He Opened the Envelope His Mother Told Him to Destroy

What would you do if, on the day you buried your mother, you discovered a hidden bundle of records labeled with one clear instruction: Please destroy these?

In this gripping first part of Corey and Kendall’s conversation with retired journalist and author Paul O’Connor, a lifetime of hidden family history begins to unravel through DNA testing, courthouse archives, old birth records, and one relentless search for the truth. 

Paul shares how a mystery surrounding his mother’s identity turned into a years-long investigation that ultimately became his new book, The Missing Child: The Life She Lost and the Life She Led, releasing May 26. Pre-orders are available now.

What begins as curiosity about his mother’s background evolves into something much deeper: an emotional exploration of shame, secrecy, adoption-era stigma, and the devastating weight family secrets can carry across generations.

Using AncestryDNA, 23andMe, historical records, and help from newly discovered cousins, Paul uncovers shocking truths about infidelity, hidden relatives, and the biological grandfather his family never knew existed. Along the way, he and Kendall discuss the emotional complexity of adoption, identity, DNA surprises, and one question that lingers throughout the episode:

Is knowing the truth always better?

In this episode:

•  Paul discovers hidden family records after his mother’s death 
•  A DNA test reveals unexpected biological connections 
•  The emotional fallout of long-buried family secrets 
•  Adoption stigma and shame in the early 1900s 
•  How genealogy research helped uncover the truth 
•  Why Paul wrote The Missing Child
•  The complicated emotional legacy of secrecy 
•  Kendall reflects on growing up adopted without secrecy 

If you’ve ever searched for biological family, uncovered a DNA surprise, wrestled with identity, or wondered how hidden truths shape generations, this conversation will stay with you long after it ends.

Pre-order Paul O’Connor’s new book, The Missing Child: The Life She Lost and the Life She Led, ahead of its May 26 release, and subscribe to Family Twist for more stories about DNA surprises, adoption, NPE discoveries, donor conception, and the secrets families keep.

Transcript

Corey 0:00

Okay, quick pause before we jump in. Kendall's talking to Paul in this one, and I've gotta tell you, this is one of those conversations where you think you know where it's going, and then it just keeps taking turns. Paul is a retired journalist, which you'll pick up on immediately because he basically starts interviewing Kendall. I mean, I respect it, but I also feel slightly replaced. Paul's story starts in a way that feels very family-twist. He and his sister are going through their mom's things after she passes. They find a bundle of records that literally say, don't open this, and yes, of course they open it. What comes out of that turns into this full-on investigation, which eventually becomes Paul's book. And not about having I wrote a book about my life kind of way, but I spent years trying to understand my mother, her past, and the secret that shaped everything. It's part DNA search, part historical digging, part emotional unpacking, and you can feel all of that and how he tells it. If you're into the whole, I just went down a genealogy rabbit hole, and now it's 2 a.m. and I'm looking at records from 1917. This is your guy. Alright, let's get into it with Paul.

Kendall 1:12

Paul, welcome to the Family Twist Podcast. Nice to be here. Very good. So you and I were chatting a little bit before we started recording, but I purposefully don't know a lot about your story so that this can unravel organically. I know you found us, which is humbling. I think that's wonderful. But I don't know what your story is. I don't know much.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Let me start by telling you who I am and what I did. I'm a retired journalist. I was a political reporter for for most of 41 years. And for 31 of those years, I was also a university professor of journalism. So two jobs, which you probably understand the necessity for at times. And I spent almost my entire career here in North Carolina, even though, as I as you do know, I'm originally from Connecticut. I spent my college years and my graduate school years in the Midwest, and that's where I started my career. But I came to North Carolina in 1977. I retired from everything, my last my university job, in 2018 after the after the spring semester, because I had started to work on a book. And the book is about my mother. And the way that I found you folks is that I gave the manuscript to my neighbor, who was a retired history professor, and he's a real pro. And he said, I wonder what historians will do in the future with DNA, how will it shape the writing of history? And they said, gee, that's a great question, Rick. I have no idea because I don't really understand DNA. I got a C in high school biology and a C in every other science class I took. But that for that 12 years that includes the writing time and dealing with publishers and press people, I put together this book and Rick read it, and he said, I need to look into this more off a little bit more. So he did, and in the process, he found the New Yorker magazine. And you're mentioned in there. So I said, I've got to see what these guys have to say. So I pulled you up, hadn't heard of you, and I listened to a couple of your episodes and said, This is interesting. It's different from what my experience is. But DNA really made a difference than the lives of these people who share their stories with you. And the DNA that we just we use made a difference in in some lives. Not so much in mine, but in in the people I found. And that's basically, I can tell you about the book itself and the story, but staying on the DNA, you might have some questions.

