Within a few days of my results being published I was contacted through the AncestryDNA portal by a cousin who turned out to be the son of my birthmother’s brother. A First Cousin! He introduced himself and expressed his delight in meeting a cousin he didn’t know he had.
He then provided me with all sorts of information about the man his family had been told was my father. I was informed that my father was Melvyn Everett Hansen who’d been killed in WWII while serving with the US Army Air Force as the gunner in a B52-F bomber.
Hansen! It all fit. Or nearly because I also started getting messages from other cousins who informed me that I was related to them through their Shawnee ancestors.
That led me to research my birthfather more deeply and discovered he was from Blackfoot Idaho before marrying my birthmother and living in Cape Girardeau Missouri. His mother’s name was listed as Martha Sporhawk and, that even looked Indian, although it wasn’t.
Strangely, nothing was mentioned of my mother except she was dead.
Now on the scent I started delving deeply into the Native American history of that area of Idaho and was about to contact the US government to see how I could get a copy of the air medal Melvyn Hansen had been awarded. I was convinced he was my birthfather. After all, he’d been 6’1” tall and I’m 6’3”. He was blond and so was I. We looked alike in the photos I had of him with his bomber crew. It all fit!
Back L to R: LT A. M. Blossman (B), LT J. M. Acker (CP), LT E. J. Sierens (P), LT S. J. Scousi (N)
Front L to R: SSGT G. A. Hunt (BT), TSGT H. J. Ketterman (RO), TSGT M. E. Hansen (RW), SSGT M. H. Johnson (TT), SSGT V. G. Jones (LW), SSGT L. D. Brindley (TG).
Shot down on August 12, 1943 mission to Gelsenkirchen, Germany, aboard B-17F 42-30046 “Merrie Hell” (BK*H). All crew members were KIA except for Ketterman and Brindley (POW’s).
Until … I was contacted my a third cousin on my father’s side who was a genealogist working on a couple of family trees that included the other cousins who had contacted me. I was indeed part Native American. But the tribe was Shawnee and my biological father was a man named Lacey Little McKenzie.
My mother’s nephew was perplexed and consulted his mother and the genealogist who managed his family tree. Apparently they weren’t surprised my mother had birthed the child of another man. She’d already had a daughter who was Melvyn Hansen’s, so I had a half-sister. But they never liked my mother to whom they were only related by marriage and they let my cousin know they didn’t want anything further to do with her … or me. I was an offspring non grata.
So although I know that her name was Sylvia Jan Burns, that she’d had a daughter with Melvyn Hansen and another daughter with her second husband, Richard James Fanning I’ve been cut off from any further information about her life, her death or her other children unless one of my half-sisters or their offspring follow up on our matching DNA.
BINGO! © Robert R. Feigel 2022 – All Rights Reserved
Pieces from a Puzzling Life 