I still have no confirmations but lots of suspicions in the persistent quest to identify my birth parents. The evidence continues to stack-up, but there is no admission. I have now had contact with 6 different DNA relatives on my growing Jerry Banister family tree that I’ve built through Ancestry.com. I’ve discovered thousands of “family” connections with less than a hand-full of confirmed links, as I continue to work the tedious process of verifying hint-after-hint that the site provides. Who are all these strangers, many of them dead, and why do I insist on doing this?

Does it really matter? I can’t exactly explain why, but apparently it does. It’s like trying to fill a hole in my life; something that I must do before I die. In some ways, I feel like time is running out. I also feel like a late-intruder, interfering with other lives rather than following the natural course of family relationship-building. It’s similar to being late to the party, which from what I understand will be taking place later this month in the form of a Banister reunion. I’m certainly not invited, as is the case with several branches of the extensive family who eventually moved even further away from their Jennings County roots. Initially it was seven Banister brothers, Joseph, Fred, Louis, Clyde, Ivan, Ora, and half-brother Alvin….AL-VIN!  The annual get-together will be in Seymour, Indiana, where many family members have since settled, and so that John Cougar Mellencamp can attend if he’d like to sing a couple of songs about “small towns” and “little pink houses.”

I am working on a face-to-face meeting with Terry, my initial DNA-relative match (third cousins) from first testing with the ancestral website 23andMe. Terry found for me the birth certificate and census info on Edna Faye, my suspected birth-mother, that led to this genealogical quest. We have not yet determined how we are related, but will discuss the possibilities in the near future. He lives up near Wala Wala, Washington, but he and his wife are coming to Portland to pick up a repaired violin bow. I hope we can “orchestrate” some answers, as we both have a similar challenge in trying to identify our birth parents. Conversations and e-mail messaging with him over the past six months have led to similar exchanges with even closer matches through saliva samples submitted both to 23andMe and Ancestry.com. 

One of the “keepers” of similar Banister (or Bannister) trees is a relative I’ll call Bruce, who I mistakenly thought had written to me with the suggestion of also taking a DNA test through Ancestry.com. This was some time ago, after I told him about my possible connection to his family. I took that second test but never found a match with him. As it turns out, I got his identity confused with someone else, so some of my initial inquiries to him were undoubtedly confusing. Who is this guy claiming to be related? It’s very difficult to keep all these Banisters, who are essentially strangers, straight in my mind; especially since there are now over 2000 names to sort out. I’m lucky that Janine (second cousin), and Julianna (first cousin or closer), both Banister descendants, have been so helpful and understanding over the past few months. Even though I never was able to get in touch or find a match with Bruce, I did find these much closer ties by submitting on both web-sites. Just the other day, another second to third cousin, Deb, popped up as a match. I was actually expecting this to happen once Janine had told me about their recent conversation regarding my place in the family.

It’s very difficult to earn credibility when the woman that most likely is my birth-mother refuses to acknowledge any association with me. It’s frustrating because the more I research this connection the stronger the evidence. It’s compounded even further when I consider the possibility that the father might have also been a Banister. It’s a big family concentrated in the same area, so these type of relationships naturally develop. In fact, I watched two of my distantly related cousins “hit-it-off” while playing miniature golf at one of my adopted-family reunions. They eventually got married, had three kids, then divorced; always giving us “something to talk about.” I’m just glad to be alive, and certainly not embarrassed with being the product of “kissing cousins.” I’m just sad if I’ve stirred up a controversy and embarrassed a few people in the process of trying to discover my mysterious heritage.