We Were a Family of Strangers
“23.5% Ashkenazi Jewish”
That’s what my 18 year-old son John’s 23andme results said, but this was news to me. When John texted me with a screenshot of his results back in April, my first response was “Maybe it’s inaccurate” followed by “What about your Mom?”.
Zero Percent.
When we talked, John’s first question to me was “I didn’t know we were Jewish?” and maybe with a question of “Why didn’t you tell me?”. I had flashbacks of Luke with old Ben Kenobi.
The math said that if John was 23.5% Ashkenazi Jewish (really 25%), then I was 50% — and it meant that one of my parents was likely 100%.
From my desk in Redmond, Washington, where I’ve lived and worked for more than 20 years after a lifetime between Boston and Rhode Island, I started to question the meaning of truth. What I had known my whole life was that my mom (Hilda Ward) was from Maine from a long line of long time Down-Easters (Malcolm Ward) and her mom (Margaret Ellis) from Nova Scotia. I had some vague sense of “English”, but no real details. My dad (John Michael Wallent), he was Polish (with maybe some Lithuanian in there somewhere) although we weren’t ever really totally sure. My parents both grew up around Brockton, Massachusetts. They were married in 1952 when they were 16 and 18 (but they had been together for at least three years before that). It was a while before they started having kids, starting with my two sisters, born in ’58 and ’59.
I was born in February of ’69 at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. There had been various stories of a blizzard precluding my birth, but also stories of how my parents really wanted a third kid and were even about to adopt before I came along. I can’t say how many times folks had said, after hearing about the gap between me and my sisters, that I must have been a pleasant surprise (I added the pleasant part).
My parents have both passed on — my mom back in ’12 and my dad in ’06.
Given the facts that I knew, although at this point my hold on what was a fact and what wasn’t was shaky, my line of investigation was on my dad’s side. Could it be that his family, both his mom (Doris) and dad (John) were both actually Ashkenazi? Did he know? Did they know?
For a month, back in April and May, I was on Ancestry a lot. I found amazing records — census data, immigration data, and even the ships that my great grandparents arrived in America on. Here’s what I found — my paternal grandparents were John Wallent (aka Wallentukewitz, Vallentukewitz, and many more) and Doris Giniewicz — my great grandparents were all born between 1883 and 1885 in different towns in what today we’d recognize as Poland and Lithuania. They all immigrated to America between 1899 and 1902 independently, and got married around Brockton, both couples in 1904.
None of the four grandparents though had names that were classically Jewish (Michael, Eva Kraunelite, Charles aka Kasimir, Pauline Genuta). I also found out that they had all self-reported that they hadn’t spoke English, which was likely the reason why our last name drifted so much (Valentukevich, Valentukevicius, Wallentukewitz, Wallent — the list goes on).
I couldn’t find any relatives further back than the great-grandparents though. I was thinking that looking back in time to where they were from and finding their parents might solve the mystery of when these four people, who MUST have been Jewish in ancestry if not practice both converted AND kept that fact of their conversion from everyone.
In early May, my 23andme results had come back. Unsurprisingly, it showed I was 50% Ashkenazi. Also unsurprisingly, the list of genetic relatives on my maternal side was aligned with people and the story that I knew. I reached out to people who the site reported were related to me on my mom’s side and got stories that made sense. I had found some cousins, and an interesting story about how the Ellis family ended up in Nova Scotia. During the Revolutionary War, they were loyalists and escaped to Canada. Oddly, on my dad’s side, the genetic relatives that it uncovered were unknown to me. What I had thought was that these were relatives who were descendants from my great-great grandparents. These people were generally showing that they were from Poland and Lithuania and also were that they were also Ashkenazi. The Ashkenazi connection made my story more credible — maybe it WAS the case that we were an offshoot group who had converted. I was hoping that by connecting these many dots that I could figure out how the Wallent and Giniewicz clans were connected to those people.
I was at a dead end though. Ancestry and 23andme weren’t giving up their secrets to me. I submitted another genetic test — to Ancestry’s DNA service, which I was hoping that would connect my DNA results to other relatives who had also created their family trees. Maybe this would help me figure out the mystery?
Solstice in Seattle is an auspicious event. We wait all year for the glory of July, August and September. June may be a little cold still, but dammit, its close enough. The morning of the 18th of June, my results for Ancestry DNA came back. As I woke up that morning and checked my phone, I saw the results and gave it a cursory glance. They were different than I had expected because I had a small number of “close relatives” who I didn’t know. I didn’t think about it very much until later that night, when we went to a friend’s house and started to talk through the implications of this.
Initially I had thought that these people on my close relative list were likely 1st cousins — all about my age. Maybe in fact their bio-dad was my uncle (my dad’s only brother) who had been a student in Boston in the late 60’s. Maybe my dad was their bio-dad and that he had been stepping out on my mom. These had to be the only options. Occam’s Razor had to be applied.
