So today I spent considerable time trying to acquire the name of a potential birth mother for an adoptee. I was finally able to give this person a date of birth and location. However, it just did not fit with the non-identifying information we had; a disappointment in my book.
I can never tell if an adoptee would want to know I had a suspect, or to actually prove it beyond a reasonable doubt before sharing people I come across that might be “the one”. Part of me feels that this is a shared experience, and I need to keep people informed, no matter what the consequences pan out to be; given more time to research.
The pitfall I am referring to in the subject for today’s blog actually is not the disappointment of this individual who may turn out not to be a good candidate for the birth mother. It is actually that I started this tree based on the genetically related second cousin’s family tree. She had over six thousand people on her tree.
When I reverse engineered the individual I was looking at to her father, who happens to be the great grandfather of the second cousin, I found out that he was married to someone else before. His first wife who appeared to be listed on his “find-a-grave” described her as “unknown”. Although I had found a first name and middle initial for the first wife. It did not match what the second cousin had listed as her great grandmother.
While that changes things a bit if it were true, I looked at all the kids born under this great grandfather. All of them seem to have been born before the second wife entered the picture. Yet the second cousin mapped out the second wife as her great grandmother. Here is where it gets a bit ugly. If my facts align as they appear, all those children that the second cousin thinks are her biological relatives may actually be adopted, and thus raised, as the second wife’s children.
Which makes everyone beyond the great grandmother build on the genetically related second cousin’s tree NOT her biological relatives. That’s right all six thousand of them. Let’s just say, it might be hard to swallow that knowledge. In fact, I hope I am wrong. It literally throws a monkey wrench into the works, and makes things a bit more challenging for us. Although, I am not sure how I would handle the news if someone told me all six thousand of my relatives on my tree were…. well not my relatives. An exercise in futility is putting it mildly.