A Broken Tree Page 13
Many thousands of war babies were born as a result of this I’m-probably-going-to-die-anyway attitude. Think about it: Most of the men who fought in World War II have died by now, but their children are still alive. Then there was the Korean War, the Vietnam War, both Gulf Wars, and all of the other military conflicts we’ve been involved in. With the exception of World War II, many of these veterans and their spouses and children are still alive. Now that DNA testing is so inexpensive and accurate, we are beginning to see people from around the world trying to link up to their biological fathers and their American families.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of Vietnamese children were fathered by American military personnel. Life for them has generally been an unpleasant experience. Because of their mixed parentage, many opportunities to get ahead have been closed to them. Most have experienced extreme prejudice, making life very difficult. Many of them are motivated to find their American fathers and begin a new life in America.[3] If your mother told you that you were fathered by a man from a rich Western country, this would present you with some very exciting possibilities. Connecting with a man who might be able to get you out of your wretched conditions and help you come to a safer, more affluent Western country would be too good to pass up. Or maybe some of these children simply want to know who their fathers are and what their ancestry is. Either way, this has the potential of creating some very interesting, and potentially difficult, family reunions.
A second issue that should be seriously considered is what DNA testing can do for people who were adopted and have no way of finding their biological parents. For many decades, adoption cases were sealed, making it nearly impossible to find any information on a person’s birth parents. The birth mother or, in some cases, the adoptive parents did not want the child to learn anything about the circumstances of their adoption.
Things have changed dramatically now. An adopted child doesn’t have to bother petitioning the courts to access their adoptions records, nor do they have to resign themselves to the possibility of never locating their biological parents. They can simply buy an inexpensive DNA test from a testing company and get their DNA sample added to its database. If they closely match someone in the database, chances are good that this person is their biological parent, or a very close family member. They have a golden contact that in most cases can help them find their genetic roots. According to Brianne Kirkpatrick, founder of the Watershed DNA website, for a person trying to locate a close family member, it’s no longer a matter of if they will find them—it’s now a matter of when they will find them.[4]
As helpful as this is for those who have been adopted and are trying to find their biological families, this could be unpleasant news for the mother or father who put the child up for adoption.
I have a close friend who had a child out of wedlock. She knew that life would be very hard for her daughter, as she had no family support system in place to help her raise this baby. She put her baby up for adoption, adding conditions to ensure that her daughter went to a family that met specific requirements, in hopes of providing the best home environment possible. She chose a “closed adoption,” which means a legal decree indicated that no one would have access to her adoption files. She felt terrible for giving up her child and was doing all she could to put this pain behind her.
My friend is familiar with DNA testing companies and what they offer. Because of this, she has refused to submit her own DNA to any of them, for fear this child might one day match up with her DNA. Reconnecting with this child (who would be in her early forties now) was not something she was ready to face. She thought it best if this child never knew who her biological mother was.
Eventually, her biological daughter did add her DNA to the
AncestryDNA.com database. Even though my friend never added hers, her sister did, and out of the blue one day, her sister got an e-mail from a woman in her forties, saying she was related to her sister (my friend). Of course, the sister knew exactly what this was all about. She called my friend and told her about the phone call. My friend went into a panic and told her sister not to respond to the e-mail. While this put her sister in an uncomfortable position, she honored my friend’s request.
With time, my friend reconsidered and decided that she wanted to make contact with her daughter after all. A few months later, we arranged for my friend to meet her biological daughter and her adoptive mother and siblings at our home. It turned out to be a wonderful experience. Now my friend and her biological daughter are in regular contact; even though they live more than a thousand miles apart, they visit each other and call often to exchange news.
For my friend, this has been a wonderful blessing. But this might not always be the case for others. Many women (and men) who gave up babies in their youth may not have told their current partners about it—or told their children that they have half-siblings. In the past, a person could give up a baby and be reasonably assured that there would not be any contact in the future, but this is no longer the case. For better or worse, I expect we will see thousands of children who were given up for adoption locating their biological parents and bringing a dramatic change to their family’s history.
As a family historian, I’ve gathered many oral histories and family stories over the past four decades. When I listen to people recount stories about events that have taken place in their family’s past, my attention is drawn to those accounts that don’t quite add up, or just don’t feel right. I’ve become skilled at noticing red flags. In many cases, I can tell that some of these stories were created to hide something—perhaps something considered unsavory, or a black mark on the family’s reputation. This is when you might consider DNA testing and what it might provide for you. While DNA testing won’t answer all of your research questions, it can certainly help when paper or digital records can’t be found, or when you sense that something doesn’t add up. This remarkable tool is here to stay. It’s become affordable, and it’s amazingly accurate. I expect that genetic testing will revolutionize family research every bit as much, if not more, than the introduction of microfilm and personal computers years ago.
