Every time I watch, as I am tonight, Finding Your Roots on PBS, I am reminded of the nearly 1/4 of my DNA that I am not fully informed on.
Sometime back, when I got my DNA tested , I discovered that 21-24% of it is Ashkenazi Jewish. I thought at first that it might be in my German background in my mother’s side, but we tested her, and it is not. My brother tests the same as I do, so it is in my father’s side. DNA family in my fathers mothers side shows none, so it would have to be his father, my paternal grandfather. He separated from my grandmother in my father’s infant or toddlerhood, and, according to my father, told his mother that he did not want to see him. My father wrote him off, and never met him as far as we know. His mother married his stepfather when he was 6, and my father went by his last name until he joined the Navy at 16, when his birth certificate reflected his birth father’s name.
I have a fairly extensive family tree on his birth father’s last name. However, none of them reflect linked dna to that last name. His parents married when she was already pregnant, him having been born 7 months after they went to the Santa Ana Courthouse and lied about her age. She was 16 and he was 20, but the license says that she was 18. Their mothers were friends, my GG Elizabeth and Olive Worley Haynes. They obviously married to make my father legitimate, and they separated very soon after his birth. Until the DNA results, it didn’t occur to me that my father’s biological father might not be the man in his birth certificate.
It took a long time to find dna relatives on that side who were closely enough related to provide any kind of clue I found second cousins to me who were half siblings to each other (a pair of full sisters, and their half brother). Their shared father was estranged from them, too. They did not grow up with his name, either. Eventually one of the sisters was able to give me her father’s mother’s maiden name. This led me to a Jewish family of Russian origin (Brill) from NY, who had one son move out to So Cal and raise sons. One of them may well be my father’s biological father.
More convoluted than that is the fact that my father’s own paternal grandfather may not be as advertised, based on DNA breadcrumbs that relate me to a Poole family. My GG and her daughter, my grandmother, parted from their children’s named fathers very early, and no one seems to have had contact with them again. All this came to my knowledge long after anyone who might have any of them died. My father is 20 years gone, and was the only child of an only child. My mother knows what he told her, and what he believed to be true. The only thing that bugs me about disavowing my Haynes paternal line is that the only pics we have of his named father shows a strong resemblance. Curiouser and curiouser.
I can only guess at what my father’s opinion might have been of these discoveries. He might have discounted them, it might have reconciled him to his “father’s” abandonment.
The search continues. I may yet find Haynes distant cousins, who knows. We are certainly legally Hayneses, whether or not we are biologically related to the ones named in our original tree.
In every true sense, we are Hayneses, because of the family my parents built. They married 6 months into college, he was 21 and she was 17. He had been out of his parent’s house since he was 16, getting his mother to sign off on his joining the Navy. His mother had been in a tuberculosis sanitarium for nearly two years, and he had enough of his stepfather. Mom had been a child dancer and actor, quit to help her mother recover from a breakdown, graduating early from high school, entering college at 16. Neither had a typical childhood, and they made a family between them, raising the three of us in the San Fernando Valley in the 50s-70s. They raised three decent self sufficient kids, and were happy with how we turned out.
I remain fascinated by my dna questions and mysteries, but know that my core family is who I’ve always known they were.
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