My Family Went From 2 to 10!

This is Our American Stories, and up next, a story from one of our listeners, Jamie Scott. Jamie now tells a story about how, because of a simple DNA test, his family went from two to ten within the span of a few months.

Take it away, Jamie. I’ve got an interesting story to tell you. It’s all about family, you see. When I was born in September of 1963, I was put up for adoption. I didn’t realize this until years later. Of course, I was adopted by a wonderful man and woman, Ted and Sanders Scott, and I was raised in Concord, North Carolina, which is in Cabarrus County and the beautiful part of North Carolina in the Piedmont region. Had a good raising. They treated me well. They took care of me, they provided for my needs, loved me to death, and treated me just like their own son. See, Mom and Dad didn’t think they could have any children, so when they adopted me, they figured that I would be it. However, my little brother surprised them a couple of years later and came along. I found out when I was a few years old about my adoption because it was a mean lady that my mom worked with that one time who said to me, when I was about four or five years old, that my mommy was not really my mommy. You want to talk about breaking a kid! I didn’t know what that meant, and of course, I told my mom about it. She got very upset. I don’t know what she did to that lady, but I’m sure it wasn’t nice. But she sat down and explained to me that, yes, I had been adopted, that somebody else had given birth to me, and that they had gone in; they wanted a child, they chose a child; they wanted somebody for their very own, and they went and chose me. And they also described to me how Paul talks about in the Scripture that when we accept Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior, we’re adopted into the family of God. We become His sons by adoption. And it’s just exactly the same process. If God could do it, why can’t others do it? So that made me pretty good with the whole adoption thing. I didn’t have a problem with it. But like most kids who are adopted—and I’m sure all of them do; I haven’t talked to a ton of them, but every single one I’ve ever spoken to has always said that—you always wonder why: why were you given up for adoption? Why weren’t you kept? What? And you assume, like children do, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ That they gave me away, not thinking, as we do later on when we’re parents and when we’re having our own children, that it was very possible that they did what was best for me. You never know for sure, but you know, you always have that thought in the back of your head. Well, I went to the U.S. military, retired from the Navy, had families, children, even adopted a son—regular life. Didn’t give it much thought. Every now and then I would consider it and think about it, but didn’t give it much thought until my dad. He was in his eighties at this time, Mom had already passed away, and he was thinking about this Ancestry.com thing and wanted to know what his background DNA was, where his family had come from. I mean, he knew his mother and father and that whole background, but he was wondering. So, of course, he went ahead and did the DNA, and then he got it, and he was all excited about it. He had Scottish and Welsh and a whole bunch of different things in his background. And then he said, ‘Then, that’s nice! Another: we’ve got that in our background.’ And I looked at him kind of funny, and of course, then he realized that, you know, I don’t have the same background as him, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ll do it one day, Dad, maybe, maybe I’ll do it.’ I don’t need to do it. I’m perfectly happy with the father I have. Of course, that made him happy, and I knew why he would want me to go ahead and do it, because he thought it was the right thing to do. It would have bothered him when I found out if I’d found another family; it would have bothered him, so I didn’t worry about it. A couple of years later, Dad passed away, and I really hadn’t thought about it until I was actually listening to Our American Stories, and it was in the month of November. I’m pretty sure it was in November, which is supposed to be my adoption month, and there were a lot of these adoption stories, and I thought, ‘Oh, I think I better…’ Now’s the time to do that DNA test! So I ordered the Ancestry DNA test in November, right around Thanksgiving time, and I went ahead and did it and sent it off. I got the results of my Ancestry DNA test on Christmas Eve 2018. It said that I had two first cousins, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ So I opened up Ancestry and saw that it had a gentleman named Daniel, a gentleman named Scott. Didn’t know the names, didn’t know anything about them, but I did go ahead and shot them an email off and said, ‘Hey, it seems that we’re first cousins.’ Just want to let you know that I’m adopted and trying to find out things about my natural family, and it appears that we’re cousins. Scott didn’t reply to me at all. He didn’t know what to think. I don’t think he noticed it right away for several days. I did speak to his mother later, and she told me that he had. By the time he emailed her and asked her what she knew, the rest of the family was already aware of me. But anyway, Daniel responded to me within half an hour, said he was on his way to a Christmas party, but that I looked a lot like his grandfather, and he sent me some pictures of his grandfather. His name was John Ed Ferguson, and he lived in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, so he had passed away several years earlier, so he wasn’t alive at the time, but I did look a lot like him. He also called and spoke to his mother, Sue, who lived in New York, on Long Island, and Sue contacted me a couple of days later and said that we talked a little bit and told her what I was trying to do, and I was trying to figure out my family, so she said she would take a DNA test. So we were waiting for the results of Sue’s DNA test to see where and how we were related when I got an email from Ancestry telling me that a close relative had popped up. So I opened up Ancestry and looked, and I had a lady named Catherine Joy Binkley listed as a possible, even, sister. I contacted her and found out that she was adopted also. She was a year younger than myself and had also been adopted, and that her son had gotten her the DNA test for Christmas that year, and she had done it in the information. So I got hers back at around February; I contacted Sue, so she came back in March. It came back in March, as she was my half-sister. It also showed that she was Joy’s half-sister, so it appears that we all share the same father. So it was pretty exciting to get Sue as a sister, and to get Joy as a sister, and then to kind of find out that Sue was actually one of seven, that my biological father, John Ed Ferguson, had been married and had had six children, then had gotten a divorce back in time, which was odd. He was actually able to keep the children, and his ex-wife moved to Arizona, where later on she had more children, of whom I’ve met Mary, who says, ‘You know, we may not be related by blood, but you’re still my brother.’ So anyway, then he remarried and had a daughter named Robin. It just appears that during the time—the about three years that he was divorced—he produced me with some woman as yet unknown, and produced my sister Joy. And we did discover who her biological mother was, who’d also passed as well. But it’s wonderful because here I went from having one brother, who I love very much, to having many brothers and sisters. It’s wonderful to have family. It’s fantastic to have family.

And in special thanks to Jamie Scott for sharing his story, and great work as always by Monty. And by the way, you now know that we really mean it when we say your stories are our favorites. Jamie Scott’s story here on Our American Stories.