Once again, I find myself backlogged on what I need to report out.  Things are moving pretty quickly, and it’s been a lot to process, to say the least.

I’ve spoken with Meredith several times now, catching each other up on our lives.  She spoke with both of her brothers.  Her older brother is apparently not a candidate, but her younger brother, “Darren” (name changed), is!  He also believes that it’s possible that, while in the hospital after his accident, his doctors may have taken sperm samples to check his fertility.  If so, knowing what we know now about how early fertility doctors frequently went rogue, it’s possible that one of his samples was then used to impregnate my mother.

If that happened, in my mind, that is a HUGE violation, and I would totally understand if he were upset by it.  I’M upset by it for him, and I’m the one who got to live life as a result!

However, miraculously, he’s more excited than he is upset.  He actually welcomes the idea that he may have more biological children out there.  At this point in time, he only has one, who was conceived several months before his accident.  He actually thought that the results of his tests indicated that he was infertile after the accident.  That still may be the case, but I’m sort of holding out hope that it may have been him since he’s actually open to us being his biological children.

Since hearing that from Meredith, I’ve received a deluge of facebook friend requests from her siblings and nieces.  We’ve been sending each other messages and pictures as we frantically try to catch up and make up for lost time.  Everyone who has reached out has been tremendously kind and welcoming so far, which has been absolutely beautiful and amazing.

The thing is, I might not be Darren’s.  It’s still also equally if not more possible that I’m Keith’s, and there’s no guarantee that he and his section of the Reilly family will be anywhere near as receptive to us.

Meredith told me that she would speak with Keith’s sister, Christy, about me and keep me posted.  She was good for her word.  After speaking with Christy, Meredith told me that Christy would be calling me soon to chat more.

Gulp-part-2.  Will things go as well with Christy as they had with Meredith, my new lifeline to the Reilly family?

It took a couple days for Christy to reach out.  In the meantime, I worked to further flesh out my mirror tree, particularly on John Robert Reilly’s side, focusing on building backwards in time the family line for his wife, Mary Neill.  If I could get a few more surnames to work with, I could then compare those with my match lists for any hits.

When I discovered Mary Neill’s parents names, Martin Neill and Bridget Guinness, I then entered “Neill” into the search feature of my AncestryDNA match list.  This would bring up anyone on my match list who also has that surname in their family tree (assuming they had a family tree built out and attached to their profile, which not everyone does).

Bingo.  Not only did I have 12 folks on my match list with “Neill” somewhere in their family tree, but one of my closest paternal matches, “J.O.” (family name Orr) did, too!

^obviously the image doesn’t show the full list, but these are the first 8 of 12.

I then went to check out where on the Orr family tree the Neill name appeared.

This is where I struck gold.

Not only was there a Bridget Neill (not the same one as Mary Neill’s mother, but still), but she was related to GUINNESS!!!

It felt like the pieces were really starting to fall together now.  I knew previously that Orr was a fairly close paternal match, but that he was not genetically related to the other Reilly’s who had tested.  That could only mean that somewhere one of his family lines connected with the Reilly family lines by marriage.  I still didn’t have the exact connection, but it was looking very likely that it ultimately occurred when Mary Neill married Jacob Robert Reilly and had their children, Keith and Christy.

Something else that had been throwing me off all this time while I had been searching for information on Jacob Robert Reilly’s line (which was yielding little to nothing) was revealed to me through Meredith.  As it turns out, Jacob Robert Reilly at some point in his life changed the spelling of his last name, reverting it back to the traditional spelling of Reilly, which was O’Reilly.

The is the spelling that I also saw appear on James’ Y-DNA match list.

It was all starting to make sense.

As excited as I was to have such hot leads, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed in a way for Darren and Meredith.  They had been so excited about us, and Darren was even hopeful that we might be biologically his, even despite the method of conception.  I don’t want to  have gotten his hopes up only to find that we’re not his biological children after all.  I was also selfishly becoming concerned that Meredith and her family might lose interest in me if we were just cousins, no closer related to me than Jessie.  Worse, what if that happened AND it turns out Keith’s side of the family wants nothing to do with us? To feel like I had made so much progress and finally been accepted, only to have all of that taken away has been so frightening.

