My father is listed on my birth certificate as "unknown," And the only person who could have told me something about him, my mother, died in a car accident when I was an infant.
No one knew my father's name and it seemed impossible that I would ever find him.
But that didn't stop me from searching.
No one knew my father's name and it seemed impossible that I would ever find him.
But that didn't stop me from searching.
I had reason to believe he was an Air Force Officer, and so I formed an image of him as a jet pilot. Tall and handsome. A hero. I imagined him on holidays, sitting at the head of a table in a tastefully furnished suburban home, maybe somewhere in California, surrounded by his loving wife and his grown children (my siblings) all with interesting careers and hobbies.
I searched for eight years, but didn't find him, and came to terms with that fact.
I grieved for my unknown father and moved on.
I grieved for my unknown father and moved on.
But then everything changed as the result of the increasing popularity of DNA tests. So many people have taken these tests - in the interest of genealogy or just out of curiosity - that it is now fairly easy to find biological relatives this way.
Ted Hadley died in 1990, but I have learned a lot about him from my newly-found paternal relatives. I have been given many photographs and a DVD of his home movies. So, even though I will never meet him, I feel like I know him a little.
I am extraordinarily amazed by all this, and yet it is such an ordinary thing: to know my father's name.
As it turned out, my father was not a jet pilot. Not a hero. And not what you'd call a family man. But he sure was handsome. Also hard-working. And fun-loving. "He liked being the center of attention," my half-sister recently told me.
This is a photo of Ted Hadley in his costume for a children's television show that
was broadcast in LasVegas in the early 1950s.
