When I was born, I was given the name Karen Whitted – Dad‘s last name was Whitted, so, so was mine. Unfortunately, he was murdered when I was only 5. I never really had a chance to get to know him or anything about his family from him.

It wasn’t until I was about 12-13 years old that I found out from Mom that Dad wasn’t actually a Whitted. Huh? What?

So who was he? (Who am I really?)

Mom only knew a few bare facts from the little he had spoken about his family:

• He was born in Idaho
• He’d been adopted by an aunt and uncle named Whitted at age 11
• After being adopted, he contracted polio and was laid up in bed for a year
• He cut off contact with his original family after the adoption
• Dad had 6 sisters, all quite tall, two of whom he liked, but never talked with anymore
• His adopted dad died 2 months before I was born
• His adopted mom died when I was 8
• His biological father had a last name of Sorensen (Aha!)

That means I would have actually been Karen Sorensen, not Karen Whitted. And somewhere out there, I had aunts and cousins and grandparents I knew nothing about.

For most of my adult life, though, my little world still only included my Mom’s side. And even that was sparse – we only had contact with her 4 brothers and her sister, along with their kids. I knew the names of a few of Mom’s 10 aunts and uncles, plus a couple of her cousins, but the rest of the family tree was a big blank.

Mom did say I was half Danish, a quarter English, with the rest of my pie filled by German, French, Scottish, and Irish. (Possibly a toenail’s worth of Cherokee hid in there, too.) But I had no clue who were the actual people behind that DNA or any of their stories. (My actual percentages are a bit different, but that’s a story for another day.)

2013 changed all that. I suddenly found Ancestry.com.

Being a database nerd with mad research skills, and enough curiosity to kill 10 cats, I dove right in.

I filled out everything I knew about my Mom’s side right away. My little tree started with the 5 people in my immediate family, plus Mom’s parents and siblings, and their kids. I was so proud of myself. Then I started getting those little “leaf” icons. Now I was off and running.

Except, I still only had a last name for Dad of Sorensen and no idea of whether the aunt or uncle who had adopted was a blood relation. It wasn’t until I added a Newspapers.com subscription that I finally got a break. I tripped across his real mother’s obituary because it had Dad’s name in it! And to my surprise, she was born a Whitted. (BTW, I now had the names of his 7 (not 6) sisters!)

So, at this point, I discovered I really am a Whitted AND a Sorensen. I probably should have stopped there…

After a few years of adding every little tidbit I found, my tree was now up to about 5000+ ancestors and cousins and their families. I happily got to my 3x great-grandfather on Dad’s mother’s Whitted line, Jonathan Whitted (Whitehead), when I hit a snag. He was illegitimate. And he’d been given his mother’s last name. (Here we go again.)

The records don’t show who his real father was. His mother, Mary, married a guy named Thomas Pleasants a year after Jonathan was born. When he was 4, a man named Isaac Sugars (Shugart) took him as an apprentice to learn the “art” of farming. The whole Pleasants family moved to Indiana, leaving Jonathan behind. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s and had a family that he, too, moved to be near his mother.

So … does this mean I’m really Karen Pleasants? Karen Sugars (Shugart)? Or something else yet again? According to a DNA test one of Jonathan’s direct male descendants took, the men have a fairly rare YDNA profile: I-L233. Per my research, it’s heavily associated with the Lindsay Scottish clan, So, am I a Lindsay? Eeeek. I’ll probably never really know, but I’m still going down rabbit holes looking.

It just goes to show what a can of worms you can open by researching your family history.

So who am I really? For now, you can just call me Kelly (my nickname) and the rest, as they say, is history…