January 11th, 2020
Meeting My Father For The First Time At The Age Of 71!
Grover Howard Cook
Meeting My Father For The First Time At The Age Of 71!
Meeting My Father For The First Time At The Age Of 71! Have you ever heard of such a thing? I was shocked. I believed the story my mother told me as a child. How this came about is that I signed up on Ancestry.com and did the DNA test. My mother married a man named Joseph John Paige in 1947, Yuma Arizona. She was living in Imperial Valley at the time. He had just gotten out of the Army. He had been in for 8 years. They fell in love. He asked her to marry her. He picked out a wedding ring in a shop that was owned by a woman who happened to be one of my mother’s best friends in Holtville, California. Unfortunately the check he wrote bounced. Of course, this causes quite a ruckus and my mother felt she had no choice but to file charges against her husband Joseph John Paige and have him prosecuted. He was sent to San Quinten to make a long story short. They were only married a grand total of six weeks. In the meantime, she became pregnant and moved to Bakersfield so that her mother, my grandmother, could help with child care so she could work to help care for me. She wrote to Joseph informing him of being a father. When he was released he came to Bakersfield, picked me up for a day, bought me gifts, dropped me back off and never heard from him again. I was one year old. Mother married a man named Edwin Lewis Lyons, who shortly afterward, I was two, adopted me as his own. When I was 31, I wrote the Social Security office to look Joseph up. I wanted to know more about his background because my mother didn’t know very much. He was thrilled I wanted to know him. He told me a few things about himself and his background. We met a few times. He followed me back here to Alabama before he died and stayed about three weeks. He said he wanted to make sure I was going to be alright. He never even knew he wasn’t my father. This is laying the groundwork of what I am about to tell you. I thought Joseph John Paige was my father. He is on my original birth certificate. I honestly think my mother thought he was my father. Will explain further down the road. I have a friend who works for Ancestry.com and she says there are lots of stories out there just like mine. This has been quite a shocker to me. I hope you enjoy this. Or find it interesting.
Applying For Ancestry.com DNA TEST!
I applied for the Ancestry.com DNA test in 2006 to learn more about my background. I was more interested in my Ancestry background than my family matches and really didn’t pay much attention to the possibility of the relatives I had out there. I did meet a first cousin on my mother’s side that I became friends with for a while. I found out my great grandfather ran with Jessie James. He changed his name to hide from the law. That is why there is no record of him. You can’t trace him. I thought that was very interesting. That made my grandmother un traceable also since she carried her mother’s maiden name instead of her father’s name. No one knows what his name is. That I can find right now anyway. A young woman contacted me on Facebook and told me she thinks her grandfather is my half brother. He had all these Cook people pop up in his DNA. I started looking at my DNA and I saw that there were quite a few Cook people in mine. Surely there was a mistake. My father is Paige. I told the young woman that had to be a mistake because my father is a Paige, not a Cook. As time went by we sort of went back and forth about this. Another woman who was doing her DNA also had the same thing. She said she was my half-sister. She discovered her father, she didn’t know, neither did this young woman’s grandfather, that her father was this Cook man. We started talking back and forth for about a year. These people pretty much discovered they were related. One of the women flew back and met our half brother and his family. She finally got her mother to admit that she had an affair with this Cook man and that was how she was conceived. She discovered how our half brother was conceived and put up for adoption. Me being the cynic of the group, my half-sister wouldn’t give up on me, wanted to meet me, she flew out here to Alabama from Texas recently to meet me. While she was getting ready to fly out here I decided to find a lab here in my city that did DNA test for siblings and have it here when she got here. I felt this woman and I was related but not sisters. I found a lab and had the test overnighted to my house. It was waiting for her when she arrived. She spent five days with us. We had a blast. We took the test and got it right back in the mail. The results came back the following Thursday. Guess what we discovered. We are 99.7 % of half-siblings. I was totally thrown for a loop. I’m still pretty shocked.
This is what I believe happened. My mother was so distraught of what happened with Joseph, that she needed consoling she hooked up with a one night stand with Howard. It was so close to sleeping with her husband Joseph that she thought he was my father. Howard was a preacher doing circuit tent preaching and was used to consoling wayward woman and just happen to get my mother at her worst time. I honestly believe she thought Joseph was my father. So did I.
Where To Go From Here!
Where to go from here, that is the question. I guess I will just keep searching and finding more siblings out there. I was told by a nice I found who knew her grandfather that he liked hooking up with young women, marrying them and having children and not divorcing them. Who knows how many of us are out there. In case you are one of us, his name is Grover Howard Cook. He was born on April 27, 1905, in BlueRidge, Fannin County, Georgia, USA. Feel free to contact me. He was a handsome man. He died early of heart decease. 59. His oldest son died in his 40’s. I believe his father also died of the same condition. I am hoping to live a long life. I am 71 right now.
