I’ve always thought I had plenty of relatives, living and dead. My interest in DNA testing has been primarily to learn ethnic background, not to find cousins. I had already located and reunited with my birth son, and gave him all the information I had. As time goes on, however, I keep finding more family, more ancestors, more connections. As my husband has begun to do some genealogical work on his own family, he’s found a lot of information, and we’ve also found that many of our ancestors were in the same towns, or even buried in the same small country cemeteries, and no doubt knew each other, although we only met each other in high school, and our immediate families only met at that time. We even found, several years ago, that we had ancestors who belonged to the same Quaker Meeting in Pennsylvania at the same time!

Recently, I found a document on the Internet about my eighth great-grandmother, who was in that group. It made her come alive, in a way, as it told of her efforts to help others and her own life. I feel very fortunate that I have been given enough information in the past to find these things, and to pass them on to my own children and grandchildren, and my cousins. The secrecy of closed adoptions and closed records prevents many others from having access to such knowledge of their own birth family or relinquished offspring, which is why I continue to be an advocate for open records for all those with adoption connections, and for open adoptions in the fullest way possible.

While on a recent trip to visit cemeteries and locate more records of both our families, and visit some living relatives and “almost-relatives,” we realized that family is not just genetic relatives, and people one never knew of before can tell stories we never heard before that give us insight into our families. My mother’s foster-sister (an informal arrangement that resulted in life-long closeness), the only person still living who knew me as a baby, told me stories about my parents I had forgotten or never heard. A second cousin I’d only met as a child told me about her grandmother, my great-aunt, who I never knew. While looking for my grandparents, and ancestors’ land, we met a man who knew my father and grandparents, lived next to them, and had stories I’d never known. A man mowing a cemetery told me how much another great-aunt and -uncle had done for the community. I need to write these stories to pass on.

My husband sat down at his laptop and was suddenly able to trace a branch of his mother’s family back several more generations. We both discovered marriages we’d never heard about, and relatives we never knew existed. Step-relatives in past times usually resulted from a death and remarriage, rather than divorce, but there were some of those, too, and those step-relatives are still part of one’s heritage. What we don’t know is whether other family are not in the records due to relinquishment and adoption, or whether others were adopted into our families but not included in genealogical records, or whether some were adopted but are recorded as genetic relatives, or were step-relatives but not documented as such. We keep hoping for letters, notes, or public records that will help fill in the blanks.

We found some, unexpectedly, on this trip, and it made us aware that we need to document our own stories for future generations. It seems better to have more information than one might want than not to be able to find information one needs, or at least really wants. In the past, when a parent died, sometimes another relative, or neighbors or friends finished raising a child, and learning those stories can be very important to later descendants. Those stories are rarely in family-tree charts, and not often on the Internet, so letters or stories passed down are the only sources in such cases. Researching family is like a huge puzzle that is never really complete. Sometimes people have tried to “clean up” records by changing names or dates, by not acknowledging offspring or second marriages, by not acknowledging that someone was adopted or was relinquished, or that someone changed their name.

In many cases, a woman’s original name was not acknowledged, which means no one can research her genetic line unless other documents give her name. Recently, someone told me she was never interested in genealogy; she had spent most of her life hoping no one would find out about her family. I have no idea what she meant, as I never knew anything negative about her. Now, she says, one of her daughters is interested in genealogy and she can’t be of much help. My mother’s foster sister says her nephew and niece never knew their mother had been previously married before she married their father, until their mother died. It’s too late to discuss it with their mother, and this aunt was only a young girl at the time of her sister’s first marriage, so she does not have the full story. They feel somewhat cheated at never knowing these facts all of their lives. How many people have only learned that their parents were birth parents of half-siblings they never knew, and how many only learned of their own adoption after a parent died? Silence and secrecy and misleading information still affect people, and even though the intent may be to protect someone, the end result is still negative.

So, follow your own trail and remember that you are not responsible for what someone else did or didn’t do. Than make sure you leave a clear trail for those who come after you, because even if you don’t have children, you still have family.