A Broken Tree Read online

  I can vouch that this story is true. I’ve taken painstaking efforts to verify every detail, and have left a paper trail for anyone to follow if they feel they need to. As long as my siblings and I know it’s true, it doesn’t really matter whether others believe it or not. This book was written for the descendants of Mark and Linda Anderson. They are the primary audience. They need to know the truth about their family’s real history. It would be too easy for the real facts of our story to change during the course of two or three generations into something dramatically different. I want to make sure that the facts will stand alone, and not be embellished or whitewashed with each telling. I want the truth of our family’s origins to be passed down to future generations in its intact form, and not distorted in any way because of personal filters. This is the legacy of our family—who they are, and who they come from. As such, I’ve made every possible effort to make sure that it contains the absolute truth.

  To this day, I still shake my head, wondering what in the world happened with my parents. I find myself wondering if everything my siblings and I have gone through really happened. That’s why I had to go the extra mile to make sure I did all the genetic testing with legitimate, reputable companies, documenting every step of my research along the way. I needed to know that I verified, without question, as much of the information as possible. When I interviewed other members of the family to see if I was missing anything, I was careful never to lead the discussion to any forced

  conclusions that might not have been accurate.

  In the end, I am comfortable with the conclusions I’ve made. Yes, it’s a crazy story, no doubt about that. But it’s a legitimate crazy story, and the facts back it up.

  Would you ever like to connect with your blood brothers and sisters?

  Most of my own brothers and sisters know who their half-siblings are. Several of our half-siblings have already died. At this time, Judy and Gloria have no desire to make contact with their half-siblings. Paul never knew for sure who his father was, and I have never been able to locate any other children of Paul’s (presumed) father, so he never had the chance to make contact with any half-siblings before he died. Neil, Tim, Carlee, and I know who our half-siblings are, but we’ve decided not to make contact, at least for now. I’m confident that most of them do not know anything about this, or that we are related to them in any way.

  Diane was able to make contact with her half-sister Susan. When I was working through AncestryDNA to locate one of her biological father’s living children, I quite unexpectedly stumbled upon a living daughter. Our introduction wasn’t what I had originally planned, but it turned out to be a good experience. Diane and Susan have shared some of their family information and continue to correspond by

  e-mail from time to time. Diane is seventy-three, and Susan is about seventy-eight. They live quite a distance from each other, so I’m not sure if they will ever have a face-to-face meeting. It’s hard for many people to establish new family relationships so late in life. I think they are just fine exchanging e-mails for now.

  In my case, I learned that I went to school with some of my half-siblings. Of course, I had no idea at the time that we were related. It’s a strange feeling to know that I may have sat next to a half-sibling in some of my classes. I keep thinking about how glad I am that I never knew what I know now when I was in junior high; it would have been quite humiliating.

  We’ve weighed all the pros and cons of letting our half-siblings know about our discoveries. We wonder if it’s even worth creating all that drama in their lives by letting them know the truth. Some of my siblings have asked what possible good would come of it; at other times, I think they might like to know about this strange twist in their families’ stories.

  Since Tim and I share the same father, we’ve decided that if we are going to make contact with our half-siblings, we both have to agree on it. There will be no making contact if the other brother doesn’t agree.

  With Neil, the interest isn’t even there. He’s known who his half-siblings are for the past several decades. He simply doesn’t care to meet his biological father’s family, even though he lives fairly close to some of them. In fact, he wants nothing to do with this whole thing.

  With each of my other siblings, it will be a personal decision they must make for themselves. It’s quite possible that the opportunity may never come for them.

  It’s important to think about the effect reaching out would have on those within our biological fathers’ families. The men who fathered some of my siblings were already married, with children of their own. What would the children of these men do if they found out that their father was unfaithful to their mother? Revealing this kind of personal information could be terribly devastating. On the other hand, these half-siblings might like to know we exist, and maybe even establish a relationship with us. In addition to that, there are some definite medical issues I know of that raise concerns among my brothers and sisters, and need to be addressed with preventive care and vigilant screening. I know that in my own case, the brother of my biological father died in his late forties of a heart attack. Their father died at fifty-eight; their grandfather, at fifty-one; and their great-grandfather, at forty. I’ve traced this line back several generations, and it appears that with few exceptions, most of the men have died younger than normal, and all but one from heart-related issues. It’s good for us to know this information so that Tim and I can take preventive measures to address any potential heart problems of our own.

  When I thought that Mark Anderson was my biological father, I was concerned about two very prominent medical issues within my family’s health history: first was the high likelihood of diabetes, and the second was the unusually high occurrence of cancer, especially in the gastrointestinal tract. My great-grandfather died of cancer. His son, my grandfather, died of stomach cancer. Three of Grandpa’s children died of cancer, two from stomach cancer. Do you see a trend here? Cancer does not run in my mother’s line. Very few people on my mom’s side have died of any variety of cancer, but Mark Anderson’s side is loaded with it.