There’s nothing I can do.  All I can do is hope.

Christy called me two nights ago around 7:30pm.  I had been wired all day and had just taken something to help me fall asleep since I knew I had to be up at 4am the next morning drive my parents to the airport.  Oh, timing!

My energy level wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to be, but I tried to power through.  She started off (after saying hello, of course) by asking me to walk her through how I knew what I thought I knew so far.

Understandable.  Of course she would have every right to be wary and to want to double-check my work.  After all, I am a complete stranger to her.  How could she know the quality of my research, or even what my intentions were?

So I walked her through everything that I knew so far–why I had taken my AncestryDNA test in the first place, how my results made clear that my Dad wasn’t my biological father, what my parents finally told me about our conception and their fertility treatments, etc.  Before I could even get into explaining the ins and outs of how centimorgans (cMs) of DNA work, cross referencing the cM levels of folks on your match list with relationship prediction charts, scouring family trees, how Y-DNA works, etc, she stopped me at my mention of my parents fertility treatments at the hospital where they received them.

Keith’s wife, “Priscilla” (name changed), had worked at at that same hospital as a nurse in the 80s.

She was now convinced that the “donor” was her brother.

I explained how I was learning that fertility doctors, having no real regulations at the time (let alone today) sometimes used unscrupulous measures to get their patients pregnant, such as using sperm samples from other men who were having their own fertility measured.  If the sample was viable, it was sometimes re-purposed, without the provider’s consent, to fertilize another patient.

She told me that Keith and Priscilla had been having their own fertility issues in the 80s (the shape of her uterus had been causing some issues, as I later discovered after some googling lead me to an article featuring Priscilla’s story). They, like my parents, had been receiving treatments at the same hospital, where Priscilla worked, as well.  We both agreed that this may have been the connection to how my brothers and I entered the picture.

Things loosened up a bit from there, although, probably due to her own shock, I didn’t get the sense that she was anywhere near as excited about all of this as Meredith had been.  Maybe she was reserving her full connection with me until she could speak with Keith and confirm the truth.

That has still been hard, but I understand.

I understand that she might not now, or possibly ever, feel towards me the way an Aunt who had known me my whole life would.  This could be to her just a random other set of children of her brother’s who he never intended to have, who were born through an incredible violation of his rights (assuming he didn’t voluntarily donate, which is currently unknown).  Regardless, I never expected for him to feel towards us the way a traditional father would…it’s not even FULLY what I would want–I have a Dad who I love to the moon and back.  Why should I expect her to feel that way?

While I’m not sure that she was immediately “all in” on our familial connection (I’ve just been swimming in a land of assumptions, and mostly fear), she DID generously offer up additional information about her family and childhood memories of growing up in the Reilly family.  She told me that her grandmother (and my great-grandmother), Mary Ethel Kelly Reilly, had the various wings of the Reilly family over, in rotation, for home-cooked Sunday dinners at their home in South Jersey.  Christy reminisced about the recipes her grandmother would make and how wonderful it was to spend that regular time with her family.  She also spoke a bit about her mother’s side of the family, naming some of the same names I had come across in my research.

My research was coming alive across the phone line.

We talked a bit more about each of our families; branches that were different yet also the same.  I then told her a little about where I grew up and went to school.  As it turns out, we both went to Penn State!!  Years apart, of course, but what a coincidence!

She mentioned a bit about her children, their ages and where they live now, stretched across the country.  Then, she mentioned the kicker–her brother, Keith, has three children of his own, two boys and a girl, just slightly younger than my brothers and me.

Whether we are of Darren or Keith, we have half siblings out there for sure.  It was and is a surreal feeling to think about.

As we wrapped up our call, Christy offered to meet up for coffee if she is ever in the Philadelphia area anytime soon, and let me know that she would try to speak with Keith about everything I had shared with her.  She felt sure that he would want to speak with me.  I wasn’t so sure.

