How I found mine

This page is for people who found out, or suspect, that their parentage is not what they were told. It is not support and it is not advice. It is what I did, in the order I did it, and what I would skip if I started again.

The certificate came first

My birth certificate said Jean and Martin. It is a real certificate, filed with the state, and it is wrong. Until the early 1980s a person could walk into an office in Utah, fill out paperwork, and put names on a record. Nobody checked.

So start with your own certificate. Order the long form, not the short. Read the names on it, read the dates, read the ages given for the parents, and read who signed it and when. An amended record and an original record are different documents. Ask which one you are holding.

Everything else I did was an attempt to answer one question: is this piece of paper true.

The test, because paper can lie and blood cannot

I spent two months chasing a name I had been given from memory. It went nowhere. So I stopped chasing the name and took a DNA test instead. I spat in a tube, mailed it off, and waited. That took another two months. Four months in all to get to my father, and two years to find the rest of it and start writing.

The match came back on Ancestry. Not my father: a man called Bruce, a second cousin, far enough out on the tree that we had to work at it and close enough to be real. That is the part people misunderstand. A second cousin is not an answer. It is a starting point, and you build from it, his tree, his surnames, who married whom, who lived where.

It got me my father. It did not get me anything else. Everything about my grandmother, and everything that happened in 1961, came out of courthouses, not out of a test tube.

The phone calls

This is the part nobody tells you to do, and it is the part that worked.

I called the people who were still alive and I asked them. Aunts, uncles, cousins, my mother's husband, people who had not spoken to that family in thirty years. Twenty-one calls. I recorded every one of them, lawfully, as a party to the conversation, check your own state's law before you do this, because the rules differ and getting it wrong matters.

I did not wait until I had documents. If I had waited, most of those people would have died first. One of them told me the truth in the spring and was dead by August.

What the recordings gave me was not proof. It was direction: names to search, counties to search them in, and dates close enough to find a filing. Then the documents proved or disproved what I had been told. Several things I was told turned out to be wrong, including things told to me in good faith by people who believed them.

I did not do this alone. My brother worked it with me, two people splitting the searching, and each of us checking what the other found.

County recorders

Once you have a name and a place, county recorders hold the originals. Marriage licenses, divorce filings, decrees, property records. Not birth or death certificates in most states , those sit with the state vital records office, and they are usually restricted for fifty years or more.

Ancestry first. Anything I could not find there I got on the telephone, from county recorders' offices or from the courts. Mostly Utah. I also called Nevada, Colorado and Texas. Some of it came from documents other people in the family already had, and anything I thought might be wrong I cross-referenced against something else.

Some clerks knew exactly where to look. Some did not. Fees ran from a few dollars to about twenty-five per document. Ask for the certified copy and ask for the whole file, not the summary, the useful details are in the attachments, the affidavits and the service records.

Ask for a case number even when you are told nothing exists. A number gives you something to go back with.

Newspaper archives

Court proceedings get reported. Fines, convictions, hearings, and the small court columns local papers used to run. That is how I found a January 1986 conviction that no relative had ever mentioned.

Utah Digital Newspapers is free, needs no subscription, and holds the full run of the Salt Lake Tribune. Most states have something equivalent through a university or state library. Some papers are only on subscription sites, and some periods are missing entirely, the Deseret News has a hole from 1977 to 1988 that is not available anywhere I could find. Assume gaps and work around them.

What it cost

Two DNA tests, around two hundred dollars between them. Records at five to twenty-five dollars each. Travel was the biggest expense.

I did not hire a genealogist, a private investigator, or an attorney. I do not think any of them would have helped, and I am certain none of them would have got those twenty-one people to talk to me. I was family. That was the only credential that mattered.

The real cost was not money. It was two years of evenings and weekends, and a year in which I could not eat or sleep properly. Know that going in.

What I would tell you to do first

Order your own birth certificate, the long form, and read every line of it.

Order a DNA test. Ancestry has the largest database, which is what matters, a test is only as good as the number of people it can compare you against.

Write down what you have been told, with the name of who told you and the date they told you, before you start checking any of it. You will need to know later which direction the information travelled.

Then call the oldest living person who might know, and call them soon.

Names lead to records. Records tell you what happened. But the people are the only part of this with a deadline on it.