My husband knew from the get-go that he was adopted.  His adoptive parents wanted him to know as soon as possible that they had chosen him to be their son but that they were not his biological parents.  He was seven months old when he was adopted from the Methodist Children’s Home in Jacksonville, Florida and was the first of three children that his parents adopted from that facility.  He was a big, blue-eyed baby who was good-natured but verbally silent for the first three years of his life.   

Grant’s adoptive parents, Mary Ketus Deen Holland and Zachary Grantham Holland Jr., were potato farmers living in Bunnell, Florida, south of St. Augustine.  They were members of old Southern families from North Florida and South Georgia and were distant cousins to one another.  When the Hollands adopted Grant, they started an adoption trend in their small rural town.  Other people began to adopt babies whether they had their own children or not. But Grant was the first to be adopted and the only child for the Hollands.  They adopted a second son, Zachary, three years later and a daughter, Mary, a couple of years after that. 

Grant (aka John Grantham) was raised in a loving family surrounded by aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins by the dozens.  The Hollands were industrious and educated people who were very proud of their Southern heritage.  Grant was a good student and his parents encouraged him to pursue his many interests and talents.  He worked at a potato grader from an early age and went hunting and fishing with his father and other men from the community, but he also got piano and dance lessons in St. Augustine and was singing at weddings by the time he was twelve.  He was also a strong, athletic boy, capable of outrunning anyone by the time he was four.

Grant’s father, Zach (aka Zeke, aka Daddy, aka Pa), was many things while Grant was growing up: a farmer, a cowboy, a Mason, a produce broker and a liaison between commercial banks and ranchers.  He was well respected for having a good legal mind and he knew how to build things.  Grant’s mother, Mary (aka Kete, aka Mama), became a bookkeeper early on, but her real passion was Southern history and genealogy. She was a true Daughter of the Confederacy and, as such, we all sang “Dixie” at her funeral.

Grant went to Bolles, a military prep school in Jacksonville, and was the highest-ranking junior in the school’s history. Shortly after graduating, he went on to college and had a child with the first of his four wives. After his son, Vince, was born in Rome, Georgia, Grant went on to graduate school at the University of Georgia in Athens and got his master’s degree in math.  Shortly thereafter, his wife took off with his son and didn’t reappear until many years later.  By then, Grant had been married and divorced three times, vowing to never marry again.  But he would.

When I came around fourteen years later, Grant was living in Los Angeles and working as a software engineer for Jet Propulsion Labs.  I was running around the country setting up a network of associates for a new business.  Our paths crossed and, when it seemed like we had a connection, Grant returned to the Deep South because my business was in Atlanta.

On the day that we met, Grant told me he was getting ready to embark on a search for his biological mother. He knew that he was born in Miami from a birth certificate that he had ordered from the State of Florida Department of Vital Statistics. I called Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where we speculated Grant was born but, at that time, records were sealed and the search was placed on hold. 

When Grant moved to Atlanta, he reconnected with the adoptive parents he hadn’t seen in some time.  He also reconnected with the son he didn’t get to raise and met his grandchildren for the first time.  Grant had an early start.  Vince had an earlier start.  And I, who had no children, became a very young grandmother.

One day, I was looking at one of Mama’s genealogy books and stumbled into a picture of a man from Sweden who looked a great deal like Grant.  Charles Frederick Palmquist went from Sweden to Chicago to Bunnell and had eleven children with two wives. He would have been way too old to be Grant’s father but a child from his second batch of kids would have been the right age to beget Grant’s generation.  “Surely, you’re a Palmquist,” I told Grant.  Grant was enthusiastic about being Swedish but we decided that, while Mama and Daddy were alive, we would focus on them and nobody else and we let the issue drop.

Then, Grant’s parents passed away and along came Ancestry.com.  We decided to find out if Grant was a Swede, after all.  I bought him a kit for Christmas in 2017 and, when he got his results, Grant knew that he wasn’t a Palmquist.  His background was, in fact, similar to his adoptive parents’ – English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and just a tad Swedish. 

“I look like Daddy,” he said.  “Do you suppose I could be his son?” “I suppose you could be,” I said, “but surely he would know that, wouldn’t he?”  By the time I asked that question, both Mama and Daddy were gone.

Grant forgot all about Ancestry.com until a couple of weeks ago.  I called the Methodist Children’s Home, which is no longer in Jacksonville, to find out if they had any records from the mid-1940s.  They said that with today’s HIPAA laws, old records were probably shredded.  And Jackson Memorial was likely to tell me the same thing.

At the same time, Grant received notification from Ancestry.com that they had identified a group of people that they were extremely confident were Grant’s first or second cousins and the surname was Hunt.  I personally went on to Grant’s Ancestry site and discovered several messages from members of the Hunt family.

So, Grant and I started to communicate with the Hunt family and, sure enough, we felt very confident that we had located his biological family and possibly his father, a man named Cyril Bernard Hunt (aka Bean), originally from Chicago.

According to Grant’s newly-discovered first cousin, Bob Hunt, Bean was married three times.  He would have been married to his second wife, Edith, when Grant was born but did Bean and Edith give up a child or did Bean have a child he didn’t know about?  That’s the question.  Bean did have two children by a third wife but we haven’t ascertained yet if they are Grant’s half-siblings.

Bean had a sister two years his junior.  Bob believed that Elizabeth Ann Hunt (aka Betty) got married in 1950 and never had children.  However, he very recently learned that Betty was married previously, in 1942, to a man named Austin O’Neil Strobel in Washington DC and Grant was born in 1945.  If Betty is, in fact, Grant’s mother, it still begs the question, “Who’s your Daddy?” because nobody seems to know who Austin O’Neil Strobel is – or, more likely, was.  And we still don’t know how Grant ended up getting born in Miami and adopted in Jacksonville.    

Grant and I and Bob and his wife, Kathy, and some of their family recently got together in Albuquerque and there was an instant sense of kinship and belonging.  We marveled over how much the two men have in common, right down to their hand size and love of math.  Not only did their genes match, their jeans matched! 

So many other cousins have connected with Grant, welcoming him to the family.  We are looking forward to meeting them all.  And I can’t think of a better ending to this story.  Grant has been blessed with both a loving adoptive family and a loving biological family.  We don’t get to choose our families but, if Grant could have chosen, he would have chosen both.