Hey.

It’s been 26 years today. At this point I honestly can’t even remember much about you. I have that answering machine tape with your voice and it wasn’t what I was expecting for your voice, I’ve got photos of you but with this much time passed it just feels like another random stranger I’m looking at. I still get incredibly sad when I think about your passing, especially in light of information that was confirmed to me last year. You see… I’m not a Mercer. I’m not your biological son…

As it would turn out my father is a man called Ed Snyder of Fort Wayne, born Eduard Schlegel of Bavaria. They have these services where you spit in a tube and send it off, they sequence the DNA and then match you with others that have done the same. I did that via two services and… yeah. I matched Ed as a father/son match on one of the two platforms and when he realized what it was saying he blocked all contact with me.

On my birthday last year I was laid off while out to lunch with my wife. Shortly after I sent a letter to Ed just wanting to know some stuff about his parents so I could start doing the genealogy for my “new” family and understand more about where I came from. He reached out to mom telling her that he “wanted no contact with me” because I would “ruin things with his wife and kids”. So I’m not your biological son, and you are 26 years in the grave, and I am his biological son but he can’t even be bothered to tell me about his other children so I might know my other half-siblings. I’ve managed to identify one I believe, and watch their career from a distance because it is the best that I can do. I could message and explain the situation but I’ll respect his wishes until I see an obituary for him.

What really gets me is he’s a Master Mason like us, it looks like he was raised much later though - in 2008 and he went York Rite like I did too. I don’t want to disrupt his life, I don’t want money or missed love or anything, I just want to know more about where I came from and for my other siblings to know I exist. I believe he arrived here by boat with his mother on January 8th, 1953 as that’s what the immigration record I found records. It’s funny we always called my one eyebrow the “Jack Mercer eyebrow” in hindsight, especially since I look quite a bit like Ed:

While you may not be my biological father, you were there for just shy of 13 years of my life. I mourned you for 25, assuming you were my father; I’ve mourned you for another year, wondering if you still accept me as yours. Hopefully, when we meet again, on the other side of the veil, in that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens you’ve processed everything and still accept me as some part of you. I still keep a photo of you in my office and dining room.

Until next year Mark,

-Your… stepson :/