If I have learned anything from this experience, it’s that you need to be careful about what questions you ask. You may not like the answers that your DNA test results reveal. Are you ready to handle new revelations that might redefine the dynamics of your entire family? Have you decided how you’re going to deal with the extremely sensitive discoveries that could turn family members against each other? I’m not saying that DNA testing will reveal explosive results for everyone, but if genetic secrets are out there, testing could very likely expose them. With DNA testing, it has become very easy to find what some families have spent years—and a lot of effort—trying to hide. Be ready for the possibility of surprises—and I mean big ones. Like Pandora’s box, once you open yourselves to genetic testing, your world may never be the same again.
Knowing what you know now, do you think Mark Anderson was sterile?
That’s the million-dollar question. Growing up, we never even gave this a thought; in fact, with nine kids in our family, sterility was the last thing anyone would accuse Mark of. It wasn’t until we discovered that we had a brother and possibly two sisters who were not fathered by Mark that one of my sisters jokingly said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we found out that Dad was sterile?” By 2012, we had learned that an additional four kids had not been fathered by Mark. What used to be nothing more than a joke quietly shared among us kids had become a very serious possibility.
You have to ask yourself: How could a man be married to a woman for twenty-five years and never get her pregnant, unless he was sterile? It seems like far too many men in town were able to get Mom pregnant with just the wink of an eye, but not Mark.
I remember Mark telling me something when I was about fourteen years old. I had come down with a case of the mumps and didn’t think much of it. I remember it was quite painful around my face and neck, and I missed several days of school.
It seemed like a big deal to Mark; he kept after me to stay in bed and take my medicine, which puzzled me. I had been a lot sicker than this several times before and don’t recall Mark ever making such a big deal about it as he did when I had the mumps. He told me that if I didn’t take care of myself and follow doctor’s orders, having mumps could make me sterile. What? Seriously? As a fourteen-year-old kid, that meant absolutely nothing to me. The last thing I was worried about was whether or not I could have kids as an adult.
But it seemed like a big deal to Mark. I asked him if he’d ever had the mumps, and he told me that he had. He’d come down with them when he was a senior in high school. By the time I had the mumps, Mark was forty-four. I wonder if he knew by then that he was sterile, and whether he attributed his sterility to having mumps as a young man. (By the way, it’s quite rare for a case of mumps to cause sterility, so I’m sure if he was sterile, it’s doubtful that it was caused by contracting mumps when he was well through puberty.)
Given what we know now, if anyone asked me today whether Mark was sterile, I would have to say a definite yes. How could I think otherwise? Of course, we will never know for sure, as he was never tested. Men from his generation didn’t like to entertain such questions. It was an affront to a man’s masculinity to even consider being tested for that kind of issue. But I can’t help but wonder if Mark ever considered the possibility.
Do you think your parents had an agreement to have other consensual relationships outside of their own marriage?
I’ve had several people suggest that maybe Mark knew he was sterile, and because of this, they had an agreement between the two of them that Mom could get pregnant with another man to give Mom the kids she wanted. But Mom was never one of those women who longed to have kids, much less nine of them. Each of us just came and she dealt with it in her own way. I seriously doubt that her adventures with other men represented an effort to address some kind of longing for children that she might have had, to make up for Mark not being able to get her pregnant.
Another reason this idea of an agreement doesn’t make sense to me is because my oldest sister, Holly, was born a little less than a year after they were married. I seriously doubt Mark would have had any thought at this point in his life that he might not be able to father children. The next two children came in quick succession, within about fourteen months of each other. There aren’t a lot of years between any of us children. I just don’t think there was ever a long-enough stretch of time between any of us that might have led Dad to wonder if there was a problem with his fertility. As far as he was concerned, all was well, and he had a big family to attest to his manliness. It also seems unlikely that Dad would have allowed Sam, the man who was competing with him for Mom’s hand in marriage, to be the guy to get her pregnant. Even more improbable was the idea of so many other men taking part in this arrangement. Enlisting the help of all these men simply seems too far-fetched to be a serious consideration.
Some have suggested that maybe Mom and Mark were swingers—couples who traded spouses for an evening of fun and entertainment. I suppose it’s possible, but it doesn’t seem likely. I
seriously doubt there were any agreements between my mom, Mark, and any other man (or men) to help Mom have the children that Mark could not provide her.
Why did you decide to go public with this very private and personal story?
There are several reasons I have decided to share this story with
others.
