Stories That Live In Us

An Opportunity for Connection | Episode 40

• Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist • Season 1 • Episode 40

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When my mom was just 17, she lost her father – but 50 years later, DNA revealed an unexpected gift...

In this deeply personal episode, I share how an ordinary AncestryDNA test revealed an extraordinary family secret. What began as a potentially devastating discovery became a beautiful experience that brought four women (in their 60s and 70s) closer together. As the story unfolds, you'll see how even the messiest parts of our family stories are an opportunity for connection. Join me as I explore how DNA testing can unlock forgotten stories, heal old wounds, and create new bridges between generations that transform both our past and future relationships.

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🖼️ Ready to turn your family discoveries into a beautiful conversation piece? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥ Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Crista Cowan:

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. Can change everything. When my grandpa, woody, passed away, my mom was just 17 and she spent the next 50 years missing him, wishing she had more time, more stories, more everything. Then, one day, through the most unexpected DNA discovery, she got a piece of him back, just not quite in the way that any of us would have predicted. If you remember, back in episode 33 with Diane Southard, I alluded to this story in our family, but I decided it was time to finally share it. It's not entirely my story, though it is part of me and I was part of the experience. It's my mom's story, but the story also belongs to the rest of our family, and so today I'm going to try and tell it and do it justice.

Crista Cowan:

My mom was raised as the youngest of two children. Her parents were both born in Northwest Arkansas and my nana, Jessie, moved out to California during World War II to work in the factories. My grandfather Woody yes, my grandparents' names are Jessie and Woody my grandfather was serving in Italy during World War II. When the war ended and he came home to her, he made his way out to Long Beach, California, where they bought a house. My mom was raised in that house from the day that she was brought home from the hospital in 1950 to the day she married my dad in 1971. She was raised in that neighborhood with those friends. She went to the same schools. She had a very consistent life growing up. For a period of time my uncle's older brother, carl, and his wife Bea lived across the street with their two daughters, Frances and Carol Ann. So for a period of her growing up years she got to live near these older cousins and they would sometimes take vacations out to Arkansas to visit the other cousins or a Sunday drive out to Riverside County or San Bernardino County to visit some of the other cousins. My mom's dad, my grandpa Woody. He died suddenly when my mom was 17 years old of a heart attack and over the years as she got married and started her own family, she slowly lost touch with her dad's side of the family. Her mom's side of the family was very involved in surrounding this widowed woman with two teenage daughters and there were family reunions and there were other things that kept them going. So my mom was very connected to her mom's side of the family as she started her own family, but she was very disconnected from her father's side of the family after his death, and that's true, I think, in a lot of families. We all drift away and things get busy as life moves on.

Crista Cowan:

Well, back in 2013, shortly after Ancestry DNA launched, I asked my mom to take a DNA test. Not long after that, her cousin Francis took a test, and you may or may not know this, but when you take an ancestry DNA test, you don't just get ethnicities showing you the regions around the world where your DNA was 500 to 1,000 years ago or the journeys your family took that landed them in certain communities two or 300 years ago. You also get a list of DNA matches other people who have taken the Ancestry DNA test that share enough DNA with you that we can tell how closely or distantly you're related to this person. In this case, Frances popped up near the top of my mom's DNA match list because she is her first cousin and Frances and I connected over that and we started working together on our family history, collecting family stories, building out that Woodruff branch of our family tree. My mom and Frances and I at one point all pitched in money and bought a bunch of DNA kits on a sale so that we could start handing them out to the cousins. We just understood the power of DNA to really help us continue to make family history discoveries and to dig into the stories.

Crista Cowan:

But one Thursday afternoon at four o'clock I was sitting in my office and Frances called me, which was unusual because usually we just exchanged text messages or emails. But she called me and she told me that she had tested her sister, Carol Ann, and that Carol Ann's DNA results had come in and that there was something confusing about it and she wanted to take a look at. She wanted me to take a look at it, so she shared her results with me. She shared Carol Ann's results with me. I logged into my account and pulled them up and immediately what I saw was that, instead of being full siblings, Frances and Carol Ann were only sharing enough DNA that it indicated that they were half siblings. Even more startling than that was as I scrolled down Carol Ann's match list and saw my mom and my Aunt Len, I realized that they were too high up on the list. They shared too much DNA with my mom, that Carol Ann was not in fact, their first cousin, but she was also their half-sibling. I checked and double-checked the results Because some of the other cousins had tested. I was able to go look and see how much DNA does Carol Ann share with each of them? She was their first cousin. How much DNA did they share with Francis and my mom and my aunt Len? They were their first cousins.

