When you don’t know who your biological parents are, you jump on any little scrap of information you can get.
I’ve talked to several people who knew my mother, including her best friend, Nancy. During our first conversation, she assured me she had no idea who my bio father could be. The second time we talked, she told me she never knew my father but very casually mentioned he was a golfer. A golfer? A professional golfer? A suburban guy who liked to putt around on the golf course for fun? Nancy didn’t know. How long did he and my mother go out? I asked. Just a couple times, Nancy said. Hmmm. Very interesting.
That’s all I know about my father. My mother was married and had four kids when she met him. She worked as a waitress and cook at a number of bars, restaurants and a very nice private club with a golf course in the suburbs north of Chicago. Did she meet my father at one of those places? Possibly. I don’t know where she was working in the summer of 1963, which is when I was conceived.
I hope a DNA test will move my search in the right direction. Using Family Tree DNA’s Family Finder test kit, I scraped samples of DNA from the insides of my cheeks and sent the results back to the company. Family Tree DNA will contact me if my sample matches any samples in the company’s database.
I know where my mother came from and what her childhood and adult life were like. I have a picture of her in my head and several photos of her on my desk.
Dad is a mystery man. Unless I find someone who knew him, someone who can tell me what he was like, I’ll always picture my father as some featureless guy in a golf shirt toting a cart full of clubs and flirting with married waitresses.