionate and supportive toward one another–something I’ve desperately been needing.

We also talked about some concrete next steps that I could take.  One of these was to create additional mirror trees (based off of other close matches’ trees).  These trees would still be contained within the same master mirror tree.  The purpose of this is to attempt to see if and how the family lines of the different sub-trees connect.  If you’re able to identify where they do, you can essentially narrow down your search to a more distinct family line (in this case, it could at least help in identifying which of Robert Edwin Reilly and Mary Ethel Kelly’s children is my grandparent).  She also advised reaching out to other close matches to see if they might be able to fill in more gaps for me (whether they currently have a tree attached to their profile or not).

Gel was also impressed with the progress I had made so far in my tree/search, which was a nice affirmation…this is not easy or quick work to do.  Also, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, she confirmed that each subsequent rung of narrowing down my search will likely be harder and harder to do.  There’s just less and less publicly available and easily found information to peruse due to privacy constraints.  You can’t even access Census data online if it’s from a Census that was conducted in the last 50 years, all for the same reason.

While I still had Gel “on the line”, I gave her the login information for the FTDNA portal associated with my brother’s Y-DNA kit.  I figured she might be able to deduce more from it than I could, given that she’s been doing these kinds of searches for longer than I have.  She said that she isn’t as familiar with Y-DNA testing but that she’d give it a shot.

Immediately, she commented on the fact that many of my matches have surnames like “Reily” and “O’Reilly”.  Like me, she surmised that these are probably just variations on the surname “Reilly”.  A while back, I had looked into this same possibility and found that, indeed, Reilly is an Americanized version of the original Irish “O’Reilly” surname–it even has its own crest!

This just served to further confirm that we’re on the right track with honing in on the Philadelphia/South Jersey based Reilly family.

One such historical website put it this way:

A while back, Gel had also recommended going to my AncestryDNA list of matches and using the search feature to see if any matches had particular surnames of interest in their family trees (while still keeping in mind that not all members have trees associated with their account).  I had done this at different points in time without all the much success.  However, on a hunch, I decided to try again but this time instead of using surnames associated with Robert Edwin Reilly or Ethel Mary Kelly, using the paternal surnames of my closest DNA match (Jessie).  I knew it would be unlikely to result in any hits since the amount of DNA she shares with me suggests that I wouldn’t match her father’s line (and thus that her parents are not my grandparents).  However, I noticed that when I input various surnames from that side of her tree, I was getting match hits anyway.  Gel also thought this was unusual.  We’re still not exactly sure why that would be.  At this point in time, my best guess is that it’s because of the way that Scandinavian folks (of the Danish and Norwegian variety, in particular) seem to work their surname conventions.  The last portion, or suffix, really, of those surnames are all code for the generic term “son of”, and the first part of the surname is the FIRST name of that person’s father.  As such, surnames change with each subsequent generation (although they also may frequently remain the same since it was common for families to name at least one of their sons after their father).  Further, it appears that the first names frequently given to sons are very popular names, and thus many folks with ancestry from this part of the world end up having a fairly narrow variety in last names (and, of course, first names, for that matter).  This Wikipedia article confirmed my hunch.  In fact, this last name is literally the most common Danish surname, followed closely by the rest that I saw frequently populating Jessie’s paternal family tree.

Anyway, all that to say that since I DO have some Scandinavian heritage, and based on how they pass on their surnames, it’s probably just a coincidence that I have matches with the same surnames in their trees.

But, then again, who knows.  I’m not currently in a position to totally disregard any possible leads.

At the end of our conversation, she noted that she had made some updates to the donor conceived DNA search guide she had been creating.  She mentioned that there was still a lot of work to be done and that it would certainly need ongoing editing.  I immediately felt the need to help, and offered to take a stab at reviewing/editing it if that would be helpful.  She was thrilled to have help, and I was thrilled to finally have a way to start giving back my own time, skills, and resources to the donor conceived community.  It feels tremendously important to me to lend my support in any way I can.  Besides, I finally have the flexibility in my schedule, so I might as well put it to good use!

Building community. Serving a larger purpose.  These are the kinds of things that fuel me, and the sorts of things that I’ve intentionally taken time off to reflect on and search for.  Maybe, in some way, my identity, and with it my new purpose, has found ME.

So, I have several posts-worth of updates that I meant to write before this one, but this JUST happened and feels too significant not to write about in the moment.

I just spoke with my possible paternal aunt!!!

I think I mentioned earlier that, a while back, I had sent out facebook friend requests to several Reilly family members who I had (okay, creeplily) found over the interwebs.  Anyway, as of a couple months or so ago, only one of them, Meredith (name changed), had accepted my friend request, and it just so happened to be the “family historian”.

Gulp!  This could either be good or bad?

From what I could tell over Facebook, she and I seemed to have a lot in common (similar beliefs, both love animals, etc. etc.), so I figured she would probably accept me, but I didn’t know for sure.

Fast forward a bit, and I had a realization about my brother’s Y-DNA results.  I already knew that Reilly (and variations of the name) showed up in his Y-DNA match list.  What I didn’t (for some reason) put together was that this actually quickly narrows down my list of who my paternal grandparents could be.  After reading up about how Y-DNA works, I learned that Y-DNA is ONLY passed from fathers to sons.  It traces one’s father’s father’s father’s (etc.) heritage line.  That means that the Reilly surname was passed on to my brother(s) from our father, and from HIS father, and his father’s father.  This gives me one big gigantic clue–our donor’s biological FATHER (not mother) was a Reilly.  Our paternal grandparent’s father was a Reilly.  Robert Edwin Reilly only had two sons.  Jacob Robert Reilly and Ryan David Reilly.

