My husband found his father this week. He found him from an obituary, which means he is about 2 years too late. But honestly, from what we've learned since then, I'm not sure it would have been possible to find him any other way. With a last name like "Davis" it's hard to track someone down.
It's been an emotional couple of days. His mother left his father when my husband was 3. No one his mother hooked up with ever had any money, so while social services kept track of his father pretty diligently, even they gave up after a while. About ten years ago my husband made a lot of phone calls and found a person we're pretty sure was his grandmother. She gave him a phone number for what might be his father, but no one ever answered the number.
A couple weeks ago he got on ancestry.com and started putting together his family tree. It's a lot easier to find someone once they are dead. He found his grandmother and her husband, and her first husband (his grandfather). At least, he was pretty sure they were the right people, based on what little he knew about the family.
Then someone connected to his tree (basically a distant cousin) sent him an obituary for his father. It had all the right names. He had found his father, two years too late.
The obituary had a phone number for the funeral home. He called them and they passed his message along to his father's wife. She tried to call, but they had given her the wrong area code, but when he called the funeral home back they gave him her number.
He was super nervous. He called her--and she talked his ear off for two hours. She told him all about his father. He had the same personality as my husband, only more so. He died of colon cancer at age 57. He hated to go to the doctor and he put it off until too late. My husband's grandfather also died of colon cancer at age 30. That scared him, so first thing this morning he called and scheduled a doctor's appt!
His father liked science fiction and football. She called him a "redneck hippie". That sort of contradiction describes my husband very well. (He doesn't like football. But he has many likes & dislikes that don't seem to go together.)
It's like a birth and a death in the family all at once. He keenly regrets not pushing harder to reach him, 10 years ago. But after learning a little more about his grandmother, it seems likely to me that she might have given him the wrong phone number, and it is very possible that wasn't accidental. (By everyone's account she was not a nice person.)
His father's wife said he was "a very confused boy" and then one day just quit drinking and straightened out his life. All the time I've known my husband (half my life now) I've been disdainful of the stream of fathers that left his mom & her kids penniless, even destitute. It is true that his father was the first of them, but it sounds like at some point he did change. So both my husband and I are having to readjust our world views. This is a much bigger deal for him. "It's part of my identity," he told me this morning. His identity included this missing piece that was his father. That piece isn't missing anymore.
This is way too much like a Lifetime movie.
