Hightailing it to Minneapolis to Meet my Two ‘New’ Aunts

By Robin Dohrn-Simpson

Ihave found two new aunts of ours on Ancestry.com. There were three, but one passed away,” my sister Paige informed me in March 2020. Paige had started the 2020 lockdown of the pandemic taking over my father’s passion for family heritage.

“I’m just sad Dad wasn’t here to see how advanced family history research has become since he slogged around libraries, the Ellis Island registry, military records, and talking with relatives” she said.

You see, growing up, my family had a different last name than my cousins, but in retrospect, I never really asked and my dad never talked much about his story except that his mother had died when he was 18. The sadness from this loss pervaded throughout his adult life. We knew Grandpa Amos, his step-father, but I never knew why he was a stepfather. And I don’t recall ever asking why.

As I got older, pieces of the story came out more and more. My father was born out of wedlock in 1927. His mother, Agnes, was 16 and unmarried. She lived in the small town of Trimont, Minnesota, and was as I’m sure all were in the early 1920s, very sheltered.

Agnes had met a boy Bill, or “Bud” as he was called, from the big city of Minneapolis when he came to town to visit his aunt. She got pregnant and had no idea how it happened or that she was even pregnant. She told a friend that she’d just “felt wrong down there.”

Agnes wrote many letters to Bud over the course of her pregnancy, but he never replied. She was heartbroken. The family forced her to marry another boy to make her unborn child legitimate. On the same day she gave birth to

my father, Bud came to town looking for her. Sadly, he found out that she was married and decided to step away. My father never met his birth father. Turns out Bud’s mother had hidden all the letters and never showed them to him. When he eventually found out, he headed out to Trimont.

Bill Bailey, his biological father had married in Minneapolis and had three daughters with his wife. We recently found out that he’d an affair during his marriage and fathered another child.

Paige searched on Facebook for our new aunts and found them living in Minneapolis. After introducing herself and telling me about our newfound family, we were all introduced to each other.

Throughout the past year due to the lockdown and pandemic, we have met on Zoom calls. I was surprised to find out that one of our aunts is only two years older than my oldest sister and looks almost exactly like her. Only a few years ago, my aunts heard that their father had a child before he married their mother, but it was never spoken about in their presence. Thankfully, these two women were very open to hearing about it and meeting us. It’s been so wonderful learning about their father and the genetic similarities between him and his son.

One thing that we also learned throughout this ancestry process is that not everyone out there wants to be found.

When my sister Paige discovered a family member in our lineage none of us knew, she searched her out and the two of them found that she was the granddaughter of the child born as a result of Bud’s affair. When she asked her grandmother about this, grandma was not happy. Her advice was “Leave it alone and mind your own business.”

But that’s ok, to each their own. However, when travel resumes, guaranteed I’ll be on a plane to Minneapolis.