The Correspondent
Ms. Henrietta Gleason
Hoply
The Yule Road
Scotland
United Kingdom
January 6, 2017
Dear Ms. Gleason,
Please let me begin by saying this is far and away the strangest letter I’ve ever written, and I have written a number of letters.
My name is Sybil Stone Van Antwerp and I was born in the United States on May 29, 1939, and adopted a little over a year after by Lawrence and Margaret Stone.
I’d like to begin by saying that I never (never, never) meant to do something like this.
A few years ago at Christmas my oldest child, my son Bruce, gave me a gift of membership and DNA testing with an organization called Kindred.
I believe his intent was twofold: his father (my ex-husband) was dying and he and his sister, Fiona, were facing that starkness of mortality and wanting to hold onto something, as we all do.
Watching their father be erased with the incoming tide made them cling faster to me in a way, and that sense, I suppose, of one’s lineage or history.
In any case it took me some time to accept not only the gift but also the fact that there was something missing for them.
I sent the saliva sample away at last. I was surprised by how anxious I became in waiting, an anxiety I couldn’t define, and then the results came by mail.
The pie chart of my alleged ancestry woke up something in me I hadn’t even known was in slumber, a deep and hidden thing.
I admit I wept over it. Do you wonder why I am sharing all of this with you? I rather do. Let me get to the point.
I never intended to open my DNA to the sharing option.
What I had gained in knowing my biological lineage threaded back to the British Isles, Russia, and Native Americans was plenty.
It was a warm sense I had, even the vaguest, of roots.
But there was a night when I was emotional, rather electric and outside my normal right mind, and it sounds mad, but by mistake I checked the box in the Kindred website to allow connections between my DNA and that of other users to be established.
Before I knew it, within a week, I had an e-mail indicating Kindred had found a user with a 49% DNA match to me, and I am certain you know the direction of this, which is, namely and exclusively, that this person was, or, is, I believe, you.
For a number of reasons (not worth getting into) I didn’t contact you initially, and then after a few months, I did.
Immediately I received an error message from the website saying you were no longer a user.
At the risk of frightening you, and in the interest of full disclosure, I admit I asked my friend who worked for Kindred to try and find your address (this was all happening over months, you see; I first learned of you in mid-2015) and then I lost communication with this individual, and I was of course putting a great deal of thought into these decisions.
In due course I was able to sort out that you lived near Fort William, and then this month I’ve had a child staying with me, a disturbed boy who is the son of a friend, but he’s extremely clever, you know, growing up in the age of the internet, and he found your address, and… VOILà.
My DNA matches your DNA by 49%. I know nothing about my biological family other than that I was adopted from inside the US. I was raised largely in Philadelphia.
I do hope you write, even if it’s only a quick missive to tell me to bug off. It’s just that now, this thing that has been woken, I can’t seem to lull it back to sleep.
Warm regards,
Sybil Stone Van Antwerp
17 Farney Road
Arnold, Maryland
21012
USA
sybilvanantwerp@