Well with a deep breath I sit here on May 2nd, 2011 and write my words. Sooo much has happened since I last wrote..ya ya..I know I am remiss. The most important update: Ok..wait for it.... I found my Sister! Yay! Ok for those of you who don't know, and apparently there were more than a few, I have a sister and her name is Kim. She is my half sister, my father's daughter. I have known about her for as long as I can remember, and finally I was able to find her thanks to Ancestry.com.
I am not going to bore you with all of the details, but it was a bit hard to find her, but I did it..Ok...so I will bore you with the details, because in a few years...I know I will forget!
I began researching somewhere around 2001 or so. Online etc. All that I know is that my sister's name was Kim. She was born on June 9th and that her mother's name was Florence. Not much information to begin with. Recently my gusto for researching family lineage began to overflow! I couldn't seem to stop, with all of the amazing information that I was finding not only on my side of the family tree, but on Rob's as well. There were death certificates from Rob's GG Grandfather, which led to more and more information on his lineage. I was purely elated by how 'easy' it seemed to find the information I was looking for! I decided to dig a bit deeper. Here I was with all the tools I needed at my fingertips, yet I didn't really know how to go about searching. I began watching a new show called aptly 'Searching For' with a professional genealogist Pam Slaton. She is an adoptee who began searching for her birth parents and made a career out of searching for family members of people who request her help. I was going to contact her, but thought that I would indeed watch her show, and see exactly how she did it.
So I did.
And with that...I found her. I found that her mother re-married some 7 years later after divorcing my father (rightly so) and that Kim had been adopted by her new and only father Albert. She told me that he is a great father, and like Sean and I who have a great father too, was very lucky. Armed with this new information, and knowing her last name, I entered the information into Ancestry.com website, and really, literaly held my breath. And straight away, up popped her name, and attached to her name was in (parens) her married name. I let out a big sigh, and realized that I found her married name, and armed with that...I KNEW I could find her.
I looked up her married name and found that she had indeed been married sometime ago in the 1980's and found her husbands name as well. I actually just sat on that information for a couple of weeks, already knowing that I was about T-H-I-S...(finger and thumb about 1mm apart) close to finding her. I had an old address, and two other addresses so I wasn't so sure which address was hers. Lorimy BFF being the Realtor that she is, told me to look up the County assessor records for the county she lives in, which of course is public record! Thank goodness she is a smarty pants...because when I went onto the County Assessors website, and typed in her name...Low and behold, a house was quit claimed to her by her husband in 2010! Therefore....I now had her address, at least what I thought was her address.
I decided before I went on holiday with Rachele to send her a card, and just to let her know that we were indeed related, and that I wanted to talk with her. I included my business card and sent it off the day we were leaving.
I didn't expect much, or much of anything to be truthfully honest. I wasn't sure how this news of being her sister would be taken. I didn't know if she knew anything about my 3 brothers and I. Well as you have it...she didn't. She didn't know anything at all about any of us. She emailed me first, with a short and to the point email that basically said she didn't know anything about our biological father, or his family. I felt it was important, that she know in case she had children, and for her to know about her biological father just for goodness sake.
WE have chatted a couple of times on the phone, and facebooked, and emailed..and it's all been Great! I love getting to know about her, and her children and I still want to get to know more.
I have a Sister!!
I am more than excited that she is just as excited to know about Sean and David and Bruce too!
This is only a short 'synopsis' of what happened while searching for my sister. I hope to continue growing our relationship, and learning more about her in the years to come.
Super happy!!
Thanks!!
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