Breakthrough

Twenty-eight years ago, when my siblings and I started down the path of finding my father’s family, I had great confidence that we would solve this mystery. I was young then and filled with the abject surety of a Twenty-Something. But as nearly three decades of life experience settle upon me like an October frost, I find myself entertaining seriously the idea that the answer to this mystery may simply lie too deep for us to uncover. What has not been obscured by time or made inaccessible by distance may well be forever masked in deception. An illegitimate child is reason enough for a family to take extraordinary measures to hide the truth; whatever other shames may have their fingers wrapped in this saga is anyone’s guess.

Nevertheless, I find myself loathe to abandon what has become to me nothing less than a quest. I feel like one of King Arthur’s Knights, driven by some vague hope that the clue to the location of the Holy Grail is just a vale away, hidden in a church closet somewhere, awaiting my discovery. To give up now is to give up all that has been invested and hoped for for so long.

Recently, a friend suggested that I send my DNA to Ancestry.com for analysis. 
I had already submitted several tests to Family Tree DNA, one of the first websites to offer DNA testing for genealogical purposes in the early 2000s. Although what we found was valuable—including a definite paternal link to the surname Reeb (and its many variations)—what we did not find was a clear genealogical trail to follow. The family of Reebs to whom we appeared to be related, Gustavus Reeb and Anna Margaretha Stroh of Alsace-Lorraine, had 15 children, many of whom emigrated to the United States at various times throughout the 19th century, settling in Pennsylvania, Tennessee and North Carolina. 

In those days, having a dozen children was the norm, and although many often died before adulthood, those who did survive bred as prodigiously as their parents. Exponential growth being what it is, within three generations a family of ten, if each succeeding generation has ten children in turn, will count as many as 1,000 progenitors. That, combined with the fact that we could not be certain of our connection to Gustavus’s family, made a systematic search of his descendants very much like looking for a needle in a haystack. So I was reluctant to submit yet another DNA test to another company; I just wasn’t sure it would produce any new information.

I could not have been more wrong. Within a few clicks after logging into Ancestry.com (after submitting my test and having the results posted), we hit pay dirt: Direct evidence of a tractable family connection. It wasn’t the Holy Grail—but it wasn’t far from it.

What Ancestry.com offers genetic genealogists that Family Tree DNA does not is a treasure trove of digital family trees which tens of thousands of devoted genealogists have spent years collecting and documenting. Some of the families to whom I show a connection have more than 18,000 names in their on-line trees.

In contrast, although Family Tree DNA encourages people to create family trees, few do. Consequently, although I had good evidence that I was related to many people in the Family Tree DNA database, I had no idea exactly how. I e-mailed many presumed relatives, asking for information about their family genealogy but few responded.  Consequently, I had no way of knowing exactly how we were related.

(I should note that the handful of people who did respond to my inquiries were generous and eager to help.  One devoted genealogist, John V. Reeb, spent decades tracing the family of Gustavus and Anna Margaretha Reeb, and the information he provided was genealogical gold. I cannot overstate my gratitude to him.  In this our quest for the Holy Grail, John has been nothing less than a Merlyn.

Nor do I want to imply that submitting my DNA to Family Tree DNA was not valuable. Indeed, that data was like shining a flashlight on the Ancestry.com information. What Family Tree DNA offers that Ancestry.com does not is exquisitely detailed DNA sequencing—so detailed in fact that one can compare individual strains of chromosomes to other people in the database—allowing a person to map ancestral relationships with great precision. The data from Family Tree DNA made it easy to see the importance of what we found on Ancestry.com. Both tests were key to this discovery.)

