My favorite cases to tackle are my older clients who have finally decided later in life that they want to learn the identities of their biological parents. It fascinates me that they have lived most of their lives, never choosing to seek out the identities of their birth parents, only to take that step well into their 60s, 70s, or even 80s.
I have a recent client who is 78 years old. She called me up and asked if I could help her identify her birth parents. She had registered her DNA with Ancestry and 23andMe. She had also obtained some basic information on her birth mother that she didn’t know whether or not was true.
I got to work.
My client, we’ll call her Agnes, was born in the earlier part of 1945 in New York. She knew her birth mother was 22 years old when she was born and that she was from Boston. She had a couple of pretty strong DNA matches, but the ages of Agnes’s birth parents were adding some difficulty to the equation.
After much research, hurdling over some misinformation, and working through the lives of those long-ago passed, the pieces finally came together.
Agnes’s birth mother was born in 1922 and, unfortunately, passed away in 1976 at the young age of 53. She was a chain smoker who died from lung cancer. She had married eight years after giving birth to Agnes. They had a daughter who also met a very early death.
Agnes’s birth father was 14 years the birth mother’s senior. He was married with four children at the time of Agnes’s birth. He died in 1977 at the age of 65 from a heart attack.
I discovered from 1940 and 1950 census records that Agnes’s birth parents lived less than a mile apart, on opposite sides of a park in Boston.
Because no one is still living who can put any additional pieces together, we’ll never know how Agnes’s birth parents met or the nature of their relationship.
Did they meet in the park one day when Agnes’s birth father was watching his children play? Did they take the same streetcar to their jobs? Maybe they met at a subway station in the neighborhood. Or perhaps Agnes’s birth mother worked as a sitter for the birth father’s children. We’ll just never know.
But, thanks to DNA, Agnes now knows the identities of her birth parents. And whichever narrative she decides to cling to will have to suffice. No matter how much I love to solve a mystery, some secrets really do go to the grave.