I mentioned to her that Darren agreed to take an AncestryDNA test, which would reveal for certain his relationship distance to us.  It was already en route, although the results would likely take another 1-2 months to be received.  I made clear that I didn’t expect her or Keith to test, just that the option was there.  She felt pretty confident that he wouldn’t mind, and even thought it was possible that, after finding that he was fertile, that he and Priscilla may have donated any unused samples of his for the hospital to use with other families desperate to conceive.

It’s a long shot, but it’s possible.  The butterflies in my stomach aren’t painting such a rosey picture, but what do they know either?  Breathe.

After our call, I immediately looked up my possible half-siblings on facebook, looking to see if I could find a resemblance.

While in my mind, it’s there, I don’t know that I trust anything that isn’t objective, verifiable fact at this point.  It’s weird, but I’ve been able to mentally distance myself from feeling too connected to them yet, I’m sure out of an innate sense of self-protection.  Who knows if they will accept us?  Biology doesn’t always mean the same thing to everyone.  Blood doesn’t always mean connection in everyone’s book.

Even if they did accept us, would we have anything in common?  I did notice that one of their facebook profiles prominently featured ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, a symbol that I have cherished and been fascinated with ever since I was a child.

Well, here’s to clicking my heels and finding my DNA’s way home.

Again, it’s been a while since I last wrote–my apologies.  I’ve been jet setting around a bit, first to Florida to spend time with my cousins (on my Dad’s side), then to New Orleans to help a friend with her business launch over Mardi Gras.  And yes, that was crazy, haha.

Anyway, while in Florida, taking a break from the frigid temps of a typical February in Philadelphia, I tried to spend as MUCH time at the beach as possible.  It was glorious.

On one such afternoon, while laying down on my beach blanket with my cousins, I snapped a picture of my view and loaded it to Facebook.  I’m not really the selfie type, so of course it was just of the ocean, but I guess it’s still a slightly obnoxious thing to do when most of your friends are freezing their behinds off and/or are in the office.  But hey, they’ll get their turn to take a vacation or post about something else cool, right?  Right, I told myself.  Ahhhh, this was the life.

A few hours later, I got a Facebook message from Meredith.  Darrin needed some help with registering his AncestryDNA kit.  I did a little bit of googling since it had been a while since I had last registered a test, then passed along some steps for him.  We ultimately needed to decide if he would register the test himself, forming his own account and attaching it to his email address, or if I would register the test for him through my account.  If I did it for him, it would be a lot easier since my generation tends to be a bit techy and I had already gone through this process before (with my own kit and my Mom’s), but that would mean that the test would be officially “administered” by my account, and linked to my email address.  I wasn’t sure how he would feel about this, so wanted to at least initially push the option of him registering it.  However, if he does it, he would not only need to largely figure out how to do it on his own (which felt kind of unfair to put on him), but he would have very limited access to the results without setting up a PAID registered account.  Depending upon the subscription type, that can cost some moolah, which also didn’t really seem fair to him (and it seemed weird for me to offer to pay for that, too, since it’s an annual subscription, which isn’t especially cheap, and I wouldn’t know if he’d want it renewed every year, etc. etc.)

After explaining all of the options and steps that can with them, Meredith relayed all of this to Darrin, and ultimately they just said it would be easiest if I register the kit.  The one good thing that Ancestry does allow for is that I can add his email address as a guest to the results.  That way, he still should receive an email when the results come in and can view them (albeit still in that more limited way), so he wouldn’t be totally separated from the process.  I let her know that I would need the kit’s number in order to register it, which she passed along.  Turns out it was a different number that I needed, and after some back and forth of trying to figure it out (which I was very nervous about, I didn’t want any of this to be difficult for them to do since they were already going out of their way!), we finally got everything set up.  Phew!  They were incredibly gracious about it, which I was, again, enormously thankful for.

She then messaged that she noticed I was in Florida.  I told her about how I was visiting some of my Dad’s family that lives there.

Then she asked me if I wanted to meet Darrin while I was there.  He lives about an hour’s drive away from where I was staying.

Ho. ly.  Shit.

That was a scary question!