Kendall 4:23

Yeah, so what did you find? Okay, so I gotta go backwards. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

The day we buried my mother in 1994 in East Avon, Connecticut, my sister and I found her vital records. And they were tied up in a little bundle, and she said she had written, please destroy these. Don't look at them, please destroy these. I'm a reporter. What do you think I did? I would I'd have to open it. I opened them, and actually, my sister opened them because she's older. And we found out what we'd always suspected, and that is that my mother biologically was half Polish. Now, my last name is O'Connor, and I've lived my whole life very identified as an Irishman. As a matter of fact, I'm an Irish citizen. And we started asking questions. I was busy, I had a child to raise on my own, of my own, not on my own. And I put the papers aside, and every once in a while I mentioned it to someone. And in 2015 or 16, I got Ancestry.com. I took the DNA test. And much as you would expect from a birth certificate where the last name is Mikolijik, the my mother was Polish. So I'm 50% Polish. Eventually I'm 50% Irish. I started finding all of these names that didn't make any sense in my DNA matches. And one thing led to another. The whole genealogical quest for me on my mother's side was to find out why these people gave her away. And I had a lot of ideas, none of which turned out to be the final solution. But we were out with friends for pizza one night, and one of the women just said to me, Oh, this is a case of infidelity. I said, No, I don't think so. 1916, good Polish Catholic people. We know the couple is together before my mother is born. We know they're together after they're born. There's no way some guy is gonna put up with his wife having cheated on him and had a baby, even if they gave the baby away in 1917. He's gonna, he's gonna get rid of her, and the church is gonna cast her out. It turns out that the DNA pretty much proved me, proved this young this woman proved, I'm gonna get not going to give you her name because she has since divorced one of my best friends. She was right. And that the in in this is a spoiler for the book in case anybody wants to read it, it that it was my biological grandmother got pregnant by another man who just also happened to be Polish. And so my search became finding this other family, as you can imagine. Who were these cousins of mine who were kept? And if you go into the Vital Records room in Hartford Courthouse in Hartford, Connecticut, they let you sign up if you have an appointment, they say, sure, just go back there. So I went back there, and it's this huge room, and there's all of these wonderful bound volumes of birth certificates, death certificates, and marriage certificates. So I just looked it up and I found out that my birth grandmother had six pregnancies before my mother. Only two survived. Wow. And then I also found out just by actually pulling indexes off the shelf and flipping through them, I found two other children of theirs. So now I had this real seed corn for uh a genealogical search. And as I started putting these together, I kept going back to the kept going back to the DNA evidence. I did both ancestry DNA and 23andMe. Did you use 23andme?

Kendall 8:56

I did. We did both. Ancestry is what led me to my family, but you know, we did both hoping the value of 23andMe was that other first of all, that other people had done it, so there was a greater chance.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

And secondly, that they told you where these people were living now. Did you notice that? Yeah. And so I found this cluster of very close relatives who were living in Detroit, Michigan. And that would have made me sense on my father's side because some of my grandfather's siblings had gone to Michigan. But these were Polish people. And 23andMe told me, this is from your mother's mother's DNA. So it was the DNA, their DNA, that eventually led me to the man who was my biological grandfather. And those people have never commuted, with one exception, those people have never communicated with me. They they don't know who I am. The people who were affected by this are the offspring of my mother's siblings. So, in other words, the people who were left behind in the Mikolajic family. And I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that correctly. You should see it, it's just this mess of consonants. Yeah, I I have a better chance of speaking to you in Irish than I do in Polish. Anyway, so the uh the Mikolajics had shortened their name in my parents' generation to Michael, M-I-K-O-L. And I started doing research there. And by using the DNA matches that I had from Ancestry and a few other things like obituaries and press releases from the University of Wisconsin, curiously enough, I find the names of my contemporaries from a fellow by the name of Uncle Ed Michael. And so I start going through Facebook and I find seven of this one name. How do I figure out which one is mine?

Kendall 11:38

Did you start poking them electronically?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

That's no. Yeah. And there was one of my DNA matches. Wow. And it was wonderfully, it was a a young lady who oh, this could have been a story, but it was a young lady who is an actress in New York City. And I went online and I saw some of her commercials that she does for area businesses. And then I saw in her biography that she went to York University, NYU, the same time my son was there. Oh wow. That was fortunately, they never met and fell in love and produced children.

