A Broken Tree Read online

  Within the first hour of our search, my wife found Timmy Jacobson’s obituary. She let out a yell and laughed. We both took one look at the picture of Timmy Jacobson included with his obituary and immediately knew that Mom had been telling the truth about Tim’s paternity. The resemblance between Timmy Jacobson and my brother Tim was so amazingly close, it was impossible to believe otherwise. We never could find a picture of Ray, who died as a young man, to see if I shared any similarities with him. I didn’t really look much like Timmy, but with my brother Tim, there was no doubt.

  I called Tim and told him what I had found. I sent him the link to the website where he could find Timmy’s obituary. When Tim saw the photo of Timmy, he laughed as well. Seeing Timmy’s picture triggered a memory in Tim’s mind of an event that took place several years before. It hadn’t made sense then, but now, with the information we had discovered, it had all become clear. Tim said that several years ago when he’d returned home to visit family and friends, he’d spent an evening at the local country fair. Our dad was there, too, along with one of his friends. Dad introduced his friend to Tim, saying, “Tim, this is Timmy Jacobson. Timmy Jacobson, this is Tim Anderson.” Tim had just laughed and said, “Your name should be easy for me to remember.” They chitchatted for a few minutes, and then Timmy Jacobson and Dad walked away.

  Upon reflection, Tim thought this was a bit odd. Why had Dad introduced him to Timmy Jacobson? He’d never introduced any of his children to his friends before. It didn’t make any sense. Did Dad know that Timmy was Tim’s biological father? Did Timmy know? If Timmy did know, when did he discover this information, and who told him? With both men deceased, we will likely never know. Perhaps it was one father introducing his son to a friend, with no knowledge of the truth; perhaps it was something more.

  It was bugging me that I didn’t know whether Tim and I were half-brothers or full brothers. Tim and I have always been more than just brothers. From the time we were little boys, we’d always been very close friends. As kids, we did a lot of things together. In school, we had common friends, and we both played the same sports. I’m not sure why I wasn’t content to know we were at least half-brothers, but I wasn’t. Deep down inside, I wanted us to be full brothers, with the same mom and the same dad.

  I decided that Tim and I should be tested through AncestryDNA, as we’d done with Paul’s son, Mike, to determine once and for all if we were full or half-brothers. I bought two kits, one for me and one for Tim. We provided the saliva samples and sent them in. I wasn’t expecting too much from this, but I’d learned that if there was a possibility of finding something I’m looking for, then it’s worth taking the chance.

  When I got my test results back, I’d hit the jackpot! I was amazed to find the information I was looking for. The test showed that Tim and I are listed as “Immediate Family,” not cousins or any other distant relationship. The test also found a match with someone we’re more distantly related to on the AncestryDNA website. It showed that person as a cousin to Tim and me, and had her listed as the granddaughter of Ray Jacobson, not Timmy Jacobson. As I looked at the relationship in the tree, I realized my mom was wrong when she’d told me that Ray Jacobson was my father. In reality, Timmy Jacobson was my biological father. I now knew that my brother Tim and I really are full brothers, not half-brothers. This was the proof I’d been looking for. Since that first discovery, several other Jacobson family members have added their DNA to the AncestryDNA database, and each of their test results have added more proof to confirm the fact that Tim and I are full brothers.

  I used this same strategy with my other brothers and sisters, and discovered that my oldest three sisters, Holly, Judy, and Gloria, also share the same biological father. I originally thought that we were nine children with nine different fathers. Now the picture was taking on a whole new look and feel.

  I called Tim and shared the news with him. Out of the whole family, at least we could say for sure that we really are full biological brothers. For some people, bloodlines would not make a difference; for me, it did. Although I’d told myself throughout our

  investigation that it didn’t matter if we were half- or full brothers—as far as I was concerned, our bond would be the same, no matter what—somehow, just knowing we were full brothers helped to cement our relationship even more.

  Some New Insights into Judy and

  Gloria’s Father

  After Judy and Gloria discovered that Mark Anderson was not their biological father, of course they wanted to know who their biological fathers were. Mom had said Gloria’s father was Robert Marsh, a military man from Missouri. Neither Gloria nor I ever believed this story; it just didn’t feel right. I’d learned long ago, especially when dealing with family matters, that when something doesn’t feel right, it generally deserves some more attention. I’d learned to trust my gut. When I mentioned my feelings to Gloria, she agreed. It didn’t feel right to her, either.

  Thinking back on the stories I’d heard, I had a hunch there might be a slight possibility that the father of Judy and Gloria could possibly be the same man who had fathered our oldest sister, Holly. I was basing this on four important facts: First, as I mentioned earlier, before Mom married Mark, she was dating two men at the same time, Mark and Sam. Both were vying for her hand in marriage. Mom had decided to marry Sam, which meant Mark was out of the picture. However, because of an argument she had with Sam, Mom decided to break off the engagement. She then told Mark she would marry him, and they wed shortly thereafter. If Mom’s marriage to Mark was nothing more than the foolhardy act of a stubborn woman, proving to the man she really loved—Sam—that he didn’t own her, then you have to wonder how committed she actually was to making her marriage with Mark work. As angry as she might have been with Sam, you have to consider the possibility that she’d still had very deep feelings for him.

