FAMILY SECRETS and SEARCHES

"Ay, Ay, to be sure, there are secrets in all families..."
                   
                       George Farquar (1678-1707) from "The Beaux Stratagem"

I call my blog "My Lifelong Childhood" because childhood is a time of discovery and exploring.  This story explains why I continue on this quest.

It's been a little over a month since my last post but, in a nutshell, I've been busy!  In some of my earlier blogposts, I had mentioned discovering relatives I didn't know I had, all because of family secrets.  Once uncovered, the findings have blossomed into warm relationships.  Such was the case of my great-Aunt, Mathilde (Tillie) who had followed her brother, Leon, my grandfather, to America from Vienna in 1913 after his arrival in 1905, having established himself in business.  There was never any mention of Tillie during my entire youth and I don't think even my mother had any knowledge of her, her whereabouts, or her offspring.  My grandfather knew but kept it a secret even up until the time of his premature death in the 1930's.

Mathilde "Tillie" Sperber and John Harrison (Chris Hadjicharalambous)

To refresh your memory, if you've been following my blog, Tillie fell in love with a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner, John Harrison (Chris Hadjicharalambous), married him, and, in 1929 after the Crash, journeyed to Cyprus, changed her name to Cleo, converted to Greek Orthodox and, eventually, settled in Famagusta.  Apparently, she stayed in touch with my grandfather but this was never shared with the family, my grandfather being an observant Viennese Jew.  His other sister, Esther Scibelli, had already married an Italian immigrant and converted to Catholicism.   Tillie and John had one daughter, Andreoniki (Niki) who today lives in Ayia Napa.  In 1974, when the Turkish army invaded Cyprus, Cleo, Niki and the grand-and great-grandchildren fled the Turkish-occupied side of the island to the southern part controlled by the Greek Cypriots.  So, Cleo was a refugee twice-over, keeping her Jewish background a secret.  Around two years ago, thanks to Ancestry.com,  Elena Papanastasiou and her family warmly reached out to me and I've had the wonderful experience of getting to know them during trips to NYC and Toronto.   The family is in Cyprus, Edinburgh and Hamburg and we stay in frequent touch.  This Fall, we will journey to Cyprus to meet them all and see their homeland and enjoy their culture.  I will be delighted to meet Niki, my mom's first cousin that she never met or knew of.  The funny coincidence here is that Georgia (Niki's daughter) and her husband as well as their daughter Elena were living in Kent, Ohio where he was getting his Ph.D. and we were five minutes away in Stow, Ohio.  If I've left details out or made some errors, I apologize to my Cypriot cousins!

Cousin Christiana Raftis from Hamburg and me

Andreas, Elena, Cleo, Constantinos, Harris and Christiana enjoying Hudson Yards and the High Line

Another successful search on Ancestry was on my dad's side.  Through his mother, they were Dutch Jews dating back to the 1400's, originating in Portugal and on to France and the Netherlands.  Thanks to a new law in Portugal, I am applying for dual citizenship with Portugal.  It's their way of apologizing for the Inquisition.  My grandmother was a DeBear, changed from DeBeer when they came to America in the 1800's.  I never knew much about Dad's family but discovered his cousin, Cliff DeBear, living on Long Island.  Cliff was a photojournalist for Newsday.  His daughter, Cheryl Burgos-DeBear in Texas reached out to me and, on a visit to NYC, she and her husband, Ishmael, had a lovely evening out with our kids, Marc and Brooke.  During that visit, I was able to FaceTime with her dad. The wonders of modern communication!

My father's cousin, Cliff DeBear

Brooke and Marc out on the town with Cheryl Burgos-DeBear

I really thought I was done with discovering my family's secrets...but I was just beginning!  I took a deep dive, held my breath, and had my DNA analysis done.  I really didn't expect any surprises.  I was correct in one aspect: 99% European Jewish and 1% Baltic.  BUT...as I went through the possible matches, my closest genetic match was the name of a man I had never heard of.  Who was Marc S.?  I asked my first cousin Bob if he'd have his DNA done as well as my sister.  Marc S. appeared in both their matches as "first cousin" and "Close Family" respectively.  Obviously, my sister appeared on the list as "Full Sibling".  I let this sit for several months, always wondering in the back of my mind, who could this man be?  He had a family tree listed with seven people, his parents both being from Puerto Rico.  His DNA showed he was 49% European Jewish!

