Posted by DogRose First I’ll start by stating my agenda. My name is Jessica and I am what is called a “search angel”, meaning that I voluntarily help those on the Internet that have posted a “looking for” notice. These are people who have lost contact with or even never met an important immediate family member like a mother or father. Most of us just take it for granted that these people are in our lives. These people such as Kathy that are searching are usually in great pain and feel a huge void in their lives. I am compelled to help them because I myself am from a broken home and had to “connect the dots” to put all the pieces of my broken family back together. I especially felt great sadness at not having a father in my life. I think every girl wants her father, it’s perfectly normal. When you go through life hearing others reminisce about childhood memories of their daddy or how “my Dad called me the other day”, or how their father is their hero, it really hurts. You wonder if maybe you are a bad person because your Dad did not find you special enough to hold you dear. It really can cause you to grow up with low self-esteem. I know how it feels. That is probably why I committed the time and energy to help these people. So in my usual scanning of these “looking for” posts I came across Kathy’s just last month, August 2003. She had posted it in November 2002. It contained the same rueful plea that I see over and over. Help me find my Dad. I sent her an email to see what I could do to help. I got a response from a delightful young mother, 24 years of age named Kathy. She explained to me that she had never known her father but that she knew he now had four other children and she would love to get to know this other family of hers. She told me of how she was an only child on her mother’s side and that she had experienced a childhood that left her emotionally scarred. She longed to connect with her father and his family, her half-siblings. She hoped to capture a somewhat normal semblance of family life with them that she had never experienced. Even if it had to be a long distance relationship as she now resides in another state than where they live. I found this to be a perfectly normal quest that I was used to dealing with. Of course everyone wants to know their immediate blood relatives, their heritage, and their ancestors. That is a normal human desire! I count myself lucky that I do know who my grandparents are on both sides of my family, my aunts, my uncles, my siblings! And yes my Father too as I did reconnect with him successfully. And why wouldn’t I? Who wouldn’t want to know their child, their own flesh and blood? And so I took up Kathy’s cause. She said that she had everything in life she needed except for the love of her father. My heart went out to her. I asked her for every clue she could think of to locate this man whom she held in such high esteem. She said that she had been sending letters and pictures throughout the years to an address in Pennsylvania but had never gotten a response. She was not sure that he even lived there anymore but was puzzled because the mail had never came back to her. You have to know that a human being needs confirmation of whether or not someone wants contact with them or they are left wondering if there is a glimmer of hope that they do. Especially when you want so badly to connect with this person from which half of your genetic makeup came from. So the perfectly normal course of action is making contact with the Father and get his definitive answer on the matter. Simple right? Well no, it wasn’t so simple. The number to this address was unlisted and she did not know of any other relative of his except his father and mother, her grandparents that she also longed to know. She knew their names were John and Esther but alas, the number was also unlisted. I pressed her for more information and she remembered that her father was a prison guard. Reasoning that he probably worked at a prison near his home we found a number on the web for a prison near there and they gave her another number to the prison where he worked. She did not divulge her business to them. Summoning up all the courage she could muster she called there and asked for him. I know her heart was beating like a big bass drum waiting for him to come to the phone. We had already discussed that she should be prepared for the worse so that she wouldn’t be so let down if the worse case scenario happened, that being his rejection of her. Many people I have dealt with are scared to death to contact their father because rejection would be devastating to them.
on 9/30/2003, 12:56 pm
66.191.83.137
Kathy’s Search
Now comes my synopsis of Kathy’s search. I am writing one of these out for each person I have done searching for and that numbers approximately 50 or so.
A fellow search angel with access to a privileged database confirmed that yes indeed; her father still lived at the address! We were surprised and immediately wondered what had become of all the mail that Kathy had sent over the years. Could it be that he had received it but wanted nothing to do with her? There was no way to know since there had never been a response.
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