Crista Cowan:

Everybody's DNA lined up the way that it should in relationship to each other, based on the relationships that we knew, except Carol Ann's. Now, I wanted to make sure I was right, so I ran it past a colleague. I even went and ran it past one of the scientists at Ancestry Remember this was back in 2013. Even went and ran it past one of the scientists at Ancestry Remember this was back in 2013. Ancestry DNA had only been out for a year.

Crista Cowan:

I was still trying to understand what the DNA was telling me, but ultimately, everything that I had initially decided was the truth, and so the very first phone call that I made was to my dad. I called him at work and I said Dad, I have some news about mom's family. There's a DNA discovery that's come up and I don't know if I should tell her over the phone or if you want to tell her in person. And so I explained to him what had happened and he said oh, you're telling her. Thanks a lot, dad. He said you should tell her, but why don't you wait until I get home from work and then I can be there for her and hold her hand? When he got home, he called me and he put her on the phone and she said what's going on? Your dad's being really weird. He's sitting here holding my hand no-transcript.

Crista Cowan:

When I asked my mom what I should tell Francis and Carol Ann, she asked if she could sleep on it, and so the next morning I called her back and we had decided that we needed to fly to Southern California and that we needed to talk to them in person. So we bought plane tickets that Friday and we were on a plane Saturday morning Her from Oregon, me from Utah, and Saturday morning, her from Oregon, me from Utah. We met up in Orange County and I called Frances and told her that we were coming and that we would love to meet her and Carol Ann for dinner. Our first stop was at my Aunt Len's house. My cousin Alyssa was there with her girls and we sat around the dining room table and I explained to my aunt how DNA works and what it had revealed. And then I watched my aunt Len go through all of the stages of grief over the course of about 90 minutes. Together we worked through the timeline.

Crista Cowan:

My mom's uncle Carl and Aunt Bea got married in 1935 when Carl was 16 and Bea was 20. If I remember correctly, he lied about his age to make himself older so that they could get married, and then from then on there was some confusion about exactly how old he was. Almost a year to the day after Uncle Carl and Aunt Bea got married, francis was born. They all still lived in Northwest Arkansas back then. My grandpa was the youngest of five boys that lived. Their mom had died a few days after Carl's sixth birthday. My grandpa was only three at the time. Their father had remarried a woman who had children of her own and she treated her stepsons horribly. Now I can't imagine walking into a family with five unruly, motherless boys, and when you look back with perspective maybe there's some different things you would have said about that person, but my Uncle Carl used to describe her as the reason why wicked stepmothers are called wicked. She was very unkind to them in a lot of ways, very abusive. Their own father was no better and again, looking back, I can have some empathy for this man who had lost his wife and was left with these children. But the hardness with which those boys were raised and the dysfunction it led them to have unique relationships with each other.

Crista Cowan:

By the time my grandfather was in the third grade, he had dropped out of school and was doing farm work for the neighbors, and this was even before, you know, before the Great Depression had started. They were just poor rural farming families in Northwest Arkansas. At the time. When my grandfather would come home from those jobs, his stepmother would take his money and so as his older brothers got married and moved out, he quit coming home. As often got married and moved out, he quit coming home as often.

Crista Cowan:

My Grandpa Woody, we decided, was only 18 years old when Carol Ann was conceived. His sister-in-law, bea was 24. Everyone in that generation is gone. My Grandpa died in 1968, uncle Carl in 1982, aunt Bea in 2003. There is no one left to ask about what happened. We don't know if it was a long-term affair, we don't know if it was a one-night stand, we don't know if it was a consensual sibling assist for a couple who may have been having fertility issues in a day and age before there were treatments available. We don't know who knew what, or if they knew anything, and we're certain if they had known, they would not have shared it with their children and grandchildren.