Kendall 12:30

I tell you, those stories are there for sure.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah, yeah. I I can't imagine my son was not that bold in those days to be pursuing actresses, but yeah, that would that would have been that would have been something. But anyway, the long and the short of it is that this Polish family found out that this wonderful woman who they love, their grandmother, had to give away a child. And none of them speak well of the man who was their grandfather. And the uh the upshot of it is that it led to some real doubts amongst those family members that the two older children, the children who were born after my mother, had the same father as the two younger children, the daughters who were there when my mother was born. So there's all this DNA that unfortunately we can't use to solve that. We there is no DNA, I should say, that we can use to solve that question because those two older women, of course, obviously are long gone. They'd be well over 100 now, but so are their children. And there are no grandchildren. Wow. Yeah. But believe me, this one new cousin of mine, he and I spent a year flipping through DNA matches and old email addresses. We he tried repeatedly to get up with a fellow he knew from the family, I think a second cousin, and I think he learned that he had passed away. So it was a it was a rigorous search to try to prove that. But all of that is is the story of my found family. I found this family, and I wouldn't say that DNA alone solved this, but without the DNA, I wouldn't have solved it. Yeah, so that's my story. Now if you wanted Okay, go ahead. No, if you want to talk about the perils of trying to publish a book about something like that and tell that story coherently, yeah, I bet.

Kendall 15:02

Before we do, have you I I don't think I heard you say that you had discovered your biological grandfather's were so you have you connected with some cousins on that side as well?

SPEAKER_01 15:16

That I connected with one cousin, okay, whose response was very polite, and it was I knew nothing about my grandfather. Oh. And I connected with another cousin who has no idea who let me put it this way both her mother and her mother's mother were adopted. Oh yeah. So the obvious connection, because she's in the Detroit area, also, the obvious connection is that this it's this guy, Peter, who was one other thing that I would suggest to any of your listeners who are on a genealogical search using DNA, is to find a really smart cousin. Because I have this cousin up in not far from where you are, basically in Springfield Mass. And he was just so focused on solving this, and he has 7,000 people in his family tree, all the way going all the way back to people who rode horses with lances, and Ron figured it out, and he even figured out how this biological grandfather got from Camden, New Jersey to Hartford to impregnate my biological grandmother.

SPEAKER_03 16:58

Wow. Wow. That's my the train schedule. Not quite that specific, but he's he amazed me.

Kendall 17:10

Wow. I find that fascinating. And yeah, I'm so thankful that my half-brother, my father's son, the first person I ever connected with through my story, he has done so much research. And he was hoping to find me, of course, but he just had that genealogical interest and really wanted to trace the family, my father's family, as far back as he could. And he's done a really good job. It's fascinating to sit and look at the documentation that he has and read it. One of our ancestors was one of the founders of Connecticut. It's just I know it's bizarre.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

It's like I have him to thank.

Kendall 17:53

I know. I never knew that I had any connection to New England because I was born and raised in Arkansas because that's where my birth mother's father moved while she was pregnant with me. And I never knew I had a connection to New England, but yeah, it's bizarre. And I love these stories and I love reading the historical documents. And it's just after being an adoptee for 47 years, you just feel like yes, I loved both sides of my adoptive family. Don't get me wrong. Very connected to them. But I knew that biologically I was I didn't belong to them.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

So the danger here is that I'll take over this interview. But at what age did you learn that you were adopted?

Kendall 18:44

I never remember not knowing. My parents told me from the moment they could. And did you carry this as a stigma? No, it's I always I've mentioned that a few times on this podcast before, that surprisingly, because I grew up in a very conservative Arkansas town, there were enough people who had also adopted that if there were stigmas, I I never experienced it. Quite the opposite. When my parents joined a church when I was like two years old and we started going there, I rem I can I have memories of being three and four years old and women in the church saying how lucky I was that my parents are the people who got me because they were so kind and wonderful. And so it's so interesting. I never really felt that. And again, thankfully, my parents had couples that they were friends with who had also adopted. So I it felt very normal in my film, which was great.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

