In the time since my last update, the Australia lead came and went and ended in another rut. I did connect with both the young man from Australia and the mystery person from South Africa who matches him exactly on a particular chromosome, so while I took two steps back, I took another forward. The bright side to the Australian’s young age is he has a lot of living relatives. He agreed to let me send his mother a kit to see which line of his I am related to, and it took AGES but finally came back to show no relation with his mother which leaves me with his paternal line. Still waiting to correspond with him about this further, but again, baby steps!

But now on to the big guns. My mom called me out of the blue on the 15th and asked if I had a moment to talk. I was getting ready for my speaking engagement, but we chatted for a minute. She asked if a certain surname was possibly of Jewish descent, and I dug into why. She said she had suddenly remembered the name of her last roommate before she moved back in with her mother, and when she thought more about it the math would add up and she remembered him having dark hair and eyes. I quickly jotted down the name and began a full-scale internet sleuthing to dig up everything I could. My stomach sank when I found photos on his son’s facebook page. I was looking at myself. Even as I type this I’m trying to scale back what I say, because if I’ve learned anything through all this it is to NOT get my hopes up… but the guttural reaction I had when I saw his son, who would be my half brother, was hard to ignore. I ran this information through the two facebook groups that specialize in this sort of thing, and they both agreed the resemblance could not be ignored. One of the group members even found the would-be father’s high school yearbook photo, and the resemblance continued. I looked at the faces and saw mine looking back. Could this be the other half of me? Could this simple two words, a first and last name, have been the one I had been tormenting over for as long as I can remember? It has been a challenge to keep a realistic perspective when part of me wants to cry for 100 reasons, to call this person and hear his voice, to excitedly exclaim that I have finally found my father. It’s so hard to keep up this wall when I look at that photo and I feel like I know. I feel like the photo answered the question for me, although my sense of logic and realism know that is extremely foolish. But through this search, in the few photos I’ve skimmed through of people that could have been a potential “match” this was the first time that I felt something when I looked at him. I knew when I saw the photos. I can only hope I am not wrong.