January 2023 - Picking Up Where I Left Off

At the end of January 2023 I was finding out too much and not enough so I contacted a couple of private investigators. While I waited, I messaged a couple of the people on Ancestry that listed my maternal grandfather in their trees.

My main concern with hiring a private investigator was the can of worms I might be opening up. I worried that they might uncover the tax fraud my mother committed all the years she claimed me as a dependent on her taxes while I was living with my grandmother. I wasn’t worried on my mother’s behalf because whatever she did, if it catches up to her, then so be it. But I didn’t want to do anything that might land me in court testifying against her. Selfish? Maybe. 

Now I’m looking back at my notes and I’ve caught a discrepancy. My father posted a story about how he was a sheriff’s deputy in one county - how he was born and raised there. But looking back at the documents I was able to find, he was born in another part of the state. Weird. Anyway…

I also learned that he and his second (third?) wife divorced in 2004, about 5 years after I found him the first time. We’ll have to work our way back to that but we’ll get there!

Back to 2023, he wrote a long post about an incident where he was driving with his wife and baby, I presume his son, and was sideswiped by a drunk driver. He said he chased down this drunk driver going over 100 mph but was out of his jurisdiction as a deputy. He wrote that the other person pulled into a church parking lot and he sent his wife to a pay phone to call the police in that county while he talked to the 4 men that were in the car. He said that he was “more crazy than all of them combined” and that he was carrying. The drunk decided to leave but was arrested later and long story short, the guy ended up serving 60 days in jail, was responsible for the damages, and got 2 years probation. He wrote about the lessons he learned, then said that his narcotics had kicked in and he was going to sleep.

He seemed to be in a reflective state of mind and I was curious what else he might post so I kept checking the vibes. Had he changed since I met him in 1999? What were his circumstances now?

That weekend in January 2023 a couple of people related to my maternal grandfather responded on Ancestry but all were distant relations and didn’t know or remember him. 

On January 30, 2023 I wrote in my notes that I ordered my DNA test from Ancestry the previous Friday and had been checking to see if it had shipped yet, then looking at the tracking information for shipping updates. Between the DNA test, researching on Ancestry and other sites, and reading his posts on facebook, it felt like things might be coming together and I might finally get some answers.

I spoke to my grandfather’s niece (her father is my grandfather’s brother) and she said she went to family reunions at the church where my grandfather is buried. She’d already done a DNA test and we waited to see if we’d match. 

On the 30th I got a call from one of the private investigators. I told him my situation and what I was hoping to learn. He said he’d been a detective and had experience searching for lost heirs. (Heirs, ha!) I got the impression he probably thought I was out in left field, but he sent me a contract and I told him I’d consider it. He was talking about doing FOIA requests. It felt simultaneously promising but also kinda scary with the talk of FOIA requests and what we might dig up. 

That same day I talked to another PI and he was easier to talk to in some ways, but he made a comment about how I’d turned out okay so things must not have been that bad and that rubbed me the wrong way. If things hadn’t been that bad, I probably wouldn’t have cut off contact, but I let it slide. This PI asked me questions about my relatives and proposed our first step be a background check on my mother. That seemed like a reasonable place to start. It  took no time at all and the results hit my inbox while I was helping my youngest with math homework. I wrote in my notes that I had to close my laptop in order to stay focused. 

After I made dinner, cleaned up, and fed the cat I was able to dive into what he’d discovered in the background check. It was fascinating, but I have no way of knowing if it was 100% accurate. The report showed that my mother bought an RV, what car she was driving in 2023, that she still lives in the same house, she frequently gets home equity loans, and that she had a “demographic infraction” in another county in 2008 (whatever that means). In 2010 a credit card company took her to court over a five-figure debt and in 2012 she filed for bankruptcy. 

Now I don’t know about her buying an RV but nothing would surprise me (I now know this was correct). Maybe she had thoughts of traveling? Maybe she had a boyfriend that wanted to hit the road? I knew that she had taken out home equity loans and second mortgages. For what I never understood because she made good money working for the government. She always was taking overtime and she didn’t have any dependents to take care of. I also knew about the bankruptcy from my poking around in public records. I did not know that a credit card company took her to court over her debt, but her having a high credit card debt was also nothing new. 

Everything that my mother did before she turned 18 wasn’t covered in the background report so I wasn’t able to see her marriage to my birth certificate father, or if she had married my biological father. I couldn’t see where she had lived, if she had lived in Mississippi or anywhere else while she was a minor. Also missing were any property records from the trailer she and my stepfather owned in the 1980s and sold in 1991 or 1992. 

I remember that trailer. I recall spending one night with her and my stepfather. In 1991 or 1992, I was in 6th grade at the time, my grandmother and I went over to the trailer to help her clean it out to sell. She’d been renting it out for a few years and the last tenant had been enough to make her want to sell it, I guess. I found marijuana and I vaguely remember something about scabies. 

I just assumed maybe the trailer didn’t show up in this report because it was in her husband’s name. 

Also missing was anything pertaining to her most recent husband. I knew she remarried in 2008 but he was only listed as a “possible associate” at the bottom of the report. I googled all the names that were included as relatives and possible associates, but nothing came up that gave me answers to any of my questions. 

In the end I didn’t feel like the background check was terribly useful because nothing came up from her younger years, and that was the time period I was most interested in. I knew about her financial troubles, but what I wanted to know was if she’d had another child. I emailed the private investigator to tell him nothing stood out and asked him about possible next steps. 

Here’s an excerpt from my notes - “ I was hoping to work with him because we clicked more, though he did comment about how I’d turned out okay (compared to another person who claimed they had a microchip in the brain and wanted him to help them get it removed). He said something about how my grandmother must have raised me well, but I think he realized he’d stepped in it when he asked me if that was correct. It’s a good thing we weren’t on facetime because I was making a range of facial expressions. I told him he had made “reasonable assumptions”, but didn’t go into detail as to why he was off-base. I think he got the idea, but he didn’t ask more questions about it. He also told me I would need to find a lawyer to get records. Anyway, his next step was to run background checks on potential father candidates, starting with Daniel Freeman. At $200 a pop, I can’t see running background checks on every relative. Also, it feels a bit stalkerish to dig into random people I may not be related to.”

On January 31, I got a contract from the other private investigator company and we looked over it. Looking back at my notes I can see that I was having an awful time sleeping. I’d go to sleep around midnight and wake up around 3-4 am trying to solve this puzzle. After confirming their fees and making sure the PI would get permission if things went over $500, I signed the retainer. I uploaded all the information the PI requested - a copy of my birth certificate, my research on Ancestry and other sites, and they got to work. 

In the meantime I was having a hard time focusing between the lack of sleep, demands of parenting, and trying to figure out the puzzle that was my own childhood. I was helping my youngest with their math homework, making dinner for everyone, going on walks, knitting a bat for a gift, and doing all the day to day tasks. In my notes I wrote that I was still worried about what the PI might uncover with her taxes, but that whatever the PI found was his business. I didn’t want to go to court, wasn’t looking for revenge, and definitely didn’t want to have any contact with my mother. 

But that all sums up, pretty much, what I found between November 2022 and January of 2023. Little did I know that February was going to be packed with surprises.