I have been researching my own family history for twenty-five years. My love of genealogy started because I was searching for answers to the mystery of my beginning. I grew up without a father. I was given his name when I was a teenager. I was told the city he lived in and his approximate age, but no other information. I spent the next few years wondering and wishing I knew more.
In my twenties I discovered genealogy and started making a family tree online. That led me to try to research my father. With only a name and city to start from it was a struggle. It was a common name. I found at least a dozen men with that name in the fifty-mile radius around the city I knew he once lived in.
I spent several years meticulously tracking each man, building a family tree and trying to eliminate them from the list. Some of them didn’t fit in the age range I was looking for. Some didn’t live in the area at the time I was conceived. Slowly I narrowed the list down over the course of a few years. I eventually only had three men left on my list. I had their contact information, but I was too scared to reach out to them.
I put the search on the back-burner and focused on researching the known side of my family and helping other people research their trees. I loved learning about the history of my family. It also brought me peace to help other people find the answers they were looking for.
DNA testing started to become an important tool for genealogical research, and in 2017 I purchased an Ancestry DNA test hoping to find some new information that might help me find my father and sent it in with mild expectations.
A few days before Christmas 2017 I was sitting in a restaurant with my husband when the email came through saying that my results were ready. I logged into my account and clicked on the link to view my results. I dropped my phone when the page loaded. My husband stopped chewing and stared at me from across the table. I picked the phone back up and looked again to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. I expected it to be gone, but it was still there, right at the top of the page. My highest match. Coming in at 50% shared DNA: 3,476 cM across 26 segments. My father. The same name I had been searching for for so many years.
I was in shock. I spent the next week trying to decide what to do. He did not have a family tree on the site, but I went through all our shared matches trying to learn anything I could about him. Eventually, on December 29th, 2017 I hiked up my britches and wrote him a message on the app. Surprise! It’s a girl! I was thirty-eight years old. I wrote so many drafts of that message but eventually just said that I had been looking for him for a long time, that I knew he probably didn’t know I existed because I knew I was the product of a one-night stand, and that I had no expectations from him. I wanted to make sure he knew that I didn’t want anything from him, and that if he didn’t want contact with me I would respect that. I did ask that he at least let me know that he had read my message.
Why is waiting so agonizing? Days turned into weeks with no response. I kept researching and started building a tree for him with our shared DNA matches. I eventually found his sister-in-law on a social media site and sent her a message. She was the widow of one of his brothers. She told me so much about him, but her husband had been dead for a long time, and she had lost contact with him. A few months went by, and he still had not answered me, but his sister-in-law and I were talking regularly. Eventually I found his address and told her I was going to mail him a letter. I was unsure if I should because I knew he was married and I didn’t want to cause any problems for him with his family. She immediately offered to just drive over to his house and talk to him. I was so torn on what to do, but she insisted. She lived about thirty minutes away from him.
When she went, no one was home. She left a letter on his door explaining the whole situation. She left her phone number. We waited to see if he would call her. It was agonizing. I thought for sure that he wanted nothing to do with me. Who could blame him? What a shock it must have been to find out he had a thirty-eight year old daughter he never even knew existed. Eventually I accepted that I was probably not going to hear from him. I was sad, but I also understood. I kept working on his tree, hoping to fill in some of the pieces of my history even without his help.
On May 10th, 2018, which coincidentally happened to be my thirty-ninth birthday, I got an email that I had a new message on the site. I got a lot of messages on the site because I was researching for quite a few people and had multiple trees that were very large. It wasn’t unusual to get a message from someone that found one of their ancestors in one of my trees and had questions. I logged in to see the message and found a message from my father. He was apologizing for taking so long to answer me. He said he was shocked and it took him a while to process everything and figure out what to say to me. He said he wanted to get to know me, and asked some questions about my life. I couldn’t have asked for a better gift, and he had no idea that it was even my birthday.
As I am writing this, it is almost seven years to the day since I sent that first message to him. We live a couple of states away from each other, but we are quite close now. My family takes a week vacation to his city every summer now. He is a wonderful person and I hate that I missed out on those first thirty-nine years with him.
Finding him inspired me to do even more genealogical work. I love helping people solve their family mysteries. I have always been a great researcher, so it is a natural fit. I am starting this blog because I have decided to start a new genealogical journey. I want to start working toward becoming a CG (Certified Genealogist) through BCG (Board for Certification of Genealogists). This is no easy feat. You have to prepare a very involved portfolio and it is evaluated very stringently. Only 40% of applicants are certified. That is not exactly an encouraging number.
I am not discouraged though. I know it will be HARD. I am a really good researcher, but that is not enough. You have to be able to cite sources meticulously. You have to be able to weed out the good information from the bad. I have a lot to learn before I even think about applying. Once you apply the clock starts and you have one year to submit your completed portfolio. If you are not done in a year you can pay for an extension, but it is better to wait to apply until you are sure you are ready. There are a lot of ways to learn the necessary skills and to prepare, and that is what we are going to explore together here.
I plan to look into all the courses, study groups, books and other materials available. I will also talk about professional organizations, conferences, and groups that I find along the way. I hope someone finds my journey interesting. I hope it helps someone on a similar path. I also hope that I can share some of the knowledge that I already have along with what I gain along the way so that you can all have an easier time researching the mysteries of your own kin.