Ancestral Gifts

Ancestral Gifts

I grew up with little in the way of family. My mother grew up in foster care, and my paternal grandmother passed before I was born. While I knew my paternal grandfather, he lived far away; I only saw him once or twice a year. The only child of only children, I was often alone and became self-reliant. I knew there would be no one else I could depend upon in life, so I looked to myself for answers.

My parents both passed by the time I was in my early 30’s. While I had married and had a family, I still held a core of reserve, a well of emptiness as the only person, save my children, who shared my blood and my DNA. There was no one else who looked like me, no one else who shared experiences from my childhood or with whom I could reminisce. I was an orphan.

My husband could not understand this primal sadness which I carried. He listened and he empathized, but he could not understand. He loved me, and he wanted to help. My birthday was coming up, so he decided to buy me a DNA kit, one with a wide database of users. If I could find others who shared my genetic history, he reasoned, perhaps the loss that I felt would be quelled.

I was game to try. I spit in the tube, screwed on the cap, and sent it off to the lab. About five weeks later, my preliminary results came in. I was 73% Scottish (I always felt drawn to the Scots, so I felt validated), 6% Scandinavian, 3% Irish, and 18% English. It didn’t look like my people, whoever they were, had gone far off the islands.

Most of my relative matches were third and fourth cousins. There was one, however, who was a second cousin. I sent off a message, explaining that my mother had grown up in foster care and I was looking for my family. No response.

My husband wasn’t ready to give up. I wanted answers, and he would find them for me. He quickly learned how genetic genealogy worked, using the matches that appeared in my relative list to build a backwards family tree which he then brought forward, looking for potential parents. His work, which took months as new matches appeared, resulted in the names of three brothers, William, James, and Andrew MacInnes, three Scottish brothers who had emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. According to my husband’s research, one of these three had to be my grandfather.

I took over the research from there, quickly finding that James and Andrew had passed but William was still living in Florida. I wrote to him of my history, my life, my husband, my children, my career – everything in my life that could be crammed into a letter-and sent it his listed addressed, certified mail.

The card came back – it had been received – and a few days later a small package arrived from Florida. My heart pounding, I tore it open to find a black notebook. It was blank, save for an envelope tucked inside. Opening it, it read, “I knew one of you would find me someday. I’m sorry. I wish things had been different. Your Grandfather, William MacInnes.” Paperclipped to the note was a cashier’s check made out in my name for $20,000. The memo read, “Child Support. Paid in Full.”

First, I was stunned. Then I was enraged. How dare he? Clearly, he had known of my mother’s birth, and rather than take responsibility from the onset he let her go into foster care, an experience that had traumatized and damaged her. Depression and anger had been ever present companions for her, and as her child I had had to learn how to dance with them daily. She was a person who never embraced joy and lived in the moment – she had a well of darkness, a void left empty by having been abandoned as a child. She spent her 57 years on this earth living a fractured half-life. And her father thought $20,000 would pay the reparations for that.

What the black notebook was for I had no idea. I tossed it on my desk, along with the note and the cashier’s check, and called my husband on his mobile. I quickly explained about the package and my anger at the truly heartfelt desire on my part to know him. What a bitter disappointment this had been. I should never have dug open these secrets. Some things are better left unknown.

My eldest daughter came for a visit with my grandchildren, and as the children swam in our backyard pool, I regaled her with the latest happenings in my search. She asked to see the note, the check, and the notebook, which I quickly retrieved for her. While I continued to express my outrage, she absently thumbed through the black notebook, her expression morphing from mild interest to puzzled.

“Wait, mom – did you see this?” she queried. I couldn’t see what she was pointing at, so I put on my reading glasses, peering at the tiny writing on the side margins of each page of journal. I had not noticed these notes at first glance.

The first page read, “I met your grandmother at the Broome County, New York Fair in 1942. She was so beautiful.” The second page read, “She was with three other girls, but I only had eyes for her.” The next page, “You should have heard her laugh. It held everything good in this world.” Then, “I wasn’t much to look at, but she loved my Scottish accent.”

The words flowed in tiny script, page after page recounting their love story and the rush that comes with new love. His passionate overtures were thwarted at every turn by one soul-crushing fact: she was already married, and her husband was fighting the Nazis in Europe. He said they both fought the urge to be together because they knew it was wrong, but in the end the overwhelming love they felt for one another dominated their actions. They consummated their relationship in his little apartment in Vestal, New York.

“For a long while it seemed as though there would be no consequences,” he wrote. “Her husband wasn’t coming back any time soon, and we were so grateful for the time we had together. We were truly happy.”

“One day your grandmother came to my flat, crying and wailing. She was pregnant.” Next page: “We had to make a decision. It was 1943, and women with husbands oversees didn’t fall pregnant.” And then, “It would have ruined her, even if she divorced him. And she didn’t want to divorce him. She said he was a good man.”

And so they made the decision for her to tell her friends and family that she would be out of town for a while visiting friends (to her family) and visiting family (to her friends). In reality, she stayed in my grandfather’s tiny apartment, waiting for the product of their love to be born and then given up.

They chose the Springers Home for Unwed Mothers in Johnson City, New York, a place that I’ve come to learn actually sold babies on the black market. There are many Springer’s babies today who are still looking for their family. New York’s closed adoption laws and “Mrs. D’s” habit of changing mother’s names on birth records to keep their identities hidden has made DNA testing a last resort for adoptees.

“I wasn’t in the room when your mother was born,” he wrote, “but I was in the parking lot, waiting for it to be over.” “I wasn’t allowed to see her,” he continued on the next page, “but your grandmother told me she was a bonnie wee thing, with glints of red in her hair.” With great sadness, they made the decision to put her into foster care. He reasoned that if my grandmother’s husband didn’t make it back from the war, they could marry and reclaim my mother. But that’s not what happened. The husband returned and reunited with his wife, and my mother languished in care, aging out of the system.

“Things were not the same between us after the little one was born. The grief and guilt were too much for my girl.” Next page: “She broke things off between us. I was brokenhearted, but I think she was too.” “I heard later that her man came back. I hope he was good to her.” “I never saw her again. I tried to respect her decision, but I was never the same.” “I loved her, and I loved our baby. I prayed for them both every day.”

My mother, who had been so bitter, so angry, and so bereft all the time I knew her, had been born of love. She had been wanted. She had been cherished. She had been prayed for, every day. I often wonder now if, knowing that, her life would have been a happier and more content one. I’ll never know.

And the $20,000? My grandfather explained in his notes that he put aside $20 a week towards child support, every week for 18 years. He kept it in a tin under his bed. When he got my letter, he went to the bank to get a cashier’s check, because he wanted his daughter, whom he lovingly named “Maggie,” in his head, to have it. In her absence, I would do.

Now in the closing pages of the black notebook, with the tiny scrawls in the margins having completed its melancholy tale, there was a final message. “If you would be willing, I would really like to meet you and your family.” “Maybe you can use the child support money to come for a visit. I want to meet all of Maggie’s babies.” “Here’s my phone number – call any time! With love, William MacInnes.”

There were no more entries in the black notebook, but I didn’t need to read any more. My questions had all been answered. I had a place in the world. I had a grandfather. I had cousins. My uncles were gone, but I knew their names. This was a gift I wish I could have given my mother, to find her people. With deep gratitude in my heart for the gift of my grandparents’ story, scrawled in the margins of a simple notebook, I picked up the phone and dialed his number.