Finding family.
What is finding family? What does it feel like to find family?
I was 7 and my 2nd grade class was working on a "nationality" project. I remember going home to my mother and asking, "What is my nationality?". My mom's answer was not "you are Scottish, German, English, etc". It was "Your Uncle Bob has been working on family genealogy. Let's have him send us a copy and see". I waited eagerly for the package to arrive. I say "package" because it was an entire manilla envelope stuffed full of papers. We opened it, spread it across the living room floor, and so began my journey of finding family.
Did you know that I'm related to Lady Godiva? That's what the papers said. And, perhaps I have my own horse to ride one day...
Spreading out in front of me were rows upon rows of names, held together by thin lines. Lines zigging here and zagging there. Lines separating and coming together again. I was fascinated and I reported back to my class that I was Scottish. I was German, I was English and connected to kings (I think that we all are, the way they got around back then)! I was American Indian somewhere among those lines. I was all of them mixed together.
A few years passed. The papers were tucked away, brought out from time to time for school projects, for family get togethers, for review of a fact now and again, but mostly forgotten.
The finding family bug bit again when I was 16 and a Junior in high school. I had grown up most of my life not knowing my father or much about his side of
my family. I knew he was married before he married my mother, at least once and maybe
twice, and that I had a couple of older brothers and an older
sister. His parents were dead when he met my mom. Names were hazy, my
mom didn't know much beyond my father's parents names (James Sr. and
Rena French), there might have been a sister - Jane or Jean, and my father's
children: possibly Paul, James, David and there was a Bonnie for sure. I
always pictured Bonnie with an "ie" like my name - Tammie - and we were good friends in my imaginings. She was my big sister and I didn't have to be the oldest anymore. In 1986, there was no internet. I picked up the phone and called the operator in Vermont. I was looking for Ann MacDearmid. That was her name, my father's previous wife. At least, it was the name we knew. Rumor was that she had changed the childrens' last name. We didn't know to what but if I could find a MacDearmid, I might find her, and them - my family. The calls were unsuccessful. No Ann MacDearmid in Vermont and for good reason which I would learn later. On and off for a couple of years I picked up the phone, scanned local phone books, and called on anyone with the same last name as me whenever the bug hit. Finding family meant locating my brothers and sisters. No family to be found.
I spent 1994-1999 in college when the computer was growing in popularity. Web crawlers were brand new and, using Yahoo! one day, I was once again bit by the bug to find my family. I was 25 and convinced that this new fangled internet could help me to find them. In went the search parameters: James Melwin MacDearmid Jr. Nothing. Let's try again... James MacDearmid. Nope, nothing. MacDearmid? Ah, a few links to message boards but with different name spellings: McDermid, McDiarmid, McDermit, etc. I spent hours following links, reading posts, posting messages, searching, searching, searching. Until... I found the Social Security Death Index. Sounded ominous but I went exploring it anyway as there were a handful of MacDearmids listed. By "handful" I mean about 3 or 4 and James was one of them. I had found my Grandfather and he had died in 1974. That didn't make sense. My father had told my mom that his parents were dead when they married in 1968. I called my mom. "Guess what! I found my grandfather. He's dead but he didn't die until 1974 and I can't find my grandmother online. She is supposedly dead too so I don't know why she isn't listed. Maybe the database isn't done yet. Maybe they haven't added all of the names". It never occurred to me that she wasn't dead.
I would make a trip to the archives in Boston, Massachusetts during these years to find the birth certificates of my father James Jr., his sister, Jane, and my grandparents. At this point finding family meant searching for that elusive American Indian in my history. The rumor is that Carrie May Tarbox (my grandfather's mother) was an Indian (at least partially) and I wanted to find out for sure. I traveled 4 hours north into Maine to visit the archives that housed my great grandparents (Tarbox) records. The recollection is fuzzy now but one of them was born on P.E.I. (I'll need to pull out the papers and read them again).
My mom would also give me the address to the Social Security Administration where I could write and request a letter be passed on to my father. I wanted medical history. I wanted to know about me. I wanted to know about my family. I never sent the letter. I was not ready to know why my father had chosen to stay out of my life. It was a painful thought and finding family didn't include finding my father. Thinking back, finding family had always been more about finding those who I hadn't met yet - my brothers and sister, my grandparents, my aunt, and anyone who might be related to them.
I graduated college and moved on to a full time job. Finding family took a back seat to life. I always wondered, I randomly searched, I learned a bit of trivia (Ann MacDearmid is a renowned harpist but not related - there are MacDearmids in Massachussetts but I haven't found a link) and still I found none of my family.
2001 - My mom had asked my uncle (the famed family researcher who had years ago provided the map of our past) to help in the search for my elusive relations. He would locate my posts of years gone by, some marriage records in FL that we would later learn were my father's later wives, and the death record for my father. He had died in 1999. When I learned of his death, I had mixed feelings. He was, after all, my father but I had known him barely 6 years and now any chance of knowing him had passed, forever. But did I really want to know him? Hadn't he neglected to know me. HE was the grown up while I had been the child. Surely had he wanted to know me, he would have made the effort. I called his widow. I didn't learn much. Lung cancer, suffered a bit, she was his 4th wife (that is what she thought!), had a visit from his children near the end (she didn't believe that I and my sisters were actually his), and no, she wouldn't pass my phone number on to them. The end.
