I found my biological grandfather. Now what?

He opted out of our lives eighty years ago. Does the connection matter?

For the past couple of months I’ve been neck-deep in a search for my mother’s biological father, who was never part of her life. My mother was raised by another man, my grandmother’s eventual husband (pictured holding Mom below), with whom Gram had four more children. My mother didn’t learn the truth until she was an adult.

My mother with John, the man who raised her as his own.

My search started on 23andMe, where I connected with multiple distant family members but couldn’t figure out the common ancestor. It then took me on a research trip to my mother and grandmother’s birth place, where my family and I went down a few rabbit holes of false leads. Then I signed up for an AncestryDNA test kit, and after a few weeks of waiting, the answer was staring me right in the face.

AncestryDNA matched me with a close family connection, listed as a “possible first cousin” - but she was just a couple of years younger than my mother and the strength of the relationship was about the same as my aunt Kay, my mother’s half-sister. Another half-aunt, then. And a quick look at her family tree turned up the name of my grandfather - a very similar sounding name to the one we’d been searching for.

Just like that, my mystery grandfather was found.

I don’t know what I expected to feel about it, but I didn’t expect it to be…nothing.

My biological grandfather is dead, as is the aunt whose DNA led me to him. I’ve made contact with a half-cousin, and we had a brief conversation - a very nice guy, but he doesn’t remember too much about his (our!) grandfather, who died back in 1992.

But what would I gain if he did? The man who contributed a quarter of my DNA was never part of my life, or my mother’s, either. Nearly eighty years’ worth of living and working and birthing and dying have happened since my mother’s story begun, happening in two completely separate families connected only by one person’s DNA. What commonality could I possibly claim with this other family?

I was looking to solve a mystery, but it turns out there’s no mystery here: it’s a tale as old as time. A woman who shouldered most of burden of fertility, and a guy who removed himself from the picture - in this case starting another family two years later.

All these years later, who knows how it all went down? Certainly no one still alive, and my mother’s biological father had his own reasons for the choices he made. But by opting out of her life, my grandfather also opted out of mine. He chose not to know us, or be known by us - so his life since, it would seem, has very little bearing on mine.

Yet there are things I still want to know about my background. I’m definitely curious about my Finnish roots, about traits my siblings and I may have inherited from our biological grandfather’s line. I’m hoping to connect with more cousins and would love to plan a trip to Finland one day.

And maybe one day I’ll learn something about my biological grandfather that will make me smile in recognition or feel a pang of regret for never having known him. Maybe I’ll see a glimmer of my mother, or my siblings, or myself in a photo or a story. Maybe there’s an opportunity for him to become more to me than just an obituary filled with “survived by” names that don’t include anyone I’ve ever known.

Maybe.

My grandmother - likely still quite ill with tuberculosis - and my mother.

But today, I find myself most curious about the women of the family and their stories - the parts of their lives not reflected in census documents, which tell us very little about the women raising children and working in those homes.

I’ve been thinking about how much abundant fertility often impacted these women’s lives, for better and for worse, just as it has mine and my sister’s; just as it did my mother’s.

What was my grandfather’s mother’s life like? I’d love to talk to her, to learn what it was like to come over from Finland as a young woman, to raise children in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1910s and 1920s. To be a woman and a mother and a miner’s wife 100 years ago.

I still believe there’s a story here - but maybe it’s not so much a genealogical mystery as it is an exploration of what it means, and has meant, to be a woman whose life is shaped by fertility and motherhood - especially now that I’m on the edge of that stage of life being behind me.

Perhaps this DNA link to a now-known grandfather isn’t really about him after all; it simply connects me to more generations of mothers whose stories need telling.

It’s a story I’ve already lived and am living; it’s as nuanced and complicated as it to be alive. What a wondrous thing, yes?