No fewer than four of the family trees to which I showed a close genetic connection in Ancestry.com included the same man, Simon Reph, born in Northampton, Pennsylvania in 1812 and married to Maria Anthony. That this Simon bears the surname, Reph, which is a known variation of Reeb, is a good sign. That he shows up as a common ancestor in four separate family genealogies in the Ancestry.com database is a great sign, suggesting strongly that we are indeed related. That Simon is a direct descendant of Gustavus and Anna Margaretha Reeb is nothing short of spectacular, as it confirms the conclusions drawn from our Family Tree DNA test. What is even more encouraging is that we also appear to have a clear genetic connection to the Anthonys as well, Simon’s wife’s family. This could only be so if we were direct descendants of this husband and wife.

It is, in short, a colossal find: A clear connection to a specific family tree and a relatively recent ancestor. I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend for his simple but brilliant suggestion.

Our next step is to sift through all of Simon and Maria’s children—and their children, and their children—until we find a connection to Oklahoma City in 1926, the place and time in which my father first appeared in the world (as far as we know). This is no small task. As I said previously, within just a few generations, the number of people to be traced grows to a staggering number. That it was a time when people migrated from one part of the country to another looking for opportunity does not make it any easier. That it took place at a time when record keeping was scant, at best, complicates it further. At the very least, it will require the time and attention of many people working in concert to resolve.

If it can be resolved at all. Although the discovery of Simon Reph is very encouraging, I cannot shake the thought that in spite of it, and in spite of all of the energy that has been poured into this quest to date and all that will yet be poured into it, in the end our Holy Grail may simply never be found.

Nevertheless, I am anxious to learn more about the family of Simon and Maria Reph. They seem to have fallen in love with Northampton County, Pennsylvania; the cemeteries of that county are filled with headstones bearing the surname Reph or some variation. For whatever reason, they were reluctant to chase the dreams that so many other Americans did during those decades.

A few, however, did wander. Indeed, one grandson traveled as far as south central Kansas by the late 1800s—a proximity, in genealogical terms, that is more or less spitting distance to Oklahoma City.

No, we may never uncover the truth to this mystery. On the other hand, the only way to know that for certain is to give it up. And so I have come to realize that in the realm of quests, there is a point where success becomes less important than fortitude, the prize less important than the earnestness of the effort. I suppose Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot and the others felt the same frosty realization settle upon them that I have—that for all their efforts, in spite of all their hope, the thing to which they devoted their entire lives may, in the end, never be theirs. Nevertheless, when morning came, they shook the frost from their cloaks, sheathed their swords, saddled their horses and made for the next vale.

Some quests are just too important to give up.

Our Quest

My father, Paul Alvin Holloway, was orphaned or abandoned by his parents in the Midwest during the early years of the Great Depression. He grew up a resident of the Sunbeam Home, an orphanage in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1935, at the age of about seven, Paul was adopted by a house mother at the orphanage, Ora Margaret Holloway, a single woman who, although she had no home of her own to give him (she lived at the orphanage herself), gave Paul a treasure he would otherwise never have known–a family. Without hesitation, Ora’s brothers and sisters embraced him as their own, throwing him a lifeline of love that changed his life.

After service in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, Paul moved west and eventually started a family of his own. He and my mother raised six children together, three boys and three girls, during the 19 years their marriage lasted. But in the end, grief, depression and self-doubt got the better of him. After burying two children within the space of three years, a son to brain cancer in 1967 and a daughter in a house fire in 1970, my father decided that he simply could not be near the thing that brought him such joy one day and such grief the next. My parents divorced in 1974, Paul moving to Los Angeles and my mother to Idaho, where she struggled desperately for ten years to support what remained of our family.

When my father died in 1988, he lived in a two-room cabin in the hills above Yachats, Oregon, near the ocean. He found peace there, a refuge from the emotional hardships of his life, which were numerous and severe. Of all the many demons that haunted my father, the one he battled most desperately was the question of who he was. Who were his parents, and what happened to them? Did they die?  Or did they find themselves, like so many loving parents during the Great Depression, so destitute of resources that they felt he had a better future with someone else–even a stranger? And the most important question of all, did they love him?

