Recently, I’ve made some posts on my personal Facebook page about connecting with family we have never known. There is such a long and winding story to this that I was hoping to turn this story into a book eventually. And that may still happen, but I’m impatient with some projects, and I believe the continued excitement of this story can be conveyed without waiting for a novel to be written. So, of course, I figured an alternative would be to write about it here in a blog post and I can update periodically as well. And now, without further ado, here we go…
For the longest time, since we were very young, my sister and I have talked about or, at least, made mention of trying to “find him”. These were random mentions in passing conversations though. Erin and I knew we had a biological/birth father out there that we never met. Then again, it’s been nearly 50 years since he was a part of our family and that is probably where things should start.
Quick(ish) backstory synopsis: Our Mom was married to a man many many years ago and they had Erin and I… many many years ago. After about 7 years of marriage, things happened and they separated and eventually divorced not long after I was born (yes, I’m the younger of the two of us). Mom met another man and remarried and that man helped raise Erin and I from when we lived in Baltimore and then moved to a small town in Upstate New York. Tom was our Father and Dad and he helped Mom raise us in his small hometown of Keene, NY (and Keene Valley) where we moved when we were only 4 & 6 years old. As we got older, Erin and I came to know that Dad wasn’t our “real” or “biological” Dad and that we had another Father out there in the world – our birth Father. It wasn’t until our teen years and Erin and I talked more about “him”, our birth father. We had come across our birth certificates which we needed to get licenses and then apply for colleges, etc. Mom was never one to talk about her past or the man that she was married to before. She kept so much inside and didn’t talk to Erin and I about it, but she always said that if we had questions to just ask her. But we never really did because we could see that she would be upset and I really don’t think it was a topic of likable conversation in our house anyway.
Fast forward a handful of years to when Brooke and I started dating she was checking my mail one day and noticed mail addressed to someone that wasn’t me. “Who’s David Lloyd” she asked. “Oh, that’s me” I replied. “Wait what….” she stared back at me. Uuuuhhhhh… yeah, that was a subject I never thought to bring up before then and it was about time to have that conversation with Brooke now. At least I could tell her what I knew and go from there. “Well, that’s my birth name” I said. She looked at me a little perplexed. “I was born David Jarrett Lloyd. Mom divorced our biological father and remarried Dad but Erin and I never took the Whitney name officially or legally, and since it was always just assumed we were Whitneys it never was an issue. And since I never changed it, that is still my legal name”. And it was true, Erin and I were taken in as part of the Whitney family, Dad’s family, and all the extensions of it, and as time went on we were just part of the family. Of course Erin and I always felt a little on the outside, so to speak, but we were loved and cared for and participated in everything as a family, including some big ups and downs along the way. It was around this same time that Brooke was also looking at my wallet, maybe trying to find money that wasn’t there, and she saw an old photo. This was a photo I had kept from the same file that held our birth certificates and other documents that Erin and I found. I kept it as a reminder, I think. Brooke took the photo out and held it up “When was this picture of you taken?” she asked. “That’s not me. That’s HIM. That’s our biological father.” I replied. “Woah! He looks just like you, or you look just like him!” she said in amazement. She was right. I looked identical to him, at least in this old faded photo from 1966 (we later found out). This picture was of “him” the dressed for the prom in a white, dark slacks and a red bow-tie. Looking now, there is a stark resemblance between us at these ages and I think that has stuck with me the most – how closely I resembled my birth father. Quick side note: I DID, in fact, change my last name to “Whitney” in 1995 before Brooke and I were married. It was the name I had been known by and made sense to me to change it as well.
Fast forward several more years and Erin and I continue to have random conversations that usually include the idea of “finding him”. As the internet became our primary tool for searching anything… we did some random searches every once in a while. After Brooke and I had kids, these conversations picked up a bit. When Shane was diagnosed with Autism at a very young age, this conversation picked up to the point where we wanted to try to find some medical history for that side of our family. And when Ryan was going through her diagnosis for Crohn’s disease we talked more and more about “finding him”. All in all, these efforts usually fell silent and with little effort. We knew his name because had his name on our birth certificate. Mom gave us some background on where she thought he was last living but that was years and years ago. Then Erin has her son, Grayson, and the two of us, again, talked about how we should “find him”. Erin eventually went online and with a couple searches she was able to find some locations and matching names that could be him. But that was it for a while again.