I immediately went into panic mode.  A million thoughts went through my mind at once–I was completely overwhelmed.  First, the generosity.  The love and compassion being displayed.  It was unreal.  The fact that she/they were even offering the possibility of us getting to meet just blew my mind.  We dropped on their internet doorsteps out of absolutely nowhere, and they have been nothing but open arms at ever corner.  That alone was powerful beyond belief.

Yet, at the same time, it felt too soon.  For some reason, in my mind, I’ve assumed that I wouldn’t directly interact with Darrin or either of my potential biological fathers until our relationship had already been definitively established.  When I imagine my first meeting, or even conversation with my biological father, I already know who he is to me.  I greet and get to know him as his biological child.  That would just be such a monumental and formative moment that I wouldn’t want it dampened and muddled by any hesitation and lingering questions around who we are to each other.  I want him to meet me as unquestionably his biological daughter.  I don’t want to be holding back in that meeting to protect myself from the possibility that it was all false hope and I wasn’t his, and having that affect such an important first impression.  I want to be able to be all in, and the same for him.  Who were are to one another, at least biologically speaking, needs to be pre-defined.

Just as significantly, I could tell that he was excited about the possibility and I wanted to protect him.  To protect him from any walls that I might have put up that he didn’t deserve, and to protect him from the possibility of us meeting, getting so excited/connecting, then only to find that the DNA results say he’s not our biological father after all.  He and his wing of the family have been so good to us so far that it just didn’t seem right to let this possibility play out.  If by some miracle it plays out that he is our biological father, then you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be booking a flight back to Florida ASAP to meet him.  And if the results show that he is a cousin after all, leaving Keith at bat, then I sure as heck want to meet that wing of the family anyway.  They have been instrumental in our search, and are, at the end of the day, family.  And they are family that has welcomed us.  There is no way that I can repay that gratitude, much less fully demonstrate my love for this critical piece of my family.

Also, I didn’t have a rental car or anything and was pretty much bound to my family’s schedule while I was down there.  I also wasn’t entirely sure how they would feel about my taking time out of my vacation with them to spend time with my “other” father’s side.  My Mom and Dad were going to be in town, too, the next day, so it just felt a bit too complicated for it to be the right move. At that time, anyway.

With a great deal of hesitation, and a billion times more panic, I explained my schedule and who all I was with to Meredith, suggesting that my coming down again sometime soon might be better.

I also explained a bit about how I thought it might be best to do my introduction to him once the results were in. Honestly, saying so felt and still feels awful to say…it’s not like they don’t matter to me unless he is my biological father!  I wanted them to know that, and would hate for him/them to feel in ANY way rejected.  Hell, I would fly out to Savannah and meet her in a second whether results were in yet or not!  But meeting HIM, without knowing if he is my biological father or not first…that I feel needs to be under much more planned circumstances.  It’s just too high stakes of an emotional rollercoaster not to.  Even if he does turn out to only be a cousin, he’s clearly one hell of a guy.

I messaged her explaining how I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up before we got the results, and that it might be too hard on both of us if we started to form a relationship and then found out that we weren’t related in the way that we thought (cousins rather than direct offspring).  I also explained that I 100% want to know ALL of the family regardless, especially all the wings who have been so kind to me, but figured it might be better to do that once we figure out more definitively the nature of our biological relationships to one another.  I was so very grateful to his openness to all of this, and would never want to hurt him if it turned out that I was wrong.

After sending this, I held my breath.  Or at least I did mentally, because I’m pretty sure that I was physically hyperventilating at the moment.

Once again, she proved that love has no bounds.

She was incredibly gracious, and agreed that it might be best to wait for the results and plan our own trip (and said she was hesitant to bring it up, but wanted to at least offer!)  Incredible.  She also talked about how, regardless of how the results pan out, we’re close family, and they would love to meet us.  Double whammy.  These folks are amazing.  How did I get to be so lucky?

I told her that I’d love for us to plan some sort of reunion later on, maybe even taking a trip with some family members to Ireland!  Several of the Reillys have made essentially pilgrimage trips over there to the towns our ancestors are from, and I’ve been dying to get over there ever since learning about my new roots.

I don’t know when, or under what relational circumstances, but we will meet soon.