After reaching out to the close relatives on my list, I started to connect with them. Lisa, Joy and Evan were all born at Beth Israel in Boston and are right around my age. Lisa and Joy had new insights. More than 20 years ago their moms had told them the story of their conception. That they had been born via “Donor Conception” — basically born through artificial insemination with donor sperm. They were both born at Beth Israel hospital in Boston too. Their moms had told them that their doctors reported that the donors were medical students or young doctors at Beth Israel. This is in the time before sperm banking and frozen sperm. The donor sperm had to be acquired within about an hour of the insemination. This explains why the donors at that time were commonly associated with the hospital that the procedure was done at. Lisa and Joy had recently found each other through Ancestry DNA. They knew that they had this interesting genetic connection and on top of their family stories it made sense.
Evan’s story was more complicated. We had a clear genetic connection, but he didn’t realize that there was anything exceptional about his parentage before Joy, Lisa and I had reached out to him.
With all that in mind stories in mind, I went back through my 23andme and Ancestry DNA results. I hadn’t realized initially that Ancestry DNA reports the level of “relatedness” that you share. I found the way to get this data and it showed Joy, Lisa, Evan and I all had about 1800 “centimorgans” in common.
Lisa, Joy and Evan weren’t my first cousins. They were my half-siblings. The reason why I couldn’t correlate any of my paternal genetic relatives to my known family tree was that my bio-dad wasn’t John Michael Wallent, it was the unknown doctor from Beth Israel Hospital who was also the bio-dad of Lisa and Joy. To the initial mystery of the Ashkenazi heritage, Lisa, Joy and Evan are all nearly 100% Ashkenazi. Beth Israel was the Jewish hospital in Boston, and our expectation was that the donor was Ashkenazi.
My genetic paternal relatives were a family of strangers to me.
The idea that my parents participated in an early fertility program wasn’t something that had even entered into my imagination. You might as well have told me that they were really Russian spies. Plus, the idea that they both had kept such a secret. Maybe there’s a little confirmation bias as we can’t know what secrets they kept, but you always end up knowing about the secrets that were spilled. There were other facts that also seemed to make it unlikely. My parents didn’t have a lot of money in the late 60’s. My mom didn’t drive — and the doctor was based in Boston which was more than 45 minutes away. Any insemination program like this wasn’t also likely a one-time event. From what I’ve read since, the success rate for pregnancy post insemination was about 40%. How many times did they try? Three times or more (or less?) Was it the same donor every time? They were also not the type of people who would try the most cutting-edge thing — they weren’t the early adopters on anything, and certainly not on something this critical.
When it comes to figuring out who knew what when, there’s three possibilities (back to our friend Mr. Occam). It could be that my mom and dad both knew, it could be that only my mom knew, or it could have been that neither of them knew the implications of whatever procedure the doctor performed. Just a little more on the procedure itself, because I’ve now come to understand three variations. The simplest is that donor sperm was used. At that time, there was also a practice where donor sperm was “mixed” with paternal sperm and the result was used. With this approach, if a pregnancy occurred it would have been very hard to tell with the technology of that day who the dad actually was. The last method I’ve heard about is where the mom may have thought that the sperm was from the dad, but in fact it may have been “boosted” with donor sperm. The thing about the third case is the question of informed consent.
Which gets back to what my parents knew. I’ll never know. It doesn’t matter really. It doesn’t change who I am. My mom and dad were amazing people. In the late 70’s and early 80’s they were foster parents for more than 40 infants — taking care of them for their first three months or so till they could be adopted. They were both loving, hard-working people who were loved and who loved back. My dad taught me the value of hard work and the critical skill of not bullshitting a bullshitter.
All that being said, I have tried to understand what they knew. I think, more than anything, they wanted kids. They found an OB (Dr. Julius Messer) who said he could help, and he did. Kids came. The world of 1968 Boston is different than the world of 2018 Boston (or Seattle, or New York). Were the DNA implications of their procedures widely known? Probably not. Was there some long-form disclosure describing precisely what the implications were? Probably not. Importantly though, back in 1968 Boston, can you imagine that anyone could conceive of a future world where you could spit in a cup and four weeks later get a precise list of your genetic relatives? I’m going to say no. Call me crazy.
There’s another issue here — good old New England Shame. Shame and the avoidance of shame were critical parts of my upbringing. I can imagine my parents talking about this and pledging that they would never tell another soul about this. I can imagine that they both had their own shame-based reasons for keeping that secret.
Besides these new half-sisters and half-brother, I also have two sisters who I grew up with. Sheila who is 60 and Nancy who is 59. I had shared with them the story so far, wondering if either of them had every heard about the circumstance of my conception. Neither of them had any idea about the fertility program my parents participated in and they thought it was just as unlikely as I did. After some discussion though, they both took the Ancestry and 23andme tests. I had expected that they would be full siblings, genetically related to both my mom and dad, and that they would both be not Ashkenazi. I had thought it was going to be straightforward.