Fast forward, again, to just a couple years ago after Mom passed away and Erin and I re-started our conversation of “finding him”. With Mom’s passing, Erin and I realized we were still missing something in our lives. It’s hard to explain that part to others, but we knew what it was. Of course, missing Mom was a lot, and we took it hard for some time. But in the time since her passing, the two of us felt more and more compelled to “find him”. It’s still hard to articulate WHY these conversations picked up again. The best reasoning I can come up with is there seemed to be more of an urgency now, more than ever before. We lost our Mother. She was one of a couple people alive, that we knew of, that would have any information to our lives before we moved to New York from Baltimore. Our Aunt and Cousin had been able to fill some voids for us… but we needed more. Then, in the Spring of ’23 we made the jump to actually “find him”. This first attempt seemed like a shot in the dark and it was just that. Social media is the key to this happening. After searching our birth father’s name, I came up with a couple options. In look through photos, you know “Facebook stalking”, I found a couple pictures of who we thought could be him. I ended up sending the picture to my cousin and she wasn’t sure if that would be him or not. After all, the last time she saw him was 1973 or 74 maybe. She sent it to her Mom (our Aunt/Mom’s sister) and she felt confident that the picture I sent was him. There was now some sort of confirmation that we were on the right path. I hesitated for a while but I eventually agreed with Erin to send him a direct message on Facebook. What the hell… it was worth a shot. But what do you say? “Hey, we’re your kids from your first marriage!” or “You don’t know us but…” or “So, where have you been for almost 50 years?”. I mean seriously, the questions that came up were real. But so was the sarcasm of course. Erin and I LIVE by sarcasm and humor so you’ll always have that to look forward to with us. Anyway, I drafted up a message finally, Erin reviewed it too, and the I sent it. That message, to this day, has not been replied to. But we did not despair, especially since it has already been almost 50 years anyway. So I went back to “Facebook stalking” and went through as much as I could find. And what I could find on Facebook would lead to me to doing other searches to try and match up the people I was seeing. These other people, I was assuming at the time, were relatives. So, I did what other normal people would do, I sent a couple more random messages to some people I thought were family. One of which shared the same last name so I assumed that would get us somewhere. The other one was to a presumed relative with a different last name but the intent was to message both as an “inquiry”. Well, BOTH of those messages, to this day, have sat without a reply. But that’s OK, right? We do not despair, we press on….
After a little more procrastination for a few months, it wasn’t until just this past Spring that I picked up the mission and continued… again. Erin and I agreed that we needed to try to reach others who we thought were “family”. So I dug even more. I dug into photos, then I dug into comments, and the people who commented on ANY photo “he” was in that I could find, I made a note of. Then I found a connection! A comment from a sister, presumably would be our “Aunt” lead me further into my investigation. By now I felt like I should be working for the FBI, CIA… or even the NSA (just wait until you hear about that)! It was very intriguing to see this unfold. Looking back now I don’t really know how to explain how the pieces fell in place, but I have my thoughts on that and I will let them known soon. Anyway, after all that, I decided to sent, yet another round of messages. But this time… we got a reply!!
I really wasn’t expecting much, if any, reply at all by this time. I let Erin know that I had sent another message and who it went to and who I thought that person possibly was in relation to us. I had recapped all the “stalking” I had done online and uncovered some names and possible locations of where these people were. None of which, at this point, were leading directly to “finding him”; well, not yet at least. Then I checked my messages one evening a couple days later and low and behold I got a reply from who we now know is an older cousin, Jim (hope he’s OK with me using his name – HAHA). Jim replied that he indeed was a relative of our birth father, and thus Erin and I as well, and after he mentioned some other family connections he said he was going to pass my message on to another cousin – Andrew. Well, sure as shit, Andrew replied soon after. This is THE moment that EVERYTHING began to change and speed up for Erin and I. THIS is what started everything for us to get to where we are now……..
I've Been Thinking 