  Second, a few months after Mom and Mark were married, Mark enlisted in the army. World War II was in full swing, and if Dad hadn’t enlisted, he knew he would be drafted. His thinking was that if he signed up for service in the army, he might have some say in where he would be posted, thus staying away from the front, where the odds of a soldier coming home were considerably lower.

  During Mark’s time in the army, he was sent to various locations throughout the United States and, eventually, over to Europe. While in the States, he was occasionally given leave to come home and spend time with his wife. But for the most part, he was gone for most of the four years he was in the military. Mom’s ex-boyfriend Sam stayed behind to run the family farm while all of his brothers left to serve in the war. At that time, it was military policy to leave at least one son at home to help run family farms, so that parents would never be faced with the possibility of losing all of their sons as casualties of war. It also ensured that farms would continue to operate, providing the food necessary to feed the troops.

  So, while Mark was off fighting the war, Sam was running the family farm, which just so happened to be about six miles away from where Mom was living. After four years of service in the army, Mark came home for good. By this time, three daughters had been born.

  Third, a year before Mark died, my sister Gloria remembers talking with him at his home. He told her that things had almost turned out quite differently for the family. When he came home from serving in the military, something bad had happened between our parents. According to Mark, as he was returning home from active service, he and the other soldiers he was traveling with ended up stuck in some small Podunk town. He said it had something to do with processing the paperwork to get the troops released from service and back home. With tens of thousands of American troops all returning home within such a short period of time, the process of getting them released from the military quickly became bogged down. This meant Mark and his fellow soldiers were stuck in the middle of nowhere for a whole week.

  To kill time, they played cards—a lot of cards. As I mentioned earlier, Mark was a very skilled gambler. He knew how to run a good b
luff when one was needed, and ended up winning more than $4,000 in just that one week—quite a sizable sum at the time. One of the signs of a good gambler is to know when to cash in your winnings and walk away. Mark didn’t exactly walk away, but he did send home the $4,000 he had won. He then continued to gamble, knowing that if he lost everything, at least he still had $4,000 waiting for him back home.

  The average income of a working man at that time was about $2,400 a year. This meant that Mark had won nearly two years’ worth of income that week—truly an amazing windfall for him. He planned to use the money to purchase a brand-new home for his young family when he got back home. The average cost of a home back then was $4,600, so his winnings would have practically covered the entire cost. He would have been able to do what few other young men could afford to do at the time: own a home outright, without a mortgage hanging over his head.

  When Mark sent the money home, he gave our mom explicit instructions to put it right in the bank, and not spend a penny of it! He knew what Mom was like when she got ahold of money. She could do a lot of things well, but managing money wasn’t one of them. My parents’ lives were filled with a lot of hard times simply because Mom couldn’t manage money. Now that they had $4,000, free and clear, Mom’s discipline (or lack thereof) would be sorely tested.

  I don’t think anyone but our parents knew all the details of what happened to that $4,000. It’s something that wasn’t talked about in our home. The few times my siblings and I did discuss it, we did so in hushed voices, out of hearing range of Mom and Mark. I learned about this incident only because Holly told me about it during one of the times she was mad at Mark about something. But even then, she didn’t provide as many details as I wanted to hear.

  Some thought that Mom used the money to help her ex-

  boyfriend Sam invest in something. Others think that she went to Las Vegas with Sam before Mark got home and lost all the money gambling. Of course, this was all speculation; the things that happen in any marriage are unknowable to anyone but the two people in it. In all of my research, I have never found a single bit of solid evidence to explain where all that money went. Our parents were the only ones who knew the answers for sure, and they are both gone now. I doubt we will ever know the truth of what happened to Dad’s jackpot.

  One thing is certain, however; when Dad came home from the war, something very big happened, and Dad decided he was going to take Gloria, who was only a few months old at the time, and go away, leaving Holly and Judy with Mom.

  This came as a tremendous shock to Gloria. She was sixty-nine years old when Dad told her this shocking bit of family history. She kept asking herself, Why would Dad leave Mom and abandon his two oldest daughters—just because Mom blew through his $4,000? Why would he take Gloria off somewhere far away, never to see her mother and sisters again? Gloria wondered whether Mark might have learned that Holly and Judy were not his daughters. (Little did he know at the time, but Gloria wasn’t his daughter, either.) We don’t know for sure whether Mark ever found out that Gloria was not his daughter, or indeed, if he ever had any idea how many of us kids he may have fathered.

  The fourth and final clue comes from a poem written by my mother. I didn’t discover this poem until after she had passed away. It was not written to Mark, but to another unnamed man for whom my mother had feelings. In this poem, she talks about how much she wants to be with him, and speaks of the daughter they had in secret. The child’s name in the poem is Judy, the name of my second sister.

  Untitled

  How will little Judy feel

  When she realizes the fact

  That you are gone?

