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!