I have been pretty quiet here lately since I have been away traveling around Europe (will post about that later) and especially now that I have started work, but I want to blog about something amazing that happened recently! Two weekends ago my dad got a chance to meet his half brother who was given up for adoption. So here’s the story leading up to how this amazing reunion came to be… a family reunion 57 years in the making!
Backstory
In May of 2016, I logged onto 23andme expecting nothing out of the ordinary on my accounts, but shortly realized that my father had a new member on his relative list… a half-brother. At first this was not too shocking since I grew up with a few half-uncles and half-aunts, but when I checked their haplogroups and realized that it was a maternal match and not a paternal match… I, and ultimately my family, was completely surprised. I knew my dad was 1 of 9 siblings and I grew up knowing about each of those siblings, but little did we know that my dad was actually 1 of 10! (the number is either 9 or 10 and I’ll get into this debate in a bit which ties directly into this story).
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| Half-Brother Discovered [Personal Photo] |
As you can see, directly after me the highest match my father has is his half-brother at 28.8% DNA shared across 58 segments. And a glance at their X-chromosome shows that they inherited a completely identical X from their mother through which they are related. Also, once I saw they both share the maternal haplogroup L2a1… I quickly knew that this match was through his mother as well.
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| Completely Identical X-Chromosome [Personal Photo] |
When I broke the news to my dad he was a bit shocked. He knew of a half sister from his father’s side and grew up with all of his maternal half-siblings… or so he thought. Our first reaction was to reach out to various family members. We called my grandfather, great-aunt, and a few uncles/aunts to see if anyone had any idea of an adoption in our family – specifically in regards to my grandmother. But to everyone’s surprise, no one had known that my grandmother had had another child who would end up adopted. Because of the American name, I figured that this sibling was probably born in the USA and left for adoption there. We started to chronologically go through my grandmother’s life listing major events and other children’s birth years and I remembered hearing from my great-aunt that my grandmother had spent part of the 1950-1960s living in Florida working for a doctor as live-in help there. Could this half-uncle of mine be from Florida himself?
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| Sharing Maternal Haplogroups [Personal Photo] |
I debated whether I should reach out first or give him some time to process this information and wait for his message. But then doubt set in, what if he never logs in again? What if he’s not sure how to find/use relative finder? So I bit the bullet and sent him a message. The next day… I had a response!
Getting to know Charles
As I had suspected, my new half-uncle had been born in 1960 and raised in Florida, which fits the narrative of my grandmother’s time there. Though both parties were initially shocked, we chatted back and forth a bit sharing information and pictures of his mother, grandparents, and new half-siblings. We added each other on Facebook and knew we would try to remain in contact. As time passed, my family and I kept trying to dig in more into this unusual and unspoken adoption.
The reason I say unusual is become Charles was neither the first born nor the last born of the bunch, Charles would be child 3 of 10 and my grandmother would go on to raise all of the children (we thought) she had given birth to. As our family kept thinking and coming up with new ideas, a story I had heard various times through my genealogy searches crept back into my head.
My dad always told a story that my grandmother had lost a child right after childbirth. This child, a boy, was born alive and my grandmother held him on her chest. The nurses took him off to be cleaned up and that was the last my grandmother saw of him… he apparently had been declared dead shortly after. Hearing this story, I always figured that my dad was 1 of 9 (8 who made it to adulthood, and one who had died in infancy). I had searched for the records of the Civil Registry of Puerto Rico searching for a children born in the 1960-1970s to a Carmen María Vélez Avilés in San Juan, Puerto Rico but nothing was found. And then I began to wonder… could this “deceased child” be the same child who was given up for adoption? What’s interesting is that after meeting Charles, he told us that he had been adopted shortly after his birth and that his mother who raised him was told that his bio-mom (my grandmother) had died giving birth to Charles. So as you can see… there is a lot of mystery surrounding this event in my grandmother’s life.
As my trip in Europe came to close, my mother wrote to me and told me that they were on vacation in Florida and my father wanted to meet his half-brother. I messaged back and forth between my parents and Charles and set on a date – Sunday at 2pm! I was excited and a bit jealous that I wasn’t there myself to meet this new family member, but happy nonetheless that my family was reuniting with a piece we had no idea was missing.
A family reunites
The day of the meeting, my mom and I were in constant contact. Tu padre está nervioso… your dad’s nervous she wrote. They were 30 minutes away and both my dad and his brother had texted each other that morning both excited and nervous of what was to come. A little past 2pm I got a FaceTime call from my mother… and on the other end was my newly acquired family members: a new uncle, aunt, and cousins! We chatted a bit and I was happy to see everything was going well – a genealogist’s dream come true!
Really it’s thanks to 23andme that my father was able to meet his half brother, and thanks to my parents for testing which helped me with my genealogical journey. Though we had tested years ago (I initially testing around 2009-2010), you never know what your results will show and who they can help out as well throughout time! I am definitely happy that I was able to reunite my father to his brother via DNA!
Here are some pictures of their meeting. I am happy to say my parents got another chance to meet up with my uncle and his family before they left Florida. We are excited to see where our relationship goes next, whether meeting again in New York or hopefully having a chance to head to Puerto Rico for Charles to meet his other siblings and see places connected to his maternal heritage.
PS – Though our families were able to meet, there is still a lot to question about my grandmother’s life. We have no idea what conditions or situation my grandmother was under to give up a child for adoption (whether on purpose or forcefully). However, we do know that my grandmother was a young single mother and only had her own mother at home and two siblings, seeing as how her father had died early on in her life. We aren’t sure who Charles’ father is and we are hoping that with DNA we will be able to find out about more his paternal side of the family and piece together more about this story. We can neither condemn nor forgive those of the past for the decisions they have had to make, especially when we are not in their shoes. Nonetheless, we are happy that though initially separated our families have been able to reunite through the power of DNA!
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| Brothers José and Charles reunited! [Personal Photo] |
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| My parents and aunt meet their brother and his family [Personal Photo] |