Lisa, Joy, Evan and I traded messages, mails and phone calls. They are amazing. Lisa is a law professor in Boston. Joy is a book editor in New York City. Evan is a pilot (and a check pilot at that!) for a major airline. We talked about getting together and meeting face to face at some point, and shared stories about our families and our lives so far.
They all had no information though about who the donor was, outside of the connection to Beth Israel hospital and the idea that he was likely a doctor or a medical student. Neither of them had done research to try to figure out who it was though. They were in a different place than I was. They had known for more than twenty years about the donor conception process. For me though, this was incredibly fresh and new information. I wanted to know who it was. I said I could figure out who it was, so I started looking.
I was so bluffing, but the hunt was on.
The challenge with 23andme is that the genetic relatives list is “flat” — it shows you the username (and maybe the full name of the person) with the percentage of relation that you have with them.
From a list like this, its difficult to build a family tree. The idea that I had though is that by trying to make a big “master tree” by merging the known family trees of all the people who I am related to, I could find the hole, and from that hole find out where I fit in.
Ancestry and Ancestry DNA give you much more information than the 23andme flat list. Not only does it show who your genetic relatives are, but if those people have posted (or are members of) other Ancestry.com trees, then that adds the connection to those related trees. From the Ancestry data, the first thing I did was to look for common last names among all the genetic relatives (excluding the half-sibs of course).
[I’ve changed some names here for reasons that will be obvious shortly.]
I had found three common last names among the relatives (looking back to the 2nd cousins). One name stuck out to me both uncommon, but also present in one of my 1st cousin’s trees — “Baruch”. The next step came from a hunch. Using that last name I searched for doctors in Boston in the late 60’s. I found one — Dr. Arthur Baruch. I knew also that Beth Israel was associated with both Harvard and Tufts, so I searched for Harvard Medical graduates in the 60’s. Guess who was Harvard Medical, class of ’65? Arthur Baruch. Ancestry has an amazing trove of scanned yearbooks from schools throughout the US — from elementary schools to graduate schools, mostly with meta data tagged to the pages, so that you can easily search for a name and get a result back that includes pictures from their yearbook.
I was able to find Dr. Baruch’s Harvard Yearbook page, as well as his NYU ’61 page, and then pages from his high school yearbook, which included his address from his high school years. I also had been able to determine that he is still alive and living in the southwest. My head was spinning — had I found him? Certain at that point that I had the history for Dr. Baruch, he had been in Boston during the right time and was a resident at Mass General Hospital (which is right next door to Beth Israel).
With that information in hand and pictures too. I shared it with Lisa, Joy and Evan. We had conversations about who he looked like and if maybe just maybe it could be the guy. At this point, all I had was a set of coincidences. He could have been our donor, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe 10% possibility?
Over the next week this churned in my brain, waking and asleep. How could I confirm or deny this? But now I had a theory and I still had a list of close cousins on my paternal side who I hadn’t connected with.
Looking through my Ancestry DNA relatives, nearly half had no associated trees, and then there were some with tens of relatives in their trees. However, there were also a couple of more distant cousins who were “super-producers” of ancestry research who had family trees with thousands of entries. I thought perhaps that one of these super-producers would be interested in my story and would be willing to help me out. If they had so much interest in genealogy then maybe they would be interested in helping a distant relative? This initial outreach was tentative to say the least. What should I say? “Hi, how are you. I think your cousin could be my bio-dad, want to chat?”. Sure enough, and notwithstanding my lame messages, one of my 2nd cousins — Sue — got back to me. We started discussing and talking through my results and what it could mean.
It had been about two weeks since I had found Dr. Baruch, and I had a critical insight. I had two first cousins (on the paternal side) who I was similarly related to, but these two were NOT at all related to each other. That meant that they each had an aunt or uncle who were married and one of their sons was likely Dr. Arthur Baruch. If I could in fact confirm that these first cousins — usernames of “Simon Hirsch” and “baruchsam1” — if they had aunts and uncles who were in fact married, and then had a son, then the math and the genetics would strongly indicate that I had found the donor.
It turns out that Samuel Baruch had an Uncle Milton, and Simon Hirsch had an Aunt Pearl, who were married. But the question was if they had a son — could that be Arthur Baruch? Without confirming that connection, I still had a trail of supposition. My wife Anh was on the case now too, and we were digging. In a breakthrough, he found public records for Pearl, showing one of her previous addresses in New York city. That address matched one of the middle school addresses that I had previously found for Arthur Baruch.
I had found him.
