My dad never knew his genetic father which is a shame because they would have been great fishing buddies. There is an adoptee who’s writings I follow, Tony Corsentino. He wrote a piece for this day. He titled his LINK>D.N.A. You can read the entire piece there. I’ll just excerpt it a bit here.

He mentions that he had received a copy of his original birth certificate two months before he received an email from his birth mother. He learned his biological father’s name in that email. On his original birth certificate nothing appears in the blank labeled “father.” blogger’s note – my father’s birth certificate had no name for a father either.

Yet, Tony had a name. He found his father’s Facebook page. He didn’t do anything else with the information for 8 years. He had built relationships with his birth mother and her siblings. He feared upending his new and (what he feared was a) fragile relationship with his birth mother. She and his father had ended contact when she discovered she was pregnant. 

Yet, he did want to learn more about his father and so he went the Ancestry route. blogger’s note – It certainly proved very useful in my own roots journey quest. His father had not submitted a DNA sample, although he had joined the site and created a rudimentary tree. At Ancestry, Tony was able to reconstruct an extensive family tree. He messaged a few DNA matches on his father’s side. It took 4 months before he got a reply from any of them. One of them was not kind.

Yet, he knew that to send that message out was to signal to his biological relatives that he was not going to hide who he is from anyone: not his biological relationships from his adoptive family, and not one half of his biological tree from the other half.

His father’s first cousin, (his second cousin once removed) conferred with her sister. They welcomed him as family. They were in contact with his father and agreed to serve as intermediaries for an eventual contact. He notes that a few weeks later, he spoke with his father for the first time. Here is how it went –

“He was most eager to share family history and lore—about his uncles who had perished in World War II, about his career, about his two sons, my half-brothers. And with evident discomfort he explained that his wife, who had known that he had possibly fathered a child, was opposed to my making contact with people in her family. He said he was “working on” this. That was the last I’ve heard about it. In the months since we have exchanged a handful of text messages on holidays and birthdays. His two cousins are Facebook friends. I am planning to meet them this summer. It might be the only branch of my father’s family—my family—that will accept me.”

This Father’s Day, he has questions – “Does it make sense to wish my biological father a happy Father’s Day? Did he feel my absence from his life in anything like the way my birth mother did, who carried me and gave birth and watched as they took me out of the room on the understanding that the absence would be forever? . . . Father’s Day gives me nothing to say to him. Not, anyway, as long as my existence remains a problem—a threat just outside the walls of the family stockade.”

blogger’s note – I like his ending – “Let this be a note pinned to the stockade door. Dad, you know where to find me.”