FAMILY MIRACLE
Armed with just three clues, Jyll Justamond uses Facebook to find the father who never knew she existed
Jyll Justamond tracked down her long-last dad on Facebook using just his first name and a few other clues
Jyll Justamond always longed to find her biological father. At 10, while snooping through a family member’s diary, she discovered that the people she’d called Mom and Dad were actually her grandfather and his wife. The woman she’d known as her “cool half-sister,” Linda, was, in fact, her biological mother: Jyll had been conceived during one of Linda’s flings when she was 18. “I really didn’t know who I was,” Jyll tells In Touch. For the next 30 years, she searched for her father, hitting dead end after dead end. Then she turned to Facebook. On March 31, right before her 40th birthday, she signed on, and 12 hours later, she’d unraveled the mystery of a lifetime. After years of disappointments, she had three clues to go on: Her likely dad’s first name was Al; he was Italian; and he’d been a bartender at a now-closed Palisades Park, N.J., bar called Neary’s in the mid-’70s. “I found this nostalgia page on Facebook called Palisades Park,” explains Jyll, “so I went on there and posted, ‘Hey, does anyone remember a bar called Neary’s on this street in 1976?’” Remarkably, someone did. That person led Jyll to Neary’s former owner, who remembered Al’s last name — Annunziata — and even tagged his old employee on Facebook. Jyll sent a message explaining who she was, and when Al, 63, opened it, “My heart, for a minute, just stopped,” he says. (After Al learned about Linda’s pregnancy from her friends back in 1976, he repeatedly asked Linda if he could be the father, and she insisted he was not.) “Then I typed my phone number,” recalls Al, “and wrote, ‘Call me immediately!’” They haven’t stopped talking since. Al, a divorced father of two from Cliffside Park, N.J., and Jyll, an app startup executive program manager who lives with her wife, Chantal, in Littleton, Colo., spent at least three hours on the phone every day those first few weeks. “Immediately, I knew that we were the same. It was like I was talking to another part of myself,” explains Jyll, who says they share a love of vintage cars and “have the same twisted sense of humor and philosophies on life.” Two weeks later, a paternity test confirmed it, and on June 11 — one week before Father’s Day — Jyll and Al met face-to-face for the first time. “We walked up to each other and hugged,” Jyll says of their meeting at a New Jersey restaurant, which was captured by a local TV news station. “It just felt so completely natural, like I had been hugging him my whole life.”
They’re already making up for lost time. Al will travel to Colorado to see Jyll this summer, then they’ll both spend Christmas with his sister in Las Vegas. (Linda lives in Florida, and Jyll says they’re not close.) Since meeting her dad, says Jyll, “I feel more complete. I just feel more whole. And I am an absolute mini version of him.” Adds Al: “I look at her, and my heart melts. She’s more than I ever hoped for. How do you beat perfect? You can’t.”