Finding Answers to a Family Mystery

What really happened to my father fifty years earlier?

Have you ever tried one of those genealogy websites?

It seems tracing your family tree has become a popular hobby. Millions of people around the world have logged on to see what the sites can tell them about their family’s history.

My niece decided to trace our family’s lineage to see where it might lead but we got more than we bargained for. And what we discovered gave us all a big shock.

My niece had left her contact information on the site for anyone who might be able to fill in some of the blanks with our family history. It didn’t take long, and she got a hit.

It was information about my long-lost father.

More than fifty years earlier my dad vanished. Not a trace. It wasn’t the first time he had gone AWOL, in fact, he kind of made a practice out of it. He was a traveling salesman and sometimes he just wouldn’t come home at all.

We were struggling financially and when he would leave, it was often with no food in the cupboard and no money for the rent. It was why we had to keep moving, from basement suites to the homes of family and friends.

It was hard on my sisters, the oldest was fourteen, my middle sister was thirteen and I was two, but it was especially hard on our mom. She struggled to keep us fed and clothed with a roof over our heads. Then he would come home feeling contrite as he would try to make it up to us.

But again every couple of months he would be gone again and my mom would have to pull my sisters out of one school to move them into another. We didn’t know week to week or month to month what was going to happen next.

Our dad also had a criminal record. He had been arrested for mostly property crimes, fraud, theft, and that kind of thing. He was even in jail when I was born and my mom and sisters had to wrap me up and bring me to the jail to meet my dad for the first time.

Still, when he left the last time it devastated us. I didn’t know about the bad things he did, he was my daddy, and now he was gone. My sisters did know what he had done but still wanted him home with us.

In time our mother managed to get us settled in a new apartment. We went on welfare so we at least had a regular income to pay the bills… barely. My sisters could attend the same school for more than one term. But still, we missed him.

I would run up to men in grocery stores asking, “Are you my daddy?” when they would answer “No,” I would ask, “Will you be my daddy?” My mother was mortified and I know now how much it hurt her when I would do that. I didn’t just ask strangers either. I asked family friends and relatives. I even asked my deaf barber if he would be my daddy (he could read lips) but he said no although I could visit him whenever I wanted.

The years passed and I still wondered when my dad was coming back but as I got a little older I understood that he was not ever coming back. When people asked about my dad, I responded “He ran away.” Deep down I wondered why he ran away. He stuck around for my sisters but after I was born it was suddenly too much. Was I too much? Why did he leave me?

What my mom knew and what we would learn much later, is that our dad was actually a bigamist. After he disappeared, my mom heard from a woman in Seattle who said that she was married to my dad too. The police were looking for him on a charge of fraud and now they added bigamy to the warrant.

Then my mom got a horrible, mean, and angry letter from him, demanding a divorce so he could marry his new girlfriend in Toronto. Every new revelation was like a dagger to my mom’s heart. She was forced to get a divorce, which meant she was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

Leaving The Past Behind

We got on with our lives. My sisters got married and started their own families. My mom got a job as a secretary in a real estate company so she was able to support us without the need for welfare. She also eventually met a man and married him when I was 11 years old.

I finally got the dad I always wanted. The bonus was that I also got three brothers and two more sisters too.

The police said, based on his record, my father wouldn’t be able to stay out of trouble for long so they believed he probably was already dead. When my new dad wanted to adopt me, the police (including Interpol) had to search again for him, without any success.

He slowly became a mysterious part of our past and my family’s memories of him continued to fade. But still, we wondered what happened.

His mother, my grandma, died never knowing what happened to her beloved son, hoping that one day he would come back to her too. Then his sister died and then his brother. And finally, my mother passed away. No one had managed to solve the mystery.

At that point, we realized that we would likely never know what had happened, that he was now probably dead as well.

Then several years ago my niece started playing around with an ancestry website.

She got a note from a woman who said that the name and birthdate of her stepfather matched up with our father. He had recently passed away and they were trying to see if he had any other family out there to give their half-brother.

Here’s the note:

“I stumbled across your website noted above as I was looking for information about my stepfather. I am curious about your Stanley and wondered if he might be my stepfather. My mother married Stan in 1972, when their son Michael was a year and a half old. We knew very little about Stan. There were rumors he had two daughters from a previous marriage, a brother named Terry and his parents were English but Stan would never talk about it. It was all very strange.”

After some back and forth, we all realized it was the same person. But while it was upsetting for us to have this story come back to us, for them it was a complete shock. They had no idea that he had another family.

We spoke on the phone. We tried to answer each other’s questions in an attempt to fill in the blanks from our father’s life

I found out that when our father left us, he started creating another family. but there were some things that were strange. The woman he married had two daughters, like the two daughters he had left behind. They also had a son together, Michael.

But his new family didn’t understand why our father had insisted on choosing the boy’s middle name. He wanted him to be named Michael Darren. My name is Darren. Was he trying to keep a connection to me after all?

I am beyond feeling anger or resentment about what he did. The good thing that came out of all this craziness is my new siblings. I’m developing a relationship with them now as I learn more about the man who we all called Dad.

I had a wonderful relationship with my new dad, my stepfather, but I never got to say goodbye.