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.