Online since June 1997!

New Sister?

7-Apr-04 Took the DNA test, so it should be about 8 weeks before we know definitively.

25-Mar-04 -- Rose recently asked me if I feel like I am no longer the "eldest" with all of my talk about birth order, but of course that has more to do with the environment one is raised.  I STILL had to do the lion's share of the chores around the house and was my parents' guinea pig!  I'm just glad I'm getting to know her finally.
 

12-Mar-04 -- I got a cryptic message on my mobile phone earlier this week.  I don't really use text-messaging much as I cannot really stand the word-guessing feature it uses, especially since most of the text message that I had done was with in Italian with one of my many cousins there.  This text message was different then a lot of the spam I usually receive on there, though.  It was my father's nickname.  Apparently, since I had so many email server attacks in early 2004, she had been trying to reach me via email and her messages either got lost among the spam or bounced on her.

Thinking it was another one of my father's Coast Guard friends who knew my father in Hawaii I forwarded the message to my mother and sister.  The woman, who may be my sister, who I will call RR, lives near Dallas.  She was born in 1961 and is half Filipino.  She has been married for over 20 years and has two daughters, one of whom has green eyes, as does my father. 

We are looking into getting a half-siblingship test done.  RR had a paternity test in February 2004 with a man who her mother had married after finding out she was pregnant.  His name is Keith.  However, there was always a possibility that he was not the biological father and he was not overly-involved in RR's youth, although he had hoped he was RR's biological father.  RR was raised by her mother and her grandparents in Florida and Hawaii.  This step-father's marriage to RR's mother was brief, as he was stricken with tuberculosis after one month and hospitalized for a year, during which time RR was born.  The divorce was final by the time he was out of the hospital.  RR's mother lives in Alaska now.  When RR found out Keith was definitely not her father, she became re-determined to find more out about Floyd William Hayden ("Bill").  She found my web sites (genealogy trupa.com and personal haydennet.com) and contacted me soon thereafter.  When I heard that I might be related to RR, I called her in Texas and spoke on the phone with her for several hours, and even video-conferenced a bit to show RR her Alexandra, and myself.  RR's mother knew Bill way before he met Joseph's mother (in 1964) and married her (in 1967).  I was born in 1968, Italo in 1970 and Sabina in 1971.

Via Coast Guard Retirement Headquarters, RR, having heard the speculation of her mother that she was fathered by Bill, sent him a letter even way back in 1987/1988.  She was told that her letter had been delivered to his last known address, which undoubtedly would have been his Hayward home (although they did not confirm the address by law) as he had not moved from there since 1980 and he had retired from the Coast Guard in 1984.  He died still living in that home of a smoking-related aortic aneurysm on November 20, 1990, eight days shy of his 51st birthday.  There is no evidence the letter reached him.  I do not believe my mother would have confiscated it as that would not be consistent with her character as my mother would have dealt with this head-on.

RR knew things from her mother that I did not know about my father, including some things that my mother disclosed to me for the first time when I asked her what Dad had told her about Elizabeth.  My mother knew that my father had known Elizabeth in Hawaii years before he met her, that Elizabeth was Filipino and had a child.  Elizabeth was also aware of my uncle Andrew Charles Hayden, who was also in the service, that Floyd William went by "Bill" and was temporarily out of the Coast Guard to assess whether he wanted to stay in it for a few months living in a house with roommates.  For this reason it can be explained why he was on Molokai, which is an Island in Hawaii which did NOT have a military base at the time, nor was it the island my father grew up on (Oahu).  I had no idea my father was in Hawaii in 1960/61 until RR told me, later confirmed by my mother.  I only knew that he had grown up there in the mid-1950's and then moved to San Diego where he finished high school.  I knew that at age 17 (he lied about his age), he joined the Coast Guard, much to the chagrin of his step-mother.  Bill's father had been in three branches of the military and Bill's older brother became a Navy SEAL.  Bill's half-brother Dan Stief, on his mother side, also joined the military and was actually stationed in Italy at the same time as Bill at one point.  Bill was in the Coast Guard a total of 27 years.

I was very proud to hear that with no paternity test existing at the time (to my knowledge) and even with Keith's name on the birth certificate, my father sent money to Elizabeth at least from 1961-1964 (the year he met my mother while stationed in Italy).  Obviously Elizabeth must have been having tough times as a mother of a newborn with a husband in the hospital for a year.

In 1988 when the letter was purportedly delivered by the Coast Guard, Bill had quintuple bypass surgery and therefore his mortality was looking him in the face.  He picked up cigarettes again one month after his invasive surgery and was dead within two years.  He started smoking when he lived in Hawaii at the age of 13, the mean age that tobacco companies know people start to smoke.

I found my father's medical records and he was B negative blood type.  RR's mother is A positive.  Based on this blood type form (keeping in mind that RR is Type O):

http://www.biology.arizona.edu/human_bio/problem_sets/blood_types/inherited.html

Keith could not have been RR's father, as further evidenced by the reliable paternity test that RR had taken.  However, my father COULD have been RR's father based on his and Elizabeth's blood type.

How do I feel?  Very excited!  I would love to have another human being on the planet who is a piece of my father.  I don't understand if any of my family members feel their lives are disrupted as this is something that occurred out of my father's youth.  I do believe the evidence of RR being my sister is already overwhelming and of course I want it to be true.  My father was only human, and something great came out of his relationship with Elizabeth.  RR has two daughters who would be my only nieces (I have no nephews either).  RR deserves to know the truth.

This page was last updated 28-Dec-2007.