  When I started getting a yearly physical, I mentioned this genetic tendency for cancer to my doctor. He expressed a serious concern and told me that he wanted to do a yearly test to check for any signs of cancer in hopes of treating it before it had a chance to spread. Since the most prevalent forms of cancer are stomach and colon cancer, my doctor wanted to order a colonoscopy every year, and every three years, a complete scope from both ends. These are pricey and invasive procedures that may not have been necessary after all.

  I did my exams without fail for several years, until I discovered that Mark Anderson wasn’t my biological father, and I was no longer tied to his family’s genetic curse of possible death by cancer. One of the first things I asked my doctor was whether this discovery meant I could do away with the yearly colonoscopy. He assured me that we could cut back to once every five years instead of the yearly exam. Knowing there would be no more yearly colonoscopies for me was reason enough to celebrate. This is a prime case of the good that can come from knowing your family medical history. In our case, Tim and I were unknowingly following the wrong family tree for more than fifty-five years. It’s good to know what genetic health traits you have, and equally helpful to know which ones you don’t.

  My eight siblings and I know that all of our biological fathers have died. The wives of these men have passed away as well (the last one died in 2015). We now know that none of the wives will be affected by learning that their husbands were unfaithful—only their children and grandchildren. At last count, I figured that collectively, with all of our biological fathers, there were more than twenty-seven children, and many more grandchildren, that could potentially be impacted by the knowledge that they have half-siblings and half-cousins because of the infidelity of their fathers or grandfathers.

  So, do I think we will ever contact our half-siblings? As of now, aside from Diane, who has already made contact, I doubt that any of
the rest of us will. We can get some health history from public sources like obituaries, death certificates, and the like. If we wanted to be sly about it, I’m sure we could obtain additional information through a few other ways. But all in all, I doubt that any of us will try to explain our family story to our half-siblings—at least, not in the immediate future.

  What were some of the challenges you faced as you started digging into your family’s story?

  One challenge I had to face again and again was dealing with inconsistencies in the stories I gathered from family members. Over the years, I have interviewed a lot of people in order to record their life stories. One issue I noticed time and again was that people don’t see the same event in exactly the same way. You can have five different people experience the same event at the same time, and when you ask them to recall that event, you’ll find that each person provides details the others will not include, or they may describe the event completely differently. A few may even say that some of the details remembered by another person never happened. It isn’t that one person is lying, or that another’s memories are impaired. It’s just that we all experience and remember events differently.

  Police officers who gather information from eyewitnesses find that the same questions asked of different people often result in a wide variety of answers. This is because we all have mental filters through which we process what we see and experience. I often tell people that the word history is literally “his-story” of what was experienced. Ashley Hamer wrote an informative article for Curiosity website describing how people remember the same event differently.[2] She helps to explain the phenomenon that often makes it difficult to come up with a single family narrative.

  I found this happened time and again as I interviewed my family and recorded comments from others who knew my family. I asked them to try and recall some of the events that took place in the early years, before I was born. There were some details that everyone got consistently correct, but there were others that were all over the place in terms of accuracy and consistency. It’s just how the human mind works. We all see things differently.

  Emotions also play a huge role in what people remember, and forget. Remember the story of how our mom sold Neil’s pigs to pay for a plane ticket home from Oregon? This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. For Neil, this was an incredibly emotional experience. He was planning on selling his pigs and using the proceeds to buy a car. To Neil, this car represented freedom and influence with his friends. Whether he realized it or not, those pigs were playing a big part in his life; they had a lot of value to him. So, when Mom had Dad sell Neil’s pigs and used the money to buy her a plane ticket back home, this was a betrayal so great that Neil has never been able to forgive her for it. This experience was jam-packed with emotions for him.

  But this event had little to no emotional impact on Mom. The only thing the pigs represented to her was a source of money she could use to get home. It made sense to her to sell the pigs and buy the plane ticket; it was that simple.

  Another issue that often came up was how emotions can

  play havoc with people’s memories. Highly emotional experiences sometimes “created” events that most likely never happened, especially when my mom was involved. I ran into this several times. I recall talking with one man, asking him to share some of the experiences he had with my parents. As he revealed some deeply emotional stories, I could see they were quite painful for him to talk about. His voice became louder, and he began to speak faster and use incomplete sentences. I also noticed that the details of each story began to conflict with what he had told me just five or ten minutes earlier. I could tell that some of the information he was giving me was beginning to lose credibility. I knew that I had to calm him down, or the entire interview was going to be filled with mostly useless information.

  It wasn’t easy for me or any of my siblings to deal with what we were learning as we continued digging deeper and deeper into our family’s past. Tim and I had started this research project with the understanding that one of our brothers was most likely not Mark’s son, and that there was a possibility that two of our sisters were not Mark’s daughters. By the time we were done, we had discovered that Mark had not fathered any of us. This has introduced all kinds of emotional baggage that we now have to deal with.