As it turns out, Meredith is Ryan David Reilly daughter.

I’ve been treading lightly, not wanting to message her about all of this and possibly scare her (and maybe my biological father, who may be one of her brothers) away.

Anyway, fast forward again.  This time, Nicole posts something on facebook about how she was just tested for skin cancer (fortunately her results were clear), and how she recently found out that skin cancer runs in part of the Reilly family.  Also that she has a vitamin D deficiency.  Incidentally, I had just had my own blood-work done and am also vitamin D deficient, so I posted something about this on her timeline (and thanking her for sharing the hereditary information re: skin cancer/melanoma in the family).

Jessie, who I hadn’t heard from in a while, responded to my post!  She shared a little more information about how melanoma runs in the Reilly family, and suggested that I get in touch with Meredith (!) to try and find out more about genetic health of the rest of the Reilly family (since she had limited information but figured Meredith would know more).

Well, no time like the present, eh?

It took some healthy encouragement from Nicole and a big dose of bravery on my part, but I decided that I couldn’t keep putting off talking to Meredith for forever.

I put aside the risk that she, my own family, and probably my largest lifeline to learning more about this side of myself, might reject me.  I put aside the risk that she might also warn her male family members that I was looking for them, in order to “protect” them.  But, ultimately, I had to have a little faith, and hope that she would find it in her heart to feel compassion toward me. And that she might even be interested, too.  That maybe she WOULD see me as a person who mattered, as, in some way, family.  As worthy of love and connection.  So, I pushed aside my fears and took the plunge.

(In order to be respectful to Meredith, since I’m not sure how she would feel about my blogging about this, I’m not going to paste our whole conversation verbatim.  I’ll start off with my initial messages, then switch to a summary of hers.)

I held my breath, then eventually let it go and moved on with my day when I realized I wasn’t going to receive a response immediately.  I told myself that she was probably just busy and not on facebook at the time.

Later that night, while I was out to dinner with my family, I saw that she had responded!  At first I was too scared to read what she said, but then decided that I didn’t want her to think that I was rude for not responding right away.  Without fully reading her message, I skimmed it and noted that she had sent some top-line hereditary health information, then expressed a curiosity around how exactly we are related. Oh boy.

I quickly wrote back thanking her for her quick response, then said that I was out at dinner with my family and couldn’t write back much at the moment.  And that the “how we’re related” thing is a bit complicated, but that I’d be able to explain it better once I got home.

I couldn’t eat much for the rest of the meal–WAY too nervous to keep anything else down!

When I got home, I messaged Meredith back.

I had dropped the bombshell.  From there, all I could do was wait and pray.

Fortunately, someone up there was listening, because my prayer was answered.

In a grand act of cosmic mercy, Meredith was not only compassionate toward me, but INTERESTED and EXCITED about the fact that we are family!  She immediately started asking me questions about where my brothers and I were born and whatever details I had about our parents’ donor/our biological father.  I don’t want to quote her full response, but I think it’s safe to share one thing verbatim, which was “This is just so cool”.

Phew!!!  I expressed my relief that she was okay with all of this and wasn’t immediately seeking to disown me from her life.

Quite the opposite–she was incredibly supportive and promised to try and help me figure it out.  Even after I explained James’ Y-DNA results, and how that narrowed down the list of possible grandparents to the males of that generation, she was still with me.  Without my having to explain further, she deduced that Jacob Robert Reilly and her father were my only grandparent options, and that, as a result, she may very well be my Aunt.  And she found this exciting!!!

I also explained how I had been doing a lot of research, and had been finding that fertility doctors weren’t always 100% ethical in how they came about their “donors”.

She mentioned that one of her brothers had been in a Philadelphia hospital for a severe accident in the 80s, and surmised that it was possible that the doctors had taken various sample from him to check his vitals and fertility as they treated him.  While we can’t know if this is true yet, just the fact that she was open to exploring these possibilities with me was so reassuring. She also suggested that, if not one of her brothers, it could have been one of her cousins, Keith (name changed), who is Jacob Robert Reilly’s only son, (and who currently lives in South Jersey, close to Philadelphia), although she specified that he is Jacob’s only son as far as she knows.  Anything is possible!  The fact that she was even willing to entertain that idea (and not regard it as blasphemy) was also reassuring to me.  We didn’t explore that option too much for the moment, though.

Instead, I sent her a bunch of family photos of my brothers and I as we were growing up.  Possibly too many, haha.

I told her that I would stop sending pictures for now, since I wasn’t sure if I was overwhelming her.  She said she was excited to see more!  So send more I did!  I won’t include them all here, but there were pictures of us in our Halloween costumes growing up, family reunion photos with my Dad’s family, a family vacation to the Grand Canyon, prom pictures, college pictures, and more.  I tried to give her a sprinkling that would catch her up a bit on our life, on who we are, and that we are okay.  We’ve had a great life with our Dad, even though it was apart from our biological family.  I wanted to humanize us a little bit, too.

She said that seeing the pictures made her so happy.  And that she thinks I’m her niece, because we look very much alike!!

🙂

We chatted for about half an hour longer, and she assured me that she would talk to her brothers (and pass along family pictures of their own!)

I thanked her over and over again for being so open and welcoming, then we said goodnight.

I’m still sort of pinching myself about it, and also trying not to get my hopes up too high…there’s still the possibility that she’ll feel differently after sleeping on it, or that after talking to her brothers, they might ask her to discontinue our conversations.

But I have to hope.  I have to hope that blood is thicker than fear, and the ties of family are bound by the type of love that knows no other bounds.

Here I am.  The prodigal seed that has since flowered across the meadow.  No longer fully yours, but not entirely theirs, either.  Whatever I am, I have returned.