These questions haunted my father every day of his life. Sadly, he was never able to answer them. Although he tried more than once, all his efforts to find his parents ever turned up were more questions, and eventually he simply gave up. The gnawing emptiness of not knowing who he was and why his life took the course that it did never left him.

Paul Alvin Holloway, U.S. Coast Guard photo, 1942

On the November day in 1988 when I and my three siblings gathered to remember Paul and to parcel out his few remaining possessions, we made a vow to continue his quest. But in the three decades since then, our efforts have generated few tangible results.  In fact, in spite of vast amounts of information now available on the internet, we have uncovered only one reliable fact—a single morsel of information that takes our search in a radically different direction than we had previously considered.

We now find ourselves in the role of trackers:  Having found a faint but discernable trace of blood, our only strategy now is to scour the wilderness of information before us for a second hint.  That hint will reveal our trail.  With any luck, that trail will lead us to our father's father.    

The Documents

For all his efforts, Paul’s personal search about his origins uncovered only one document of value, the Decree of Adoption, filed in the Oklahoma County Court on January 23, 1935, which made Ora Holloway his legal parent.  Obtained in 1954, this document contains the only information we have about Paul’s family and history prior to that date, which is as follows:

1) His name was Paul Alvin Stuart
2) He was born on or about February 19, 1926
3) His father’s name was Charles A. Stuart
4) His mother’s name was Opal Stuart
5) His mother died in September, 1927
6) His father left him with a maternal uncle in 1927
7) This maternal uncle abandoned him in 1929
8) He had been dependent on the public support since 1929-30
9) No family had inquired about his welfare
10) His father’s whereabouts was unknown

Shortly after his death, we petitioned an Oklahoma County judge to have Paul’s adoption records opened to us.  The Sunbeam Home (now operating as Sunbeam Family Services), which held the record, was happy to oblige.  Sadly, they had little information to give us. Their file contained a single 3×5 index card with the following information: 

STUART, Charles A. –(Oral (Ray) died 1927) – A SBH
Paul Alvin 2-19-26
Free FH, Miss Ora Holloway, Britton Okla.
Adoption completed 1-23-35
Case Closed

Although this record offered new information about his mother, it also raised new questions. For one, which was his mother’s correct name, Opal or Oral? Although Opal is a common woman’s name, Oral is typically a man’s. The mention of his adoption by Ora Holloway in 1935 indicates that the record was made after that event. 

Determined to leave no stone unturned, in 2005 I wrote Sunbeam Family Services to request a second search for information about Paul’s placement there. This uncovered a second “Master Card” (a 3×5 index card like the one above) which stated the following:

1-16-34
STEWART, Paul Alvin SBH
Admitted 1-16-34
Closed

Again, the additional information raises more questions than it answers. The first has to do with the spelling of Paul’s last name. Apparently, the Sunbeam Home created index cards for both common spellings of this surname, Stuart and Stewart, suggesting that they did not know which was correct. Another interesting point is the date of admission typed on the card, January 16, 1934. According to the Decree of Adoption, Paul had been living on “public support” since 1929-30. If he did not arrive at the Sunbeam Home until 1934, where was he before then? Additionally, in her return letter the records coordinator at Sunbeam Family Services noted that, because neither index card included a case number, she was unable to track a physical file. So it is possible that a physical file does (or did) exist in the orphanage’s archives. But without a case number, they cannot locate it. She also noted that a fire early in the last century destroyed some records from the early 1900s.

In 1996 we asked the Oklahoma Department of Human Services to search their archives for documents about Paul’s adoption. Because the department was not created until 1939, no records on adoptions prior to that year exist in their records. 

When the 1930 U.S. Census was released in 2000, we had high hopes for locating our Charles A. Stewart / Stuart and Opal / Oral Ray.  But while there were many people with these names in the record, never did they occur as a couple.  Nor could we find a Paul Alvin Stewart / Stuart anywhere near Oklahoma—not even in the rolls of the Sunbeam Home itself.  Without more information about where a marriage or death might have occurred, we were effectively searching for a needle in a haystack.  While any one individual might have been our Charles, Opal or Paul, without more information, we simply could not know it.         