Crista Cowan:

But here we sat in my Aunt Len's home around her dining table, me and my mom, my Aunt Len, her daughter, with her granddaughters playing in the background, and it took my Aunt Len a little bit of time to reach this moment of acceptance about this news that I had just revealed. It was an interesting state of acceptance, though, and I told her that it was good she got there, because we had dinner with Frances and Carol Ann in an hour, at which point my Aunt Len freaked out all over again. She didn't think we should tell them. I said we had to. Frances had called me, she knew something was going on, she had seen the DNA results, and she had asked for my help in understanding them, and I felt an obligation to be honest with her, it took a little bit of doing, but we finally decided we were all going to dinner when I told her I would go to dinner whether they came with me or not. So my cousin bundled up her kids and went home.

Crista Cowan:

My mom and my aunt and I hopped in the car and we headed to the restaurant. We got there 30 minutes early, can you tell we were a little anxious. So we wandered around the neighboring office supply store and I trailed behind my mom and my aunt Len and got to listen to them chatter on about how Len wasn't the oldest anymore and now she was really a middle child, and they dissolved into a fit of giggles over that. And then they wondered out loud, kind of somberly, about whether or not anyone knew and who should know going forward, and then they wondered if their mother knew. There were so many questions as they realized they had literally grown up across the street from these older cousins and they don't know if anybody knew.

Crista Cowan:

And I had chosen a quiet Italian restaurant where I hoped we could talk. But as we walked into the restaurant it was packed and it was noisy and we got seated right in the middle of the restaurant. As Francis and Carol Ann came in and sat down, I realized that prior to this I had only met Carol Ann twice in my whole life. Once was at my grandmother's graveside and the other was at my cousin Greg's wedding. Frances and I had worked on genealogy together for years, and so she and I knew each other, but Carol Ann was virtually a stranger to me, and so, as I sat there next to her at dinner, I took the opportunity to get to know her, and so gracefully, she did the same.

Crista Cowan:

My mom kept kind of kicking me under the table and looking at me like are you going to say something? And I thought this is not the place. This restaurant is so noisy. And so when it was time for dessert, Carol Ann leaned over to me and she whispered we should go get ice cream and go back to my house and eat it there. And I was so relieved to tell the server we're going to skip the ice cream or skip the dessert and take the check because we're going to go, and so relieved to be able to go to her home and to be able to have this conversation in private. It was a much better environment for that for sure, once we got back to her house with ice cream in hand, we settled into the sofa and I took a deep breath and dove into my explanation probably a little too technical, but it was how I was managing my nerves about the random inheritance of DNA and how much DNA full siblings would share versus first cousins versus half siblings, and I sketched out this diagram on a blank piece of paper.

Crista Cowan:

I barely looked up as I explained that what the DNA revealed was that Frances and Carol Ann were only half-siblings and that it also revealed that Carol Ann was a half-sibling to my mom and to my Aunt Len, and I could barely look at her, but out of the corner of my eye I caught Frances nodding along with my explanation, and that's when it dawned on me that she knew and I turned on her. I'm not proud of that moment. My anxiety was so high I think I just reacted. I turned on her and yelled at a woman in her 70s you knew, you knew. And she just very quietly responded yes, I've known since I was 13 years old. Then why? I said why did you call me? Acting like you had no clue. And she said I didn't know how to tell your mom and I knew that you would figure it out and take care of it.

Crista Cowan:

It what followed was two hours of a really beautiful, almost sacred experience to me. With my role as the deliverer of the news complete. I sat back and watched these four women, two of them in their 70s, two of them in their 60s, now bound by this unusual connection. Frances shared the story of the time when she was 13 years old and they had been as a family over at my grandparents' house for dinner and Aunt Bea had taken Uncle Carl home a little early. The girls had decided to stay and play with the new baby. That new baby was my mom and Frances, for whatever reason, got bored and wandered across the street back to her house and she walked in on her parents having a fight and Uncle Carl was yelling at Aunt Bea admit it, she's Vernon's daughter, admit it. And Aunt Bea kept trying to placate him. And the way that Frances recounted the experience, she said in my little girl heart I didn't believe that it could be true.

