Week 9 - Family Secret

I was never much of a "soap opera" fan, but I must say that I was sort of engaged with General Hospital during the Luke and Laura phase. What a saga that was! The story line was, for the time, provocative, seductive, and all the things that you can see watching just about anything on TV today. We all lived in a revolving door with a constant turn of events that kept us on the edge of seats, and tuning in day after day. The writers had to have gotten the material from somewhere, and I think they may have known the ancestors on one of my out-laws family trees. There is no doubt skeletons reside in that closet, but as it doesn't directly affect my own line, the names I've used are completely fiction.

Somebody knew something because the rumor has quietly floated about for years that the father of Charles Smith, and possibly one of his brothers, was not Mr. Smith. Charles got married and had a couple of sons, one who became part of my family tree. It was Charles' ex-wife who mentioned the rumor to me, but her boys were adamant that it couldn't possibly be true.

Well, it is...

Louise Haden was born in Missouri around 1921. John Smith, just three years older, was a laboratory technician in the oil industry. Whether his job took him to Missouri, or Louise removed to Pennsylvania, is unclear, but we do know they were united in marriage in Kansas City in July 1945. Their oldest son, John Smith, Jr., is enumerated with them in the 1950 census, along with their one-year-old son, Charles. Two more sons followed in quick succession, in 1951, and 1952. Just your typical All-American family living in Clifton Heights, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

Sound of a tape rewinding...

According to that same 1950 census, John Jr. is already seven year old so there is a six-year span between the brothers. It's certainly possible that John Jr.'s age was given incorrectly because we have John and Louise's marriage certificate from 1945. The census also states that both children were born in Pennsylvania. A six-year span is not unusual, but with the three additional boys so close together, a suspicious mind might start the wheels turning. Nonetheless, the family existed as if nothing were awry.

The next tidbit of information is important to remember. In 1913, a Jewish family, which included thirteen-year-old Abraham Levi Goldberg, immigrated from Russian to Philadelphia. In 1923, he married Leah Rosenberg and they became parents to a daughter the next year. This was the only child they had, together. By the late 1940's, Abraham and Leah made their home in Philadelphia, but Abraham worked in nearby Delaware County.

At first glance, it would make sense that John Jr. might not be John's son. There is that six-year span between him and Charles, and the fact that John Jr. was born before his parents married, but the rumor began to circulate that Charles, not John Jr., wasn't John's son. Charles' wife heard about it before her own children were born and they are now upwards of fifty-years-old. Regardless, the only common denominator in Abraham and Louise's life is Delaware County, unless you count the fact that Charles' middle name was Levi. There is no information about when or where their paths might have crossed even one time, much less enough for Abraham to have fathered two of Louise's sons. For all these years, the rumor remained just that...a rumor.

As it turns out, John Smith died in 1957, leaving Louise with four young sons. Ironically, Leah Goldberg died that same year. Grasping for straws here, I assume that Abraham wanted to live closer to his job, which is how and why he became a board in Louise Smith's home. The couple may have married earlier, but wasn't until 17 May 1985 when Louise changed the name on her Social Security file from Louise Smith to Louise Goldberg. No marriage record for them has been found in available records. The four boys grew up, married, and moved away. Prior to 1983, Abraham and Louise retired and moved to Florida where Abraham died in 1987.

As fate would have it, on her deathbed in 2003, Louise told her oldest son, John Jr., that his biological father was not John Smith, but a man from her home state of Missouri named Johnson. John Jr. spared no time changing his legal name to John Johnson. In most stories handed down, there is usually a grain of truth. Could this have actually been the "secret" referred to in the rumor learned by Charles' wife? Did she hear wrong and the rumor referred to John Jr. all along? It appeared the rumor was finally put to rest...until a grandchild had his DNA tested.

The Leads Method of sorting your autosomal DNA matches, places them, in most cases, in four categories, each one representing your four grandparents. This usually works well unless you have twisted family tree which often results from intermarriages between two families, or other anomalies. When this grandchild's DNA results came in, it clearly shows four familiar groups. Two were easy to identify, as they matched my daughter on each of her parents' lines. One was full of the names of Charles' wife's family (the grandchild's other grandmother) that she had provided. The fourth line had a total of eight distant matches, not a single, solitary one was a Smith. Those eight distant matches had no name in common. None were Goldberg's. The only thing they did all have in common, however, were that their names were all typical Russian Jewish surnames - Levin, Robinovich, Sirotovsky, Khavkin.

Is it a coincidence that the grandchild's DNA matches only a few distant relatives with Russian Jewish surnames? Or that Charles Smith's middle name is the same as Abraham Goldberg's? If Abraham was Charles' father, why didn't Louise confess it on her deathbed, as she did when she told her oldest son about his biological father? We will likely never know for certain if Abraham Goldberg is the biological father of Charles Smith, but one thing for certain is that John Smith was not. Oh, and the photos below? One is Abraham Goldberg's granddaughter; the other is my granddaughter. They are not related...on paper.