  My first reaction to learning my new status as an illegitimate son was profound humiliation. Each of my siblings has had to deal with these discoveries in their own way. I have learned that if you are interviewing someone about their life and you hit on an issue that is deeply embarrassing, the person is not going to be willing to talk about it and provide you with all the important details you are looking for. Or worse yet, they may intentionally lie to cover up the details that are such an embarrassment to them. This sense of humiliation can easily create misinformation and lead to an unreliable interview.

  When I gave my older sisters an early draft of this book, I could tell from the looks on their faces and the way they guardedly gave me feedback that they were uncomfortable reading it. You have to remember that the first three children in our family grew up in a generation that listened to Connie Francis, watched Father Knows Best and Bonanza on a black-and-white TV, and made out at Lovers’ Lane. The last three kids in our family, including me, grew up in a generation that protested the Vietnam War, listened to the Beatles, smoked pot, and fought the Establishment.

  My older sisters grew up in an environment where you didn’t talk about family secrets like this. My generation didn’t have an issue talking about these things. In fact, with free love being the motto of the 1970s, I expect that a lot of children were born to fathers who were not married to their mothers. As I gathered information from the older sisters, I had to deal with their hesitation and their concern for discretion. I have little doubt that what they told me was true, but I did have to decide how I was going to deal with writing a book that included many of the details that they were uncomfortable with.

  How do you think future generations of your family will react to this story?

  I have put a lot of thought and consideration into this question. My biggest concern initially was what people would think of my mom. I never intended to demonize her. Yes, she had a lot of problems. I am convinced that somewhere, somehow, something happened to my mom that badly damaged her. I have some thoughts about what may have caused the damage, but I won’t go into any of that here, since I have no proof. I have had no training as a therapist, and have no desire to go down that road. The fact is, Mom had some very big issues that may have had an influence on what she did. That being the case, I didn’t originally feel that I ought to make this story public, but with time, my feelings on that have changed.

  When I voiced this concern to my children, they were quite surprised at my hesitation. They explained to me that it’s natural for this to be a big deal to me and to my siblings. We are too close to these events to be able to separate ourselves from what happened. But grandkids and great-grandkids will be far enough removed that it simply won’t be a big deal. For them, it’s a fascinating story and nothing more. For some, it may even become a great story to share with friends at a party. I’m not worried that this will be a big problem for Mom’s family line to deal with; I expect they will handle it just fine.

  More importantly, I feel that my mom’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren need to know something about their genetic family lines. With DNA becoming such an important tool in dealing with genetic illnesses and diseases, it could be a fatal mistake for them not to be aware of who their real ancestors were. If they need to identify specific family diseases and end up going down a family line they think they belong to, but actually don’t, it could result in a family member dying, when in fact, there is no need for that death to occur. With the remarkable advances of genetic medicine, no one can afford to not have their correct genetic information. It really is a matter of life and death.

  How has this journey affected the way you and y
our siblings feel about your mother?

  Wow! How do I even try to explain the range of feelings this experience has created? Let me start by sharing a little background information about my mom, Linda Anderson. It will help you understand how things were in our family. Linda is a fascinating study of human behavior. She died at age ninety-three. Her body didn’t serve her well for the last ten years of her life, but her mind was amazingly sharp for someone who made absolutely no effort to keep herself fit or eat well during her long life.

  Linda wasn’t an easy person to be friends with. In fact, I don’t remember that she had many friends. The few she did have were very careful around her, because they knew she could be prickly and turn on them with very little cause. She wasn’t good at admitting that she might be wrong, about anything. Linda never took criticism well, constructive or otherwise. She took it as a personal assault if anyone challenged her. She seemed insecure about herself in that respect. If you made her mad, she would go into attack mode immediately. When that happened, watch out, because there would be hell to pay.

  Linda also had a fascinating tendency to alter reality when it was to her advantage. In her mind, the truth was something you simply changed to fit your needs. It was that simple. She made up all kinds of stories about her past, even when there was no need to do so; it’s just how she did things. Some of the stories she told were about the silliest, most insignificant things, yet she continued to create them and stand by them, no matter what. She did this until the day she died. Linda had some enormously thick filters through which she processed all of her life experiences and relationships.

  When Mom was about eighty-nine, I decided I needed to record her oral history. While I was in the process of recording her memories, I remember wondering how I was going to separate fiction from fact. As a professional family and oral historian, I’m used to researching facts to evaluate the reliability of stories I hear. I knew it wouldn’t be too difficult to document many of the life events Mom talked about in her oral history interview. As I began my research, I discovered that nearly everything she had told me was either greatly exaggerated or just plain wrong. She made up events with only tiny, insignificant pieces of truth as their foundation. She was remarkably good at creating an alternate reality for herself.