When she was a teenager in the ‘70s living in the High Desert of Southern California, Rhonda discovered that the man who helped raise her was not her biological father. She was suddenly confronted with questions about her past — and she wanted to uncover the truth about her biological father.

Who was he? Did she look like him? What would her life look like with him in it?

Rhonda’s mother didn’t help her investigation. Even in her later life, when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Rhonda’s mother never let the truth slip about her biological father’s identity.

Time passed. Rhonda became an adult, and then a mother, but she was never quite able to get rid of that cocktail of curiosity and dismay. Most of all, she wondered if she had missed out on a beautiful relationship with her biological father during their years apart.

She didn’t realize she would one day discover an entirely new branch of her family tree — and an unexpected family history — with her daughter’s help.

Rhonda’s daughter, Chelsea, knew about this void in her life. After all, finding her mother’s biological father wasn’t just a matter of closure — it was also a matter of meeting family members she never knew existed.

So, in the summer of 2015, Chelsea took matters into her own hands.

From False Starts To New Beginnings

In the case of most family searches, the logical first step is asking direct family members for information. But for Rhonda and Chelsea, that option was off the table. “My grandmother and most of her sisters have now died, and we had very few clues,” Chelsea said.

When Chelsea researched her family’s genealogy online, she discovered that her grandmother married when her mother was 3 months old. So, she ordered a copy of the actual marriage certificate.

It was the key that unlocked decades-old family secrets.

“My mom had searched forever, you know?” Chelsea said. “I just randomly found her marriage certificate online, and when I ordered it, my mom was like, ‘That’s definitely my mom’s signature.’ It was pretty exciting.”

From that certificate, Chelsea and Rhonda found her biological father’s name and date of birth. “I wanted to see if he had any additional family. Maybe my mom had siblings,” Chelsea said. “But I wasn’t sure where to go from there.”

Chelsea tried Ancestry.com for her genealogical research. But when she tried to find contact information, she hit a wall: the listings of living people and relatives were listed as private.

At that moment, Rhonda was the closest she had ever been to finally tracking down her biological father. One tool finally helped bridge the gap: a public records search engine called Instant Checkmate.

Finding A Family She Never Knew She Had

Chelsea had just two crucial pieces of information — a name and date of birth. Fortunately, that was all she needed. A matching Instant Checkmate report revealed a gold mine of possible relatives, addresses, and a Facebook profile.

“I hadn’t considered Facebook prior to that, but I plugged in the list of possible relatives and narrowed my search to the area of the US that was shown in the Instant Checkmate report,” Chelsea said. Through Facebook, Chelsea found Rhonda’s half-siblings, David and Mary, along with a slew of other family members. “They have a huge extended family,” Chelsea said with a laugh. “There’s a ton of them.”

After decades of searching, Chelsea’s mother finally had more information than she’d ever seen about her biological father, but she faced one final hurdle: herself.

“She definitely had way more reservations than I did about contacting them,” Chelsea said. “I think she was afraid it wasn’t real or what she would find out.” Chelsea added that her mother wasn’t afraid to learn that her father was a bad guy. The opposite scared her more. Her mother was afraid that her father was a good person to his family, and she had missed out.

“I talked to everybody first, just her brothers and sisters, and chatted with them for like an hour each before I finally convinced her,” Chelsea said. And once she did, Chelsea and Rhonda opened the floodgates.

Over Facebook, the families began the process of catching up on lost time: sharing pictures of family members, swapping stories online, and sending the small updates that form a life on social media. However, it was a bittersweet reunion. Through their research, Rhonda learned that her father had died some years before.

But while her mother will never be able to meet her biological father, Chelsea said that Rhonda will at least be able to forge connections with her new family.

On her mother’s skepticism, Chelsea said, “We’re getting her DNA done because my mom’s still not sure. Just because they were married, she says that it doesn’t mean that was her father. But if nothing else, they’re her half-siblings, or possibly step-siblings.”

But Chelsea pointed out that the evidence is there: aside from matching genealogical and public records, there’s one more unexpected wrinkle in their story. Rhonda’s half-sister is named Mary, and Rhonda’s mother was named Mary. Rhonda’s mother and Mary’s mother worked together, and the family thinks that may have been how Rhonda’s father met them both. He later insisted on naming his daughter Mary. “It was really bizarre,” Chelsea admitted.

The journey of discovery fascinated Chelsea. “It’s such a huge piece of the past that nobody knew about. I mean, my grandma took all this stuff to her grave with her, so none of us really knows what happened.”

It took decades to find Rhonda’s extended family, and it took her weeks to finally call them, so Chelsea said that actually meeting in person will be a slow process. But after so many years and unanswered questions, the search was over.

Thanks to a successful online public records search, Rhonda finally learned who her father was, what lives her half-siblings lead, and what she missed — and now, she can forge the kind of family bonds she had once only dreamed about.

Names and identifying details have been changed in this story to protect the privacy of individuals. The individual was not charged for her use of the service and was compensated for her time.

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