One of the things Don and I have enjoyed discussing over the years has been genealogy, and I like to think that it was my appearance in his life that actually got him into searching. As we both created our family trees on Ancestry, we would compare notes about what names we had found. In one of our conversations, we talked about a common DNA match we had, that seemed to be a rather close relative, but that neither of us could place in the family tree. I had reached out to the owner of the account with questions, but he explained that the DNA was actually his wife's, that she rarely looked at the account and that he couldn't be of much help. I think Don and I tried for quite some time to decipher it on our own, until I finally decided to reach out to Priscilla Sharp again and ask for her assistance. I don't think Don or I were the least bit prepared for what we would learn.
As it turns out, Priscilla's research led her to conclude that the people who Mary had grown up with and had known as her parents all her life, were NOT, in fact, her biological parents at all. Mary had been adopted, and this "close mystery match" that we could not figure out-----it was Mary's half sister. From what Priscilla had been able to deduct, a young woman named Thresa from a Croatian immigrant family, had been involved with a young Sicilian man named Tony. When Thresa ended up pregnant, it was either the families disapproval of the union, or the reluctance of the two young people themselves to marry, and from what we can conclude, the baby---Mary--was "given" to the couple that Mary grew up with and knew as her parents. In researching historical documents, Don pieced together that all the involved families lived only blocks from each other and were probably quite familiar. There seems to be no "documentation" of the adoption so we suspect that the baby was just handed over. All the pieces fell into place even further when Don and I located pictures of Thresa and Mary's new 1/2 sister Rachel, and saw the obvious resemblances. After I was finally able to make contact with Rachel and explain what we had discovered, she was initially surprised but admitted that her mother Thresa---who had passed away several years previously--must have had a life before her marriage to Rachel's father, and that she hadn't shared anything about it, except to say once that she had been in love with a "soldier boy" when she was young, but never heard from him again after the war.
Tony's records show that he enlisted in the army just months before Mary was born.
Sadly, none of the involved parties are still living, so we will never know exactly how it all played out. But after years of me wondering why I tan so well for being British and Irish, it makes much more sense knowing that I am almost a quarter Sicilian.
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