HOW I FOUND MY LONG-LOST SISTER

So, I've had a couple exciting, life-altering weeks which have kept me from blogging. As I've often said, if the Irish were meant to think in straight lines, the Celts wouldn't have put all those pretty curves around the rigid lines of the cross when they converted, so please stay with me.

I never knew my father.

Well, actually, I did, but I was a toddler when my parents divorced, so I don't remember him. My mother -- an aspiring actress and playwright, who also worked as a chorus line skater in a roller skating follies (sort of a Rockette on Wheels) -- eventually remarried and we moved to a small ranching/timber community on the Oregon/California border. Later on, my stepfather adopted me. Together my mother and adoptive father had three more girls, sisters who are eight, nine, and ten years younger than I am.

One day, when I was in the second grade, a strange man arrived at our home. Turns out he was my great grandfather, who'd apparently hired a private detective to find me. He came back a few months later for my First Communion, bringing along my grandfather and my grandfather's second wife. (Who wasn't my grandmother, whom he'd divorced during WWII, after which, I recently learned when I found her enlistment papers, she'd joined the Army. I also just discovered that's where my middle name came from.)

For several years after that, my grandfather and his wife would come visit. No mention was ever made of my father during these times. I often wanted to know about him, but also felt bad for my adoptive father that my mother's first husband's father kept staying in our house, so I never brought him up. Even though, as I grew up and didn't look like anyone from my mother's side of the family, I often wondered if I looked like him.

Fast forward several years. I'd recently remarried my sweetie after two years of divorce, when I received a call from my grandfather, who was living in Hawaii and wanted to come stay with me. (By then wife #3 had died.) Although the idea made me a bit uncomfortable, I agreed, and since we were living in the two bedroom townhouse I'd leased after selling the house when we divorced, we found him a small house a block away. For about a month he'd spend the days at the townhouse through dinner, then go back home at night.

Then one morning I showed up at his house, only to find everything gone. Well, almost everything. He'd accidentally left behind some sterling silver flatware and two photographs. One was the only photo I'd ever seen of my birth father. The other was of two young girls who, he'd written on the back, were his two granddaughters. So, at age 30, I discovered I had two more half sisters I'd never known about.

I found out from the mail carrier that he'd left a forwarding address, but of course the mail carrier couldn't give it to me. Shortly afterward, I began receiving phone calls from creditors in Hawaii. Even the Presbyterian Church, because apparently he'd reneged on his tithe. (Who KNEW Presbyterians took that so seriously?) It took me weeks to convince people that 1) no, I had no idea where my grandfather had gone and 2) although my best guess was that he'd probably moved on to live with his son, I also had no idea where my father lived. We did, by the way, sell the silver and give the money to Little Sisters of the Poor (who care for the elderly), saving enough out to buy our son a puppy.

Over the years I thought about my birth father and my sisters. And even did half-hearted searches to find him and thought about hiring a private detective, as my great grandfather had once done, but there was always this fear that I'd find him, only to be rejected. So, I just sort of drifted along, although I would dream of someday meeting him. Since he was an actor who apparently had talked about a desire to write screenplays, I thought he'd like knowing I'd grown up to be a published author. A daughter he could hopefully be proud of.

Meanwhile, I don't believe it's any accident that so many of my novels over the years have dealt with the meaning of family -- how some people are born into them, and others make their own. I've even written books with characters searching for missing roots.

Then promos for the show Who Do You Think You Are? started appearing on TV. I watched teaser clips of Sarah Jessica Parker finding an ancestor who'd been accused of being a witch in Salem, Emmitt Smith researching his slave roots, Lisa Kudrow going back to a village where an ancestor had been killed with the rest of the town's Jewish population, and Matthew Broderick researching a Civil War soldier ancestor.

And I got interested again. Unfortunately, while thanks to amazing records at Ancestry.com I managed to trace a branch of my sweetie's family back to the 1470s (apparently they kept very good records in New England and England), I wasn't getting anywhere with my family. Especially my father's side, which was made even more difficult by my father's name being changed on my birth certificate when I was adopted. It was, to say the least, a little demoralizing to have six squares filled in on my family tree and hundreds on Jay's. Sigh.

But I haven't written a bunch of books over the past twenty-seven years without getting really good at research, so I persevered and located Find a Grave that supposedly lists forty-four million gravesites with photos. I quickly found my father's, which, was a little eerie to see, but it did give me his mother's maiden name, since it was also his middle name.

With that I managed to track down his death certificate. But that seemed another dead end. Until I signed up for a newspaper archive site and found all these small town "society" column reports about he and his wife and two "charming" daughters visiting their grandmother. (His 2nd wife's mother.)

These gave me the names of the sisters in the photos. So I went back to ancestry.com and did a search for them and found one sister's California state marriage license. Which gave me her married name. So, I googled that, and bingo, she showed up on FaceBook!

Since I'm on FB, too, I sent her a message, named my father and her mother's maiden name, and asked if she was their daughter. She immediately messaged back and said that yes they were, and asked if we were related.

So, I told her yes, we were half sisters. The bad news is that -- oops -- she hadn't known our father had been married before. The good news was that her mother had known, so it didn't prove a shock to her.

Sad news is that my other half-sister died a few years ago, way too young and I'm sorry to have missed knowing her because she sounds like a fabulous person. But the best of all news is that after the initial shock, my new sister is way happy. As are her two daughters, who've also messaged me, and I've even received a note from one daughter's husband who's looking forward to meeting his new "aunt." Even my father's wife asked if she could be my "half mom."

My sister, Kelly, and I have talked back and forth on FB, and in email, and also during one seven hour conversation that lasted from eleven p.m. to almost five in the morning. And it's amazing how much we have in common, which just shows the strength of genes. (Our only seeming disagreement is that she actually likes Jake from The Bachelor, but I'm willing to overlook that, and maybe he can win me over during his gig on Dancing With The Stars, lol.) It's also exciting to learn that I look like my grandmother's sister and my father. Another missing blank of my life has been filled in.

Oh, and here's a really fun coincidence! My new sister's mother's family came from the only baby born on the Mayflower and lived, natch, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the same time one of sweetie's ancestors lived there. Given that there couldn't have been that many people living in 1600s Plymouth, we suspect they may have been related. Which may make my sister and husband related. Which just became too weird to think about!

Needless to say, this has been the best gift I could ever hope for. And, as Jay pointed out, it's filled that little part that's always been missing in my heart. We're having a big family reunion in California, in San Diego, where sweetie and I have spent so many fun times. (And where I first discovered the SEALs who show up in so many of my books while staying at the Hotel del Coronado!)

So, that's the long and winding road that led me to my long-lost sister, my newfound family, and has me feeling so wonderfully blessed and happy this Easter season.