First, this is family history in the most fascinating sense of the term. Although I may not have wanted to share it initially, as a family historian, hiding this story seems wrong. If there is one thing I’ve learned over the past forty-plus years of researching families and recording oral histories, it’s that literally every family has their secrets. Some of them are so terrible that it’s probably best to keep them hidden until they finally fade away into oblivion; there is no good that can come of preserving them. But I would suggest that comparatively speaking, there are very few stories that fall into that category. Nearly all stories of family tragedy have something of value to offer; it may take a few generations of separation before those stories can come out without causing too much trauma, but with time, even some very ugly stories can have some redeeming value.
Our family story is no different. I feel like my family is like a big pot of minestrone soup. We have a wonderful mixture of veggies, seasonings, pasta, stock, and whatever else you want to throw in, with incredibly satisfying results. My wife often tells me how surprised she is that, for better or worse, we have so much diversity and history in my family, and yet we still love to get together and enjoy being with each other. Sure, we’ve had our rough times, but we still appreciate our family bonds, and we really do love each other
dearly.
At first, I was leery of passing this story on to future generations. Is this the legacy I wanted to leave for them? But as I was talking with one of my sons about it, he told me that it was a bigger deal to me and my siblings than it was for any of the grandchildren. To them, it was an intriguing story and nothing more. I realized that our story has a lot of fascinating information to offer future generations, as well as an entirely new genetic history—definitely worth putting on paper. It’s not your typical legacy, but it’s a legacy nonetheless, with some good lessons to offer future generations.
The second reason I decided to share this story came about through keeping a journal, which I found very therapeutic. When I first learned that I was fathered by another man I never knew, it left me speechless. Then, learning that all of my brothers and sisters were also fathered by someone other than the man we all called Dad—it rocked me to the very core of my being. This was a huge deal for me. For a while, I felt like I was someone’s mistake. That kind of thinking can have a devastating effect on anyone’s self-esteem. What happened was no fault of my own. I had absolutely no say in how I or any of my siblings became part of our family. It was 100 percent out of our hands.
I once asked Tim what he thought about all this stuff we’ve discovered. He shrugged and said that it wasn’t a big deal; he wasn’t surprised by what we’d discovered. He knew Mom well enough that none of this was really all that shocking to him. I was surprised by how unaffected he was by all of it. I tried to handle it like Tim did, but found that I couldn’t do it.
The way I dealt with the revelations was to write. I wrote page after page of journal entries with each new discovery we made. I wrote almost daily, thinking that my writing might help me come up with answers that would create some sense out of what I was learning. By the time I finally came to terms with things, I had filled up a lot of journal pages. I knew that if I could write through all of this, I would find something to provide a sense that things were okay.
After reading through all of the journal entries I wrote, I realized that I had quite a story. I’ve read a lot of accounts detailing how people have used DNA testing to discover that they were adopted, or to find out who their real parents were, but I’ve never read about anyone using DNA to discover a family secret quite like ours. I thought it was compelling enough that others might find some value in reading about this experience. If nothing else, they could take some comfort in the fact that many families have secrets they only discover through DNA testing.
By the time I’d worked things out and resolved my angry feelings, I found that this story was kind of funny. In addition to writing my way through to a resolution, I also shared my secrets by talking to a trusted group of friends. With each telling, I found the reactions were all pretty much the same. At first, listeners were shocked, and then amused. For some reason, letting this go public to a small group of people gave me a great sense of liberation. From there, I expanded the limits of who I shared this with. I began speaking at family history conferences and teaching classes about using DNA to unearth valuable family stories. I soon realized that no one I was talking to saw me as some pitiful bastard. Sharing this story with the general public wasn’t
as threatening as I’d originally thought it would be. After a while, I decided I would write a book about it and share our story with anyone who might be interested in learning how DNA can play a big role in discovering possible secrets within their own families.
Third, I had to resolve the feelings I had about my mother. I didn’t have angry feelings toward Mark; I felt like he was the victim, in the sense that most of this appears to have been done behind his back. I have little doubt there is a lot more to this that I don’t know, but regardless of my feelings toward Mark, I ended up focusing all my angry feelings toward Mom.
Despite Mom’s socially unacceptable behavior, there was still a strong bond between us. My childhood was quite difficult; as a young boy, I didn’t have much self-confidence and struggled with several other issues. Mom made it a point to spend time with me and continually remind me that I could do anything I wanted to do. She told me repeatedly that there were no limits to what I could do. I’m not sure why she did this, and I wonder if she really believed the things she was telling me. Regardless, she continued to encourage me to aim for the stars and believe in myself. It seemed so out of character for her, but her words clicked, and I believed them. I trusted what she was telling me and took her words to heart.