By Irene Gibson, November 2014 — When I was a Private Investigator, a friend I had met in my Sweet Adelines singing group asked me if I could find her mother and also find out who her father was. The last that she knew of her Mom had been that she was in a small town in California, (where my friend had been born), and that she had worked in a bar there. I started by calling the bar and discovered that she no longer worked there. A great question to ask at that point was, “Did she have a boyfriend when she was working there and do you know his name”? Sure enough, she did, and I was able to track this gent to Iowa. I called him and asked if he had dated “Jane” and when he answered yes, told him that he might have a daughter! My friend and this gentleman became well acquainted over the telephone, and he continually told her that he hoped that she was his daughter, as he had never married and had no children. He offered to pay for a DNA test and it was a sad day for both of them when the result came back negative for him to be her father, though they continued their friendship. I finally tracked the mother to a trailer park in another California town where I discovered she had moved with a new husband. Sadly, I was too late as she and her husband had died from a carbon monoxide leak just 4 days previous!
While I was sorry for their passing, I’m not sure that this was a necessarily bad thing, and I do believe in divine intervention, as my friend and the gentleman from Iowa became as close as father and daughter. She even moved out to Iowa with her children so he could know his “grandkids!”