I Used the Internet to Find a Picture of My Mother

After my mother abandoned me when I was three, I didn’t see her again. When she did try to see me briefly afterward, my grandmother and father prevented her. After that, she didn’t bother. She made a new family, with new kids, and got cozier with drugs and alcohol. We did eventually reconnect in my 20s, just before her death, but I never laid eyes on her — it was over the phone.

I spent my childhood being made miserable because I was related to her and my family was ashamed my father was involved with her. My paternal grandmother would call me “Little Debbie” whenever I dared to show emotion or tell me I’d amount to nothing because of her. Obviously, since my mother wasn’t a part of my life, I didn’t know anything about her or her family tree. I didn’t know anything about her genetics or medical history. Essentially there was a big blank over her part of the family tree (and a big blank in my memory but that’s a different story for a different day). The only reason I knew the date of her birthday was because I intercepted some junk mail with her personal details one day.

One of my first and most popular pieces on Medium was about my experience using 23andme and some of the family drama it caused (it’s a common experience to find half-siblings through DNA services). While I knew about my father’s side of the family (lots of colonizers and enslavers there), I only had my mother’s name and her birthday. It reminded me that there’s huge privilege in being able to trace family roots back as far as my paternal family could.

But once I spit into that vial, I also found a cousin of my mother’s — and finally got the name of my maternal grandmother — and several generations before. It was interesting to finally read about my maternal ancestors. I imagine my half-sister had a similar journey, when I shared with her the full family tree of her paternal family.

Even with being able to trace my ancestors back to 1100 or so (some of them were quite important!) one piece of information eluded me — I couldn’t find a picture of my mother.

I knew I looked a lot like her — my dad made it clear that I did. I’ve always felt that a lot of his rage towards me is that I reminded him of the one who got away from him because even though he regularly beat the crap out of her he thought he loved her (or at least he’d tell me that when he was really drunk and particularly terrible). My paternal grandmother also mentioned that I looked nothing like their family — and heavily favored my mother. So I’ve spent several years on the internet just looking for her face.

The other family she made ended up hating her, especially my younger half-sister. Like Debbie’s other kids, my younger half sister faced her own addiction issues, and I had to stop talking to her after a while. When I was talking with her, I certainly wasn’t the sort to open up a festering wound and ask for a picture of our mom. She couldn’t understand me wanting to know about her — because Debbie had always been a part of her life.

In fact, she wouldn’t be the only one who didn’t understand why I wanted to know. After all, I was raised by people, wasn’t that good enough?

Gosh, I wish I knew why. Regardless of why, I just wanted to know what this woman looked like. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find out.

That was until just the other day when I got an alert on my ancestry.com account that they believed they had new information about one of my relatives.

Even though I couldn’t see the details (I’m a writer, I don’t earn ‘membership to ancestry.com’ kind of money), I knew it was her. It was a picture of her one year before I was born when she was a sophomore in high school.

For sure, that’s her. Because here’s a picture of me, around the same age.

My husband’s reaction to seeing her was “That’s why your dad hated you.”

Yup.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but one of the things that constantly staggers the mind is how available information is on the internet. It’s taken me years to go through genealogy sites and vet the information there and assemble a family tree based on what I can see. More information and more history are being scanned and uploaded to the internet every day — including high school yearbooks! Information I thought would be impossible to know — a picture of one of many children, from a troubled family, who disappeared off the grid — is included among tranches of data that is being added every day. So on the one hand, it’s surprising that such information is now on the internet — but on the other — no, it isn’t.

The thing that surprises me the most is that I got the information from ancestry.com instead of familysearch.org. FamilySearch.org is associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is a free service that leverages their substantial genealogical records. I’m surprised I didn’t find more information about her on there because she said she was a member of the church (I’m going to assume her standing wasn’t great). Obviously ancestry.com is making relatively quick work of tagging and flagging their massive Yearbook database, which looks like it was added in 2019.

The internet has the power to be one of the greatest tools that humans have at their disposal. In just the 30 years since I’ve been exposed to it, I’ve been able to learn skills, research complex topics, and maintain friendships — it’s become a huge part of my life. But today I’m grateful for finding the face of my mother there.