Sadly, the 1940 U.S. Census brought just as much disappointment.  Indeed, nowhere in the record is there a Paul Holloway—the name by which my father would have been known at the time—whose circumstances matched that of our father.  After two decades of pouring over the digital records available to us—the census, cemetery records, birth and marriage records—and finding nothing but disappointment, we had to concede defeat, at least as long as we used these methods.
 

Turning to DNA 

Genetic genealogy is a relatively new science, having come into wide use in the early 2000s.  The premise is this:  Now that we can map our own genes, by comparing them with one another we can determine who is related to whom and to what degree.  Around 2006, I submitted my DNA to Family Tree DNA, a website dedicated to genetic genealogy.  A “Family Finder” test searched for people in the database who matched my and my father’s genes closely, suggesting a relationship.  Although this yielded some useful information, including the knowledge that we are genetically 98 percent Indo-European, because few of the people who matched my DNA were interested in corresponding, learning more about how I and they might be related proved unfruitful. 

The second test I submitted traced my own Y-DNA.  Since Y-DNA is passed only from father to son, by comparing my Y-DNA with that of others in the Family Tree DNA database, we hoped to identify a common surname.  That surname would be our true surname and would be an important clue about our past.  We waited with great anticipation for the results, but when they arrived we were shocked.  The name wasn’t anything close to what we expected based on the information we had, Stewart or Stuart. The name was Reeb.

At first, this revelation came as a great disappointment, generating more questions than answers.  However, unlike the other information we had uncovered, the reliability of genetic data was undisputable.  Genes cannot lie.  Of all we knew or thought we knew, the conclusion of this DNA data could not be ignored.  Indeed, as far from the mark as it seemed to be, it was our most reliable clue about our father’s origin to date. 

To our good fortune, we were not the only family of this descent to be interested in genealogy.  For decades, a man named John V. Reeb has worked tirelessly to codify the genealogy of his family, whose origins lie in an area known as Keskastel in Alsace Lorraine, on the French-German border.  Since our genes match his closely, we are likely descendants of the same family, many of whom emigrated to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, settling in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee.

This genetic link is the trace that has changed the direction of our search: A surname. The barest hint of substance, it is nevertheless more tangible evidence of our origins than anything we have yet to uncover.             

Finding a Trail

But while knowing our true surname is helpful, what Y-DNA cannot tell us is which, among the many hundreds of families bearing the surname Reeb (or one of its many variants) is our line, the family whose history at some point intersects with that of a young boy and an orphanage in Oklahoma City in the midst of the Great Depression. Somewhere in the world that family exists. Our next task is to find it.
 

The Holloway Family, 1966.

   

Documents

My father's Decree of Adoption, dated 23 January 1935. This is all we know about my father's history and family prior to that date. He was not given up for adoption but abandoned or orphaned by his parents.  His adoption was consequential to that event.


 

The two 3x5 index cards obtained from the Sunbeam Home (now operating as Sunbeam Family Services) around 1990. These cards appear to be all the records the ageny has about my father. The top card says his mother's name was "Oral" (not "Opal" as indicated in the Decree of Adoption) which is more commonly a man's name. Each card spells his last name differently, suggesting that the agency did not know the proper spelling. Also, the bottom card indicates he arrived at the orphanage in 1934, only a year before being adopted by one of the orphanage's house mothers.

The State of Oklahoma did not begin recording adoptions until 1939. Paul was adopted in 1934. Oklahoma guards the privacy of parents who give their chidren up for adoption closely, as they should. However, my father's adoption was subsequent to being abandoned by his parents, who made no formal request to remain private. For children who have been either abandoned or orphaned, especially during the social tumult of the 1930s, the state should be more open about providing records.