And this is, I'm gonna tell you, this is the problem with having a reporter on. I'm gonna keep asking you questions because this ties into my family. So you never felt any shame. But you see, that's the whole impetus for my book. It is that my mother had this shame, and she had shame and the things that haunted her. But at the the base of them all was that somebody gave her away. And this happens at the end of the book. It's that she my sister decided that instead of trying anymore to have children, she and her husband were going to adopt. And my mother was just oh, she was so upset because she didn't want my sister getting some weakling nafe, I think is the word she used, nafe for waif or whatever. And when my sister showed up with her son, who he's one he did this kid is something. He's in his early 40s now, it just transformed my mother's life. She fell in love with him immediately. She was already in love with my son, who's a year older. And then the second child that my my mother, my my sister adopted, she is every every person is unique, but she is unique. And I think that my mother's the last eight, ten years of my mother's life, were so enhanced by my sisters adopting and letting my mother both have the joy of grandchildren who were close by. Mine was all my son was all the way down in North Carolina, have the joy of having grandchildren, but also having been relieved of some of this shame. That she had that that had been lifted from her shoulders. And this is going to lead me to the next question I actually wrote it down because I knew I would be taking over your podcast in me in my overbearing way. But my question is: have any of your previous guests, people who've had family twists, ever expressed to you the wish that they had known the truth about their families from the start, that they had known, okay, I'm not giving up on my dad, the guy who's raising me. But I wish I hadn't learned this when I was 41 or when I was 29, that I would learned it. Somebody had said to me when you were five, mommy and daddy um adopt or whatever the terms that they would use.

Kendall 22:55

I would say overwhelmingly, most people said that they wish they'd sometimes because of horrible health concerns. And it's it's hard for me not to be judgmental about these parents who, when their adopted child came to them with health concerns, and they had details that they could have given those children. I cannot relate to that. Like you would risk your child's health to this secrecy. I don't know that my birth mother wouldn't have done that. She she still, you know, I've never skin to my birth mother. She doesn't want to have anything to do with me. Um he's wondered, like, why I'll needed a kidney, I've ever gone to her, you know, again. I think I know the answer. Yeah. But yeah, that's that's uh a commonality, talks with people is that these lies and these secrets are just so damaging. Um and I I have to adopt a parent's credit for the fact that they never lied to me, uh everything they knew, um, which wasn't a lot.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

You see, the in in the situation I'm in, but my mother was in her birth mother never told the other children about that baby. Whether she ever told her husband, I don't know either, that I'm giving away my book here, but they had separated and she had left him, and about two or three years later, after she had given birth, he found her, and he had to come from Bethlehem where he was working in the steel mills, he had to come up to Hartford to find her. And the problem that she had keeping this a secret is that her first two daughters remembered this child who disappeared, and they told my contemporaries, the people I now consider to be my cousins, about the missing child. And that's the name of the book, The Missing Child, the life she lived and the life she missed. And they held on to that story, that there was a child missing, that they had an aunt somewhere. And so when I showed up in their Facebook messenger saying, Hey, I I've got the papers and everything, the response I got was essentially, hey cousin, how you doing? It's good to finally meet you. They've just been wonderful. They've had me in one of them had me in his house. One introduced me to his very elderly mother, who was my aunt. Wow. And I had to meet her a year before she died. And but to go back to the question I just asked you, I wonder if my mother would have been better off if she hadn't known. Now there's no way she could have could this could have been hidden from her because of other circumstances. But if she hadn't known, she wouldn't have carried this shame all of her life and this burden that was on her shoulders. Because they were very different times.

Corey 26:21

Very people just attributed stigma to children when children had well, do you explain how do you blame the kid for being born to his mother? Sure, Paul's a talker, but I mean that in the best way. Because basically what he's really doing here is working something out in real time. And that's what led to the book in the first place. This wasn't just a curiosity project. This was him trying to understand his mom, the choices around her, and the weight she carried her entire life. And I keep coming back to that question he raises. Would it have been better not to know? We don't hear that a lot. Most people we talk to wish they had the truth sooner. Paul's looking at it from the other side, watching what the truth did to someone over decades. And then, of course, you've got the DNA jerry layered on top of that. The matches that don't make sense, the branches of the family that suddenly appear, the people who welcome you in, and the people who absolutely do not. All of that becomes part of the story he's telling in his book, which we'll get more into in part two. So stick with us for that because it goes deeper, especially when you start talking about what happens when you don't just uncover a story, you publish it. We'll see you next week in part two. And remember, Family Secrets are the ultimate plot twist. The Family Twist Podcast is presented by Saboffer Markham Communications and produced by Mosaic Multimedia.