I felt both relieved and overwhelmed. The reality of it hit me. Here was a real man, with a real family, three kids who he raised and a wife who died back in 2012. He was also a doctor, who had recently retired and was living his life in peace. We found his Facebook page with his profile picture showing him standing on the edge of a desert river with a wide smile and a peaceful look.
The sibs and I discussed and fretted… we talked about reaching out to him and what we’d say. In short, we wanted nothing, but what we shared was gratitude to be alive.
With a story in hand, I reached out again to the first cousins. I was able to connect with Simon Hirsch and outlined the whole story. After a couple of days, he replied:
By now you know that you have pieced it all together. Here is one added nail. Arthur did an internal medicine internship at Beth Israel, then neurology and radiology residencies and fellowships at Mass General, so that is his BI connection other than helping me to get a fellowship at the BI where the GI chief had been Arthur’s resident when he was an intern at BI.
I’m an engineer. I solve problems. I love to turn problems from mysteries into puzzles and then to solve them. What bigger problem could there have been than the whole story of my creation? But, my heart didn’t see it that way. The emotion behind this was hard to describe. There was loss, and a sense of disconnection. How could it be that my parents had lied to me? (That was my heart talking). Who was I? Where did I belong?
What I thought though, was that closing this loop, reaching out to Arthur and perhaps just talking to him would be another connection and yet another gift. I had already felt that I had been blessed with the connection to Joy, Lisa and Evan. What would it be like to meet our genetic progenitor?
Through the connection to Simon, I delivered a letter to Dr. Baruch. It went to him on his 78th birthday. This was my favorite part:
The gift that we all have been given — of life itself — is more than anyone could quantify. I’m reaching out to you today with nothing but genuine thanks. More than anything, I’m am searching to understand what my family story is.
A week went by… nothing. No news. I was starting to get nervous, thinking that the answer was becoming clear. If he had wanted to meet with us, the reply would have come quickly. Finally, I saw a notification for a new mail from Simon.
Michael
I spoke with Dr. Arthur Baruch yesterday. At this time, he would prefer not to have contact with offspring of insemination.
If you have further questions about family health issues now or in the future I would be happy to fill in what I can.
Simon Hirsch
I was upset. “Offspring of insemination?” Yikes! Who wouldn’t want to get to know me? I was swinging between being pissed and being relieved and resigned to just not knowing. I’m hoping that maybe the answer wasn’t “No, not ever” but really “not at this time”. Maybe that time would come.
Lisa, Joy, Evan and I talked again… and again. The connection we had made was worth pursuing. We decided to have a Sibling Retreat™ — even if Arthur didn’t want to hang out with us, we wanted to hang out and get to know each other. This life we were all given, no matter how it started, is precious.
There was another mystery that Ancestry served up to us. Back in July, another half-sib showed up on my account, the curiously named “spacecadet1968”. He showed up before the mystery was really solved and before I was sure about Arthur Baruch. Arthur and his wife did have three natural children, one of them named “Michael”. Some Google sleuthing lead me to believe that spacecadet1968 was also named Michael, and I was curious if one of the natural sibs had come onto our Ancestry view. I had sent a couple messages to spacecadet1968, trying to connect to understand more, but no reply. After the “no contact” message, I had pushed a little more into the Internet ether to try to figure out who was the other unknown half-sibling. Early in August, Michael reached out to me and we talked. I explained my situation, and explained how we were genetically connected. He was born at Beth Israel too, in 1968. He and I are meeting in a couple of weeks, he’s my older brother from another mother.
Why does it matter and what defines your family? Is your family the set of genetic relationships that defines your underlying self? Other people, smarter people have opined on this, but I’ll tell you how I feel about this. For children, family is easy — it’s bond of dependency with your parent or caregiver. That three-month-old has no sense of relation other than currency (she sees her mom a lot) but she knows that if hungry she’ll be fed and if uncomfortable she will be made comfortable, and she knows that these people will be back. For them, that’s unconditional love.
Sibling relationships are different. They are the bi-directional strong bonds that mean “you can count on me” and are persistent dependable connections. Who are you calling at 4am when there is no one else to call (and maybe after your parents are no more?). The unconditional love part comes in as your siblings give with nothing to gain (is this a mitzvah?).
I have been fortunate to have found later in life siblings, even before encountering Evan, Joy, Lisa and Michael. Before I knew them, I knew that Hillel and I were brothers from another Mother. Hillel has heard me cry more than anyone. I know that Alex and I are brothers too, maybe because he’s taught me so much and our time together is life-affirming and we’ll spent.
As adults, making those connections are hard, and losing them are easy, especially for introverts and those of us without unshakable self-confidence. The magic here is the opportunity to meet another set of Intentional Family members after nearly half of our time on this pale blue dot has run out.
There may be more of us, math says there will be. But, that’s just more people to add to our Intentional Family — those who you associate with, not because of genetics, but sometimes in spite of it, and those who you choose to be with.