Happy Adventures

The story of Texas started a long time ago, before I was born. That part of the story is not mine to tell, but the next bit is.

I grew up an only child, in a single parent family, although my mother and I lived with her parents & had other family members close by, so I did grow up, at least at first, surrounded by 3 generations of immediate & close family. I also knew family who were more distant, in terms of DNA, knowing and geography.

The one person who wasn’t there was my dad. I asked about him & was given various bits of information over time, including a name, that my great, great grandmother was an American Indian and that my dad was an American serviceman.

So fast forward several house moves, a step-father, boyfriends, jobs, husbands, divorces, children, family deaths and all the other stuff life throws at you, right up to my 50th birthday.

I had spent time in the intervening years attempting to trace my dad, to no avail. Mum had given me a name and a few details, and also told me she’d written to him when she found out she was pregnant, he’d volunteered for Vietnam & been killed.

A really good friend, Shelley, who you will no doubt meet on future adventures, bought me a DNA kit for my 50th birthday.

We were hopeful, but not expectant.

It took a while for me to pluck it the courage to actually do the kit & send it off, and another while for the results to come back.

That was when I found out that I had been lied to my entire life! Not a single trace of native American in my body.

We know that white Americans came from Europe, that’s no secret at all, so northern Europe ancestry did make sense, but I had been told that my great, great grandmother was an American Indian, no clue what tribe, but hey – something special, right? Nope.

I’m not saying that my mother lied about this, maybe she was lied to & was just passing on what she’d been told, I don’t know, but at that moment – I lost that sliver of connection to the other half of my family, the other half of me.

The website, that the DNA kit was connected to, gave me a list of relatives. Mostly 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins, some 2nd cousins, that I could place in my known family tree & one lady who was labelled as a 1st cousin, and I had no idea who she was or where she fitted in; she was in America and had to be part of my dad’s family.

We exchanged a few messages but she really didn’t know where to start looking & was reluctant to just start asking questions around her family, which I can well understand.

So things got stuck for a while, until the website added a page which made family connections for you & she discovered that I wasn’t a fist cousin, but a first cousin once removed. My dad is her cousin, their dad’s were brothers.

When she made that connection there were a series of messages from her to me, through the website, each a little bit more insistent than the last. I hadn’t checked my emails & was oblivious of the excitement.

When I final did check emails & read her messages, I was blown away. Not only did she know my dad, but he wanted to know me! Could she pass on my email to him? Oh hell, yeah!

The first time I had direct contact with dad was April 1st, 2020. Yep, *that* year. The UK had been put into lockdown a week or so earlier, America was rampant with covid too, so it was emails galore. The first couple of weeks emails were zinging across the Atlantic several times a day & at all hours of night & day. We were both so excited. He was aware of my existence, but didn’t know if we were related or not, I knew I had a dad somewhere, but from what mum had said I was looking for a grave, not a person, a yet, here we were – father & daughter, getting to know each other for the first time.