  She won’t believe that you will not be back.

  She knows the love that we once shared,

  How much it meant to me.

  I know she’ll never understand

  Why I should set you free.

  Poor thing, perhaps someday she’ll learn

  Before it’s too late,

  That love like ours could never be

  We only tempted fate.

  These four clues make for a strong argument that Sam’s involvement with Mom was not over with their breakup on the dance floor. It sounds like their relationship survived long after Mom and Mark were married. By her own declaration, it became common knowledge within the family that Holly’s father was not Mark, but Sam, her former fiancé.

  After Holly’s death, we thought we had lost any chance of proving a genetic connection between Holly, Judy, and Gloria. We had very little faith in Mom’s word—that Gloria was conceived during a one-night stand with a soldier from Missouri. And with Judy preferring not to confront Mom about who her father was, we had almost nothing to go on regarding who her father was. Yet I had a feeling there had to be some way I could confirm this connection.

  I decided to call my friend Jack at Andergene Labs again to discuss what options might be available to help Judy and Gloria learn who their biological fathers were. As we’d done with Paul’s son, Mike, we decided to get a DNA sample from Holly’s daughter, Tiffany. We had already established that Holly was Sam’s daughter, so if we could get a cheek swab from Tiffany, we could compare it with the DNA samples that Jack already had on file from both Judy and Gloria. By comparing Tiffany’s DNA with her aunts’ DNA, we might be able to make a match. We already knew from Ancestry

  DNA’s test results that Judy and Gloria were full sisters, sharing the same mother and father. If we could connect Holly with Judy and Gloria, we would know for sure that all three sisters shared the same father, the real love of Mom’s life, Sam.

  After several weeks, I got a call from Jack telling me that he had completed the tests on Tiffany’s DNA sample. He had conclusive proof: Holly, Judy, and Gloria were indeed full sisters, all three, the biological daughters of Sam, not Mark.

  Judy and Gloria were absolutely delighted to learn that Holly was also their full sister. Even in their seventies, they still call each other at least once a week, sometimes more, just to talk and see what’s happening in each other’s lives. When Holly was alive, they all found great joy in spending time together. Knowing that they are full biological sisters deepens the sense of sisterhood Judy and Gloria share, the same emotions Tim and I felt when we found out that we are full brothers.

  For the past three years, we had believed we were a family with nine children, each fathered by nine different men, none of us by the one we knew as Dad. Now the story had taken on a more hopeful and happier sense of relationship. At this point, we have established that there were six different fathers rather than nine. For what it’s worth, this does give us some comfort, knowing that some of us really are full brothers and sisters.

  A few other options are available to us that might provide some additional facts about our family and, hopefully, remove some lingering doubts. Most of these options involve telling people who are complete strangers that we are their half-brothers or half-sisters. I’m not sure if we’re ready to reach out to them just yet with this information. At this point, I plan to sit back for a while and see how things play out before taking the next step. It’s time for me to catch my breath and look back in awe at where this journey has taken our family.

  Section 2

  Questions and Answers

  Chapter 7

  Questions and Answers

  While researching my family’s story, I’ve shared what I’ve found with many of my friends. Most of them knew nothing of my family, and have never met any of my brothers or sisters. At first, I used to tell this story just to see how people would respond. I was having a lot of fun seeing the looks of shock and disbelief on their faces as they listened to the details of my story. I think it helped me realize that I was not the only one who reacted this way when I learned each new piece of information. Not only did it validate my own responses, but I also enjoyed watching my friends try to comprehend the details and make sense of this crazy story. Some of them thought I was making it up, or that it was some kind of joke. They were waiting
for me to deliver the punch line, but the punch line never came. As they heard my story unfold, they kept asking for more information. They wanted clarification on some of the details because what they were hearing just didn’t make sense to them.

  As I continued to share this story with others, I noticed that a set of core questions came up again and again. Since most readers will likely have similar questions, I’ve listed the most common questions below, along with my responses.

  Do you wonder if anyone thinks you’ve made up this entire story? It just seems too incredible to be true.

  Earlier in this book, I noted that Brianne Kirkpatrick estimated that as many as 5 to 10 percent of the more than 50,000 DNA tests ordered revealed cases in which a child was not related to one or both parents.[1] That’s a lot of people who are surprised by their DNA test results. I expect that over time, as tens of millions more of these home-testing DNA kits are sold each year, and the technology for interpreting those tests becomes more sophisticated, we’ll see the percentage of these discoveries grow. As these cases become more prevalent, stories like mine could become fairly commonplace.

  However, during the early years of my research, stories of non-parental discoveries were just beginning to show up in the public media. I have to admit that if someone had told me a story like this several years ago, I might have thought some creative liberties had been taken. In fact, I’m not sure I would have believed them at all. When you look at our family’s experience, the whole story just sounds too crazy to be true. But that’s the very reason I had to go after the facts. I wanted to make sure that all of the details were accurate and that nothing would be forgotten with the passage of time. This story has to be completely and totally accurate, for our posterity’s sake.