Genealogy: How I Found My DNA Relatives, Part 4

 Genealogy: How I Found My DNA Relatives, Part 4

Father’s Side ✅; Mother’s Side ❓

Proverbs 16:9  The mind of man plans his way,  but the LORD directs his steps.

News travels fast.  Before I knew it, MANY of the female relatives started contacting me on Facebook messenger, text messages and emails.  I cannot tell you how encouraged I was.  I’ve  never had sisters, although I have quite a few friends who are as close as sisters.  Many photos were exchanged and I was really beginning to feel like part of the family.

Some cool facts about my father and his side of the family (other than the Sephardic Jew revelation in post #2):

• My father was in the Korean War and was away for 3 years
• He married in 1958; I was born in 1955
• My father passed away in 2007
• I have 2 more living half-brothers and one sister; one brother passed away 
• I have 3 more nieces and 3 nephews
• Much of both sides of my family live fairly close to each other in New Mexico but with the exception of one person, do not know each other.
• As far as anyone knows, my father did not know about me. Everyone says that he would have married my mother if he had known. But then, none of the delightful people we met on our trip would have ever been born! I was raised by a wonderful family (parents are both deceased, and I am close with my brother), so I have no regrets about not growing up with the others.  But now I have TWO sweet families!

My mother’s side of the family was more difficult to find since I had so little to start with. However, there was one woman who had done a DNA test whom I thought looked a bit like me, so I contacted her.  (I was getting a little bolder now since no one had rejected the idea of me being in the family.)   She has a 13.62% / 1st cousin relationship with me.  I had already asked several on my father’s side if she was in their family and they all agreed that she was not, so now I had ONE female on my mother’s side to help begin that search.

I sent her the same greeting that I had to the others on the 23andMe site.   She responded right away and told me that her father’s last name was Valencia.  This was huge because HER last name was not Valencia. I had no idea!!  I knew I had the right family because of her resemblance and that name. (Many do not like Facebook, but I tell you, it was invaluable to me in this research.)  We continued our conversations on FB messenger so that we could share photos. One of her father’s many siblings had to be my mother. Because she had given me her father’s full name, using Google search yielded many hits. 

Another remarkable piece of information was that one of my cousins (in her late 70s now) remembered at age 11, meeting my mother in my grandparents’ home. She is the ONLY one in my family still living who met her while she was pregnant.  My mother lived with my parents for 4-5 months before I was born. More on that later.  My cousin’s comments about her when she saw her so long ago helped narrow down her age, so now I was focusing on 2 sisters in particular rather than 6. 

TIP: When searching for a person, sometimes combining names will give a more specific hit rather than searching for just one name. Obituaries provide many family names for more precise hits.

One of those hits was my DNA cousin’s father’s headstone. Did you know that there is a website called FindAGrave.com which shows a picture and details of every headstone in the United States? I didn’t know that either.  That ONE search gave me so much information: the names of his siblings (11 of them!),  his wife’s  name, date of birth and death, his parents, etc. 

But the most important piece of information of all was a link to a woman under the picture below.  I messaged her within the site assuming that she would be a family member but she was actually a seasoned genealogist!! She is retired and her hobby is helping people find their relatives.  She, so very generously, gave me her full access to ancestry.com (which expires Sept. 1—oh, the timing of all of these details was truly remarkable).   Her one condition was that I do all of the work by brainstorming, thinking through the details, asking questions, contacting people, making charts and graphs, etc.  She answered my questions if I got stuck, but I did basically  everything myself. The saying “you learn more completely by doing” is definitely true.

This search was like a giant jigsaw puzzle which, if you know me, know that I love doing puzzles.  I stand amazed at how the Lord placed this woman in my search path at exactly the right time and that she was so gracious to me, a total stranger.

More next Monday…