Working it Out

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Surprisingly, I wasn’t anxious to find out who my biological father was because, with every passing day, I felt in my gut that I already knew who it was. I was bouncing all around through those stages of grief, and depression was a big one now.  Long-forgotten memories started to slowly become conscious ones. When I was about ten years old, I was snooping through my mother’s wallet, and I found a photo of him tucked away between pictures of us kids. I didn’t particularly understand why, but I never questioned it. And I couldn’t ask her about it because I would get in trouble for snooping through her things. Certain things were making sense now, like the memories of him coming to our house often when I was a pre-teen. He and my mother would sit in the living room over a beverage and chat. They would catch each other up on their lives. All of us kids were milling around, so nothing funny was happening. He would stay for an hour or two, say goodbye to all of us, and then leave. Honestly, I was more interested in watching the Partridge Family, so I never really gave it any thought and would head down to our family room to watch TV. I was either the most innocent kid in the world or the dumbest. I don’t know which.

But sometime during that early summer of 2016, I suddenly had renewed energy bordering on anger. A year had passed since I had gotten those original results. Now, I had an overwhelming need to know who I was and to prove who my biological father was.

I chose a time when I wouldn’t have any distractions, opened up my Ancestry account, clicked on “Create a New Tree,” and named the tree with his surname. I made the tree private and unsearchable and typed his name as the home person: Joseph Callaghan*.

*For ease of telling my story, I will refer to him by this pseudonym. Other pseudonyms will also have an asterisk the first time I mention them. It gets too confusing keeping track of who I am talking about otherwise. Even though all parties named here have passed away, I’m really not ready to publicly reveal his name, and I’m not sure if I ever will be.

I didn’t really know any details about Joseph except for his first and last name and that he lived in the same town as I did at some point. I knew he owned and operated a small market and butcher shop that was started by his father. I searched his name, the town, the state, and a vague guess of his birth year. The first record that came up was the 1920 census for my town. A household with a grandmother named Julia, a mother named Katherine, a father named Joseph*, a daughter age two named Helen, and a 10-month-old baby boy named Joseph Jr. were listed. I scanned my eyes across the document, and under father’s industry, it said, “Meat Market.” Bingo. That 10-month-old is surely him, I thought. 

Now that I had what I felt was a solid foundation, I continued on, gathering census records, military records, city directories, and yearbook photos, fleshing out the man who might be my biological father.

In all honestly, it took me all of 45 minutes to figure it out. The truth had been hiding in plain site for two years, really. I didn’t have to look any further than his parents and the woman who, two years earlier, contacted me because I was a second cousin DNA match to her father. In this woman’s tree was Joseph’s mother, who turned out to be the great aunt of her father. I connected all the dots.

There it was. Joseph Callaghan was my biological father. He lived less than 10 minutes away from me my entire life.

This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you start at my first post of the series HERE.

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