A Fatherless Century
Turns out a life-altering pandemic is the perfect time to solve a family mystery almost a century in the making.
I have one living grandparent: my 98 year-old grandma Gloria. Like many babies who never knew their father, her story has plenty of parts her and her descendants will never know. The scientific component of her parentage is now resolved, but the truly compelling bits of it remain a mystery.
Abuela Gloria was born on December 1922 in the Dominican Republic to a 34 year-old Dominican woman and a man we now know to have been a 21 year-old Anglo-Argentine spending most, if not all, of 1922 in DR. We also now know that he left 7 days before her birth. Abuela Gloria grew up in DR as an only child, which was somewhat uncommon for that time and place. She went on to have 9 kids, and a ton of grandkids, great-grandkids and great- great grandkids. Almost 100 years later, this off the beaten path pregnancy has resulted in more than 60 descendants and, almost like magic, every single one of those descendants, including abuela Gloria, is well and alive.
Not only is this the story of a Dominican girl who inherited the very English face of the father she never knew, but also the story of a girl who only had a handful of clues about who he even was and not knowing if he wanted to be found chose to leave well enough alone. This is also the story of two grandkids, my brother Jonathan and I, who felt tremendous curiosity and just had to know!
But it wasn’t easy. The way of life in that time and place abuela grew up in, she was as good as banned from asking the grownups in her life any questions deemed “intrusive.” If some sliver of info slipped into abuela’s ears, it was quite simply her lucky day. As such, about a decade ago we decided our best option was testing abuela’s DNA and the results confirmed what family lore and all her freckles made us suspect: she was more than 85% European and according to 23andme the largest piece of that pie was “British & Irish.” The Dominican Republic is a very racially and ethnically diverse land and aside from the ubiquitous African, Spanish and Taino roots, some extra variety was added to the mix with the sizable Lebanese, Japanese, Italian, Haitian, Jewish, French, Chinese, and various West Indian populations who’ve made a home there in the last couple of centuries. However, Anglo roots are fairly uncommon in the Dominican Republic thus making abuela Gloria historically exotic. However, growing up there with solely the habits and traditions of the Dominican side of her family she wasn’t all that different from those around her.
In the last decade, from time to time we would log into her 23andme account to try and see if any seemingly non-Dominican relatives popped up but all of them were so distantly related to her. It’s hard to connect any dots with a relative who is “either your second-cousin’s grandchild or one of your fourth-cousin’s grandparents.” However, the onset of last year’s global pandemic allowed us the time and space to dip into the ever murky waters of genealogical research. We started wondering if el tipo (the guy) had no siblings or other kids aside from abuela but we decided to keep digging. We set our sights on a Canadian relative on 23andme listed as abuela’s 3rd cousin that is predicted to share a set of great-great-grandparents with her. She kindly granted us access to her extensive family tree on Ancestry and we spent at least two months looking up historical records across, I kid you not, six surnames in our Canadian relative’s family tree to see if something interesting came up. Nothing panned out and we decided to collect another DNA sample from abuela to see if we got new matches on Ancestry. This was more fruitful because with new matches on Ancestry we were able to identify the surname Bowles as the one we shared with our newfound Canadian relative. We then proceeded to be on a discovery high for about a month, because one of the few details we knew about abuela’s dad was that apparently his name was William Bill. Surely, for a Spanish speaker like my great-grandmother Isabel, Bowles could sound like Bill, right?
It turns out we weren’t quite there, and although the surname Bowles is somewhere in our family lineage it was still a bit too distant to make headway. We had to go back to basics and trust family lore. My brother and I consulted with some of our aunts and uncles and revisited the few details we had: something about England, but also something about Argentina, something about being an engineer (possibly employed by a Dominican railroad company), something about him definitely speaking Spanish, something about there being love letters and an oval picture of him that was apparently destroyed in a tropical storm, something about the name very likely being William Bill and not the kind of misunderstanding that can happen with someone stating their first name followed by their nickname. We now know that he had a lifelong nickname but it wasn’t Bill.