2010 - I was 40 and finding family became a curiosity about my history.Who had my ancestors been? Where had they lived? I had a pile of papers from my cousin, Hester Pullen, and I wanted to see if anyone else out there had some information on the Pullen and Corey families. Google became my tool of choice and many of my searches lead me to ancestry.com It was time to pay for a subscription and see what I could find. I started my tree with what I knew - my mother and my father. I added myself and my sisters, our families, and then I started branching out with what I knew of my mother's parents, my father's parents, my aunts & uncles & cousins, my cousin Hester's family from her notes. The tree grew but so far I was only entering info, not finding family. My original curiosity about my siblings took hold and I started searching for any information related to my father, his first wife (wives), and their children. I searched for birth certificates for my father, his parents and sister, his children. And one October day, there it was...
James Melwin MacDearmid III
Born in 1966, here was a baby boy with my father's name. I imagined him as a baby (never mind he was 44 now), my brother. I had always been the oldest of 3 so in my mind, siblings were younger things, not older. It took a bit to realize that here was an OLDER brother. A BROTHER!! I had a brother. I'd always been envious of my friends who had older brothers growing up and now I had one. It was amazing how Jamie immediately felt like family. I hadn't spoken to him yet, I hadn't met him, but he was my family. I made plans to meet him and while I waited for the holidays to be over and 2011 to begin, I continued to look for my other siblings. There were 3 who were older than my brother Jamie; Cliff, David, & Bonnie. Where could they be? The search went on.
November rolled around and I found a marriage certificate naming a Jane MacDearmid (with a different maiden name) who had married again in the 70's. I had a new last name to search for. Could this be the name my brothers and sister were going under? Ancestry.com searches weren't coming up with much and I didn't know my brothers' names for sure so I turned to the other "database" that I'd been searching from time to time: Facebook. And there she was! Bonny. Her name didn't have an "ie" after all but there she was, my sister! I already have 2 sisters but, in my opinion, you can't have too many sisters and now I had 1 more! I sent her a message that went something like this: "Hello, I'm doing some genealogy research looking for the children of X & Y and wondering if you might be one of those children". Obviously I hadn't thought it out very well so I blurted out what came first to mind. Her response "Yes, I am. Who are you?" I explained and we made plans to meet on the weekend that I would be driving up to meet Jamie. I would add 2 brothers and a sister to my family. Oh! And 2 pretty amazing nephews!
It would appear that it is easy to find family. Let me assure you that it is not. From the time I found Jamie until the day I located Bonny, it was nearly a month of daily searches. Ancestry.com, Facebook, Whitepages online, and Google were employed for hours on end and into the night. Bits and pieces needed to be put together and checked, re-checked, and searches adjusted & tried again and again and again.
But how does it feel to find family? Interestingly enough, they feel like family. They are a part of me, genetically and emotionally. We share a common, yet separate, history. We all hold small pieces of a bigger story. Even finding records of long dead relatives felt like I had found a bit of myself. I recall thinking, after discovering my 4th great grandfather had lived in NH - the state I was living in at the time, that I could simply drive up to Thornton, NH and meet him. I had to remind myself that he, his wife, their 15 children, and all of the relations down the line, were dead. There would be no trips to meet them, only cold days spent tramping through grey cemeteries in search of evidence.
It can be overwhelming but finding Jamie, Bonny, Cliff and their families was not the end. There were cousins to be found as well. I immediately got to work searching for the children of our father's sister - Jane. After all, they were every bit a cousin to me as the cousins that I had grown up with. They were blood related, they were family too. With the help of Bonny, I had a little more to go on. Jane had lived in PA, married, and had at least 3 children. Let the searching begin!
2011 was fairly fruitless in terms of finding family and 2012 was a year of changes for me. I left off the major searching, posted on a message board for these cousins and went about packing for a move to Canada.
2014 and the bug bit again. Sitting at my computer one weekend, I was tired of work and distracted myself with some searches for "Jane MacDearmid". She was my father's sister, died in 1975 and left behind 3 children. I knew her married name by this time, her husband's name, and her childrens' names. I'd never been able to find much on Jane, perhaps because she died years before the internet and mass sharing of data. She just never seemed to exist. The first search results in Google were some links to the ancestry.com message boards. Old messages from 2011. Knowing I had written them, I passed them by for newer information. An hour and no family finds later I decided to go back and click on those links just for the heck of it. Imagine my surprise that someone had replied in 2013. Over a year ago, someone had written that they were a child of Jane. And they had 2 sisters and a brother. Here were 4 new cousins! Another hour of detective work, a renewed membership to Ancestry.com, and I had found 2 people who I was fairly certain were 2 of these 4 cousins. Facebook to the rescue again - off went 2 messages. I have since heard back from both "new" cousins, spoken to one on the phone, and hope to meet them all later this year. Stay tuned as I am sure there is more to come. :)
How does it feel to find family? Wonderful and, in part, completing.
