Illegitimate–the stigma my sweet grandmother carried with her for her entire life. Her shame fueled my quest.
For nearly two decades, I searched for the truth about the circumstances surrounding her birth. Who was her mother? Why did she give her up for adoption?
My relatives knew nothing. Those who had been living at the time of her birth were long dead.
My husband and I searched every courthouse in the tri-county area for a clue. (This was before Ancestry.com). We leafed through crackling pages of marriage and death certificates. We waded through Spanish-moss cradled graveyards, contacted historical societies, scoured the genealogy section in the local libraries, and made numerous phone calls to relatives and friends.
Each was a new dead end.
My real great-grandmother had been washed away by the sands of time.
But one day, over a decade after my search had begun, my phone rang.
“I have some information about your great-grandmother.”
My heart pounded. How could this stranger possibly know? How did she find me?