In the wee hours of March 28, 2021, using Ancestry, I came across a travel log for a bilingual Assistant Engineer named William George A. The last name was blotted out but I noticed the first letter looked a bit like a B. The travel record was for a departure by ship on December 7, 1922 from the Dominican Republic to New York, seven days before abuela Gloria’s birth. My great-grandfather’s last name was literally the only one blotted out in a page full of passenger names, all because of a piece of tape used to mend a rip in the page. In my late night tiredness, I almost made nothing of this record but luckily I mentioned it to my brother the next day and he found the same record on the Ellis Island Foundation website. This website had a clearer scan of the travel log and it was easy to make out the last name as Birt. Birt which sounds like Bill in Spanish, especially in Caribbean Spanish, where an R sandwiched between a vowel and a consonant often takes on an L sound. Our great-grandfather’s name was William George Arthur Birt and with a single record that took us a whole year and hundreds of searches to find we had found him! To date it’s the only record we’ve found of his that connects him to the Dominican Republic. However, we did find records for some other Birt family members that were visiting or living in the Dominican Republic around that time so, at least for that period of time in his life, he had deeper ties to DR than what we had expected to find.
We spent the following weeks researching his name across several genealogy websites and quickly found out the names and other details of his ancestors. We came to know that although he was born in Argentina all his ancestors were British so that’s where that bit of the family lore came from. But what of his descendants? Aside from abuela Gloria did he have other children? Did he stop traveling and return to Argentina? In mid-April 2021, I had the idea of messaging Facebook members with the last name Birt living in Argentina and within hours I found one of his granddaughters! William George Arthur Birt or Guillermo Jorge Arturo Birt as he was known in Argentina due to that time and place’s Castilianization efforts got married a few years after abuela was born and had two more daughters and three sons. Chippie, as his loved ones called him, died in 1986, but abuela Gloria still has two living half-sisters and they live in Argentina. Abuela Gloria also has four living half-nieces, one living half-nephew plus the children and grandchildren of those half-nieces and half-nephew. We’ve even connected with relatives on William Birt’s maternal side which are our Ison relatives . Some clues in 23andme and Ancestry have led us to believe the Bowles connection lies with our Ison ancestors and someday we hope to dedicate some time to connecting those dots.
Thanks to Whatsapp, Facebook, Zoom plus the loveliness of our newfound Argentinian relatives we have started making up for lost time. These relatives were also kind enough to agree to DNA testing and on June 5th, 2021, almost 99 years after her birth, we got the scientific proof that abuela Gloria is William Birt’s daughter and it still feels totally surreal. I wanted the experience to be purely joyous but I’m sentimental and some of it has given me a feeling of emptiness for lack of a better word, a sort of lump in the back of my throat for a connection that was there even if it never materialized. Gender be damned, abuela Gloria is her dad’s spitting image. Even some of her descendants look a lot like him. William Birt grew up bilingual and ironically that’s the life most of his first child’s descendants are living, since the majority of abuela Gloria’s descendants make their life in New York and a couple of other states. He left the Dominican Republic on December 7th, 1922 and he arrived in New York, his final destination for that trip, on December 14th, 1922 which was the same day abuela Gloria was born.
There are a lot of other details that came to light that tug at my heartstrings. Our Argentinian relatives have shared that Chippie knew he had a daughter and knew her name. In a time before sonograms that detail was consistent with the aforementioned family lore of the presence of love letters. Whatever the circumstances surrounding all of it and we will never know most of it, the act of my great-grandfather Chippie leaving half of his DNA in an island nation almost a hundred years ago was like building a house for himself and his child and then leaving it fully finished but unlived in. The sad truth is that in his lifetime that figurative house never became a home. However, a happy twist of fate has made it possible for Chippie’s many descendants, now scattered all over the Western Hemisphere, to make that house a home. I so want that for us.