Crista Cowan:

I just thought that my dad was drunk and my mom was trying to calm him down. But I've carried that around for years. And when I saw that all the right people had taken a DNA test. I knew that if I tested Carol Ann it would be put to rest once and for all. But then the results came back and it was true. But then the results came back and it was true. So she had told Carol Ann what she had heard and Carol Ann had agreed to take a DNA test to put it to rest. And when the results came back they knew what they were looking at. But they didn't know how to tell my mom or my Aunt Len, and so they left that up to me, and that was one of the first times that I have ever had to tell someone that the man that raised them was not their biological father or that the man that is their father fathered other children. Since that time I have done that dozens of times, but to have that first time hit so close to home was very tutoring for me in a lot of things.

Crista Cowan:

As the women talked that night and I sat and listened, I watched this really beautiful thing start to happen in the midst of the messiness of that situation and that conversation, the awkwardness and the uncomfortableness, the distance that had been in that relationship for so many years since my grandfather's death, that gap started to close. There was questions and there was confusion. There was recounting of stories, and I literally sat there and watched my mom get a piece of her dad back, the dad that she had mourned since she was 17 years old, the dad that she had mourned since she was 17 years old. In reconnecting with these cousins one of whom was now a half-sister in learning that Carol Ann was really her sister, in listening to the stories that Francis and Carol Ann shared about growing up and about my grandpa stories that they were old enough to have remembered because they were that much older than my mom All the ways that my grandfather was a part of their lives and a part of the lives of all of the cousins, one of my favorite things they shared that night was how my grandfather always helped anybody in the family that needed help.

Crista Cowan:

Now I knew that he had bought a used car dealership so that Uncle Carl could have a job. I knew that he had helped his brother Leroy through some things. I knew that, even as the baby of the family, he had been the one who had very often taken care of his siblings in their financial struggles. What I didn't know, and what was shared that night was that he had also helped pay for college, not just for Francis and Carol Ann, but for some of the other cousins who had wanted to go to college. He had helped with down payments on houses. He just was such a caretaker of the people in his life and it was really a beautiful thing to witness that night as my mom, who had only ever really seen her father through the eyes of a child, now got to see him in a different light.

Crista Cowan:

As we left that night, my Aunt Len hugged Carol Ann and she said well, I guess if I had to discover that I have a half-sibling, I'm glad it's someone I've known and loved my whole life and not a total stranger. My mom did not miss a beat. She immediately replied well, Len, daddy did serve in Italy in World War II. There could be more of us out there. Well, we haven't found more yet. But also, dna testing isn't really popular in Italy yet, so maybe one day. I hugged Carol Ann and said well, I guess you're my new aunt. She didn't miss a beat. She said well, don't expect 42 years of back Christmas presents. Yeah, she's my aunt.

Crista Cowan:

Since that time we have all gone to Arkansas together for a Woodruff family reunion with the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my grandpa's older brothers. It's a reunion that my mom had never been to before and my dad and I went with her and as I was preparing the big family tree it's a big working chart of the family tree that you hang up on the wall. You know of a big room and it takes 20 or 30 feet of a wall sometimes. Carol Ann walked up to me and she said so which dad did you put me under on the family tree? And I just replied that I had put her under both of them and she seemed pleased with that answer. You know, when I look at that family tree chart from our reunion the one where Carol Ann appears under both brothers I'm reminded that most family stories aren't perfect stories.

Crista Cowan:

One of the things I love about family stories are the choices that we get to make when truth comes to light. Whether it's the truth close in that hits us very personally because it involves people we know, or whether it's a distant truth in our family tree. There are a lot of choices that we can make In that moment. My mom could have chosen anger or denial. Frances could have kept the secret buried. Carol Ann could have rejected her new identity, but instead these women chose something more powerful. They chose to embrace the messiness of it all and to find beauty in it. Through DNA testing, my mom lost a cousin, but she gained a half-sister and more than that she regained pieces of her father, stories and memories and connection that she thought were lost when he died.

Crista Cowan:

Sometimes, painful truths can lead us to beautiful healing. As families grow and change, as you discover new chapters in your own family story, remember this it is never too late for truth to bring healing. It is never too late for family bonds to deepen, and it is never too late to create new memories while honoring the complexity of the old ones. I always ask my guests what they hope for the future, and as I was preparing for this episode, as I was preparing to share this story with you, that question was rattling around in my brain. I wanted to ask myself that question what do I hope for the future? I hope that every family secret revealed through DNA becomes not a source of shame but an opportunity for connection. I hope that by sharing our messy, beautiful family stories, that we give others permission to do the same.

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Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist

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