I didn't realize it had been nearly a year since my last post. Between then and now I've met my paternal half-brother Hans and his wife and young son. I rejoined Facebook after a 2+ year hiatus, reconnecting me with my paternal half-sister Simone, the paternal first cousin once removed who orchestrated the Von Trapp family reunion, and my various maternal relations who I only ever communicate with on there. Apparently no one was avoiding me; they just don't bother replying to emails.
No new half-siblings, leaving the donor conceived sibling count at zero. No new word from my adoptive brother Dante or any other family. I haven't heard from Dante since 2017 after I wired him our dad's life insurance payout. I thought he might've friended our cousins on Facebook since he'd said when Dad died that he wanted to get back in touch with them, but the only thing I can see that he he has done on Facebook since then is join a group from our hometown, get into some internet fights with locals, get banned from the group, and then post that he has no idea why he was banned and they're all just too cliquey. Now that's the Dante I remember.
No new word from my biological father. No direct communication since he asked me not to contact him again after receiving my letter in 2014.
I can't remember if I wrote about discovering on Newspapers.com that my dad's father had another family and a well documented criminal record (thank you, Fresno Bee) before he moved back to the Midwest and married Grandma. And thus my dad had a secret half-brother he may or may not have known about. I emailed Dante about it but got no response. The half-brother died a few years before my dad did and had no known biological children. He had been named after my grandpa, but his stepfather had adopted him when he was little and given him a new surname. I'd like to ask my dad's brother and sister if they knew about the secret half-brother, but I haven't seen my uncle since Dad's funeral or my aunt since my wedding over a decade ago. I could probably count on my hands the number of times I've talked to them in my life, so reaching out for this would be more awkward than I'm willing to do.
My mom's suspected half-sister's daughter took a DNA test, confirming my grandpa was, in fact, her grandfather too. I thought I'd written about my mom's secret half-sister/cousin, but I can't find it anywhere but here. My cousin Michelle and I had started to doubt the veracity of the claim that Grandpa had fathered Ruby shortly before Ruby's mother had married his half-brother. It was the big family "secret" all the cousins knew. Ruby's daughter showed up as a first cousin match for me on 23andMe though, which is way too close a match for us to be half-second cousins (we share more than triple the DNA I share with my known half-second cousins on AncestryDNA -- the ones who should be her first cousins but aren't), so I know for sure now that we're actually half-first cousins. We chatted on 23andMe a bit. She asked after my (our) remaining uncle, Eugene, who neither of us has heard from in years. I assume she knows as well as any of us who her grandfather is, but since I'd never talked to her or her mother (my half-aunt) before in my life and I don't know how their branch of the family feels about any of this, we never got onto the topic of biological grandfathers. I wish I knew a polite and inoffensive way to say, "I've seen some wonky shit on here and I'm comfortable talking about anything you want to talk about. You won't upend my world; I just don't want to upend yours either."
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