DNA Research: Prepare to Shake Up Your Family Tree

I haven't written much about my father's side of the family, partly because much was unknown, and partly because much was of a sensitive nature, but now and then I return to the story of my Grandma Annie, as I did several years ago when I blogged about lying to a genealogist in "The Facts Ma'am, Just the Facts."  There, my mother lied about my lineage because Grandma Annie was still living at that time and was still telling people that my father was her brother instead of her son.

Now, all these years later, we have a new page of the saga:

Grandma Annie was fifteen years old, unmarried and pregnant in a rural Southern community where everyone knew everyone else. I don’t think she ever dealt with what happened straight-on, so the only thing we know for sure is that she tried to reinvent her past by leaving everything behind and marrying a young man in South Carolina that she had known for about a week. She chose well that time. Roy Turner eventually learned that her little brother in North Carolina was her son, and when I came along he loved me as though I was his own grandchild. But Annie was always a haunted person.

I had always been told that a certain person was my biological grandfather. I knew who he was and where he lived, and sometimes I saw him sitting on his shady front porch when we drove past his house on the highway. I knew he didn’t claim me as his grandchild. My mother explained everything to me when I was about six years old and was asking the wrong questions. I learned that there are truths that you live as though they are not so.

The writer in me found it interesting to be part of a scandal that everyone knew about and didn’t mention. I was always very curious about this grandfather and his daughters who were supposedly my aunts; and they seemed curious about me, also. It seemed that everyone in the old neighborhood looked at me in a special way. I can remember walking into Matt Dale’s country store, and hearing people murmur, “Mason’s girl...” People speculated about which of the aunts I resembled. They said I had the wide-open eyes that are characteristic of that family. All this made me feel like sort of a celebrity.

In the later years of Grandma Annie’s life, she denied that the man with the shady front porch was my grandfather. Several possibilities came up and she flatly denied that one fellow in particular was my father’s father – which in hindsight, was significant. By now my father and I were both old enough that our characters were pretty well formed, so we told ourselves it didn’t matter who the missing father/grandfather was. But it did matter. And it wasn’t just our mystery. It belonged to the whole community, a generations-old story that is still talked about.

So to make a long ramble a little shorter, my father sent his DNA through ancestry.com. 
Of course it turns out to be the man that Grandma Annie said it most certainly was NOT. This new grandfather – we never knew him or his other family, and I never even saw his front porch. He was long gone from the area fairly young and may have never known he left a son behind much less a writerly granddaughter.

So now I’m in sort of mourning – because I had developed a life-long fondness for that old rascal on his shady front porch and I thought he was mine even though he never acknowledged me. I’m going to miss him in the shady area of my family tree.

Photo: Grandma Annie and my father