After mulling it over, I decided to send Marc S. an e-mail through Ancestry.com but I wasn't sure if he was still a subscriber.  Obviously, it was a sensitive e-mail in which I told him I would fully understand if he chose not to respond.  I never heard back from him and figured he was no longer an active Ancestry subscriber.  I resorted to "google" his name to see if I could discover who he was.  Two Marc S.'s appeared, the first being an economist for the EU in Paris, the second, an immigration attorney in the D.C area.  I was willing to drop looking any further and live with the mystery.  My sister, however, was more eager to find this individual, come hell or high water!  She took the bull by the horns and sent a lovely letter to the attorney directly to his office by snail mail...marked CONFIDENTIAL.  She added both my and her e-mail addresses.

Within a day, we both heard from him.  He was delighted to discover he had new relatives but wasn't quite sure how close our relationship was.  After sending him the scientific details of our match, he realized that we were siblings.  Lois and I had a brother!  He was dumbstruck as were we.  He, apparently never knew his biologic father and had been adopted by his mother's husband when she married some years after.  All of this prompted Marc to do a little research on his own.  He has a younger half-sister who seemed to know a bit more information.  He asked her what their mother was doing in 1948.  At age 30, his mother who had moved to NYC from Puerto Rico, trained as an optician, and at the time, was working for an optometrist in Harlem.  Without any prompting from her brother, he asked if she knew the name of the optometrist...the reply framed pretty much what I wanted to know.  It was my father, Monroe Mayer.  I was 5 and my sister was 7 1/2 when Marc was born.  This brought on all sorts of mixed feelings about my father and the things I didn't know about him.  As he and I were never that close, my first sensation was one of betrayal and empathy for my mother, but, as my wife always says, "It is what it is".  After further thought, I actually felt it was very cool to have a brother!

We had a long-planned four days in NYC this past week.  Friday evening, after we landed at JFK, our son, Marc, met us for cocktails at the "new" TWA hotel in the iconic TWA terminal designed by Eero Saarinen.

There's a bar inside this old Transcontinental plane, just outside the TWA Hotel!

Sunday, I was to meet up with my sister, Lois, and her husband, Frank, from Florida.  I got tickets to two Broadway shows on Saturday and arranged a family brunch for all the Mayer cousins at a lovely restaurant in the NY Historical Society for Sunday morning.  Lois and I informed them all about their new cousin!  We received an email from Marc's wife who was equally excited about her husband's new family and I mentioned we would be in NYC.  They decided to travel up from Virginia to meet us, just happening to stay at the same hotel where we would stay.  We arranged for the Lois and I to meet Marc and and his wife, Jenny, Sunday at 2pm.  Both quite nervous, my sister and I called up to his room and he said he'd be right down.  Waiting in the hotel lobby, I watched as the elevator descended and the doors opened.  Marc and I hugged and looked at each other.  While I was taller, with a lighter complexion and not sporting the mustache he had, in many ways, it was like looking in the mirror... Similar voices, baldness, crooked fifth fingers, and some swelling of the left leg, each with one eye smaller that the other!

Marc and me!

Marc, Jenny and me.

We all talked for hours and got to know each other.  I got to know of his passion for advocating for immigrants.  His wife had in-laws and a cousin in Rochester, the latter who I knew!  We had a similar sense of humor.  He told me about his two sons and his grandchildren. He told me how his mother had given him up to the care of his grandmother and aunt and would occasionally visit, eventually all living together after she married.  His mother died at age 97 in 2015 and, in the picture he showed me, was a beautiful woman up to the end.

Newly discovered siblings, Marc, Lois and me.

We exchanged contact information and agreed to stay in touch.  Just this week, he sent me a photo of himself in 1988 when he was studying at the University of Virginia.  I was really taken by the resemblance, if you remove the mustache!

My parting words were that, despite how this all happened in the past, I had hoped that, at the least, there was affection between his mother and my father.  I might never know if my father knew about him or if he contributed any support.  That, unfortunately, has gone to the grave with both of them.  Nevertheless,  I'm very happy my sister and I persisted and made this very special journey.