Unplanned parenthood: Twins discover real dad
DNA search, Facebook help Montville duo find their biological father
Montville — On the back of a placemat from the bar he owns, Joe Rogulski has drawn a family tree. At the top are his mother, Margaret, and the man who Rogulski always thought was his biological father — the man who gave him and his twin brother the name Rogulski.
The family tree already had plenty of branches. Joe and his brother Lou took Tom Rogulski’s name, but barely had a relationship with him. Their mother died in 1984, so the twins were raised by their grandfather, their uncle and the man she had married two years earlier, Jim Malarkey. They call Malarkey “Dad.” Joe claimed Rogulski’s Polish name when he joined Montville’s Polish Club — “I’m Polish and I’m handsome,” he wrote on his application. Lou’s nickname at work was ‘the Polish prince.’ But they never had met any other Rogulskis.
“We talked on the phone (with Rogulski) a couple times a year,” Lou said. “I might throw him a card in the mail.”
That had been the story, convoluted as it was, of Joe and Lou’s life. “We’re an expert in blended families,” Joe said Sunday. His own family includes one adopted daughter, a son and children that his partner had from a previous marriage. Lou is married with two kids. They all hug a lot.
Then, the Internet intervened.
“First of all, I’m wondering, ‘What are they like?’ “Geez, I hope I’m not getting a call like ‘Hey, you’re my dad, can’t wait to meet you when I get out of jail.’” DAVID JAKOBOT, BIOLOGICAL FATHER TO JOE AND LOU ROGULSKI
New search, new names
Colleen Rix, Joe’s partner, bought him an account on the popular DNA testing site 23andMe when she saw a sale online. The results were inconclusive but Joe was curious, so he sprang for another DNA test from Ancestry.com.
When the results came into the Ancestry app at the end of April, Joe started to suspect he would be getting more than he gambled for. The app showed two cousins on his mother’s side had taken the test — that much was clear enough. But a cousin he knew that is related to Rogulski and had taken the test — who should have been listed as a relative — wasn’t there. And two other names were on the list that Joe didn’t recognize.
“That’s when I knew,” Joe said.
After a day or two of Facebook sleuthing and a text conversation with one of those new names, the Rogulski family tree had a new branch, and a new revelation: the twins weren’t Rogulskis after all. The first cousin from the app had one uncle who, if the results were accurate, would have to be their real biological father. Joe sent her a photo of himself and Lou.
“She looked at the picture,” Joe said, “and said, ‘Oh, God. Do you even need a test?’”
Her uncle David Jakobot had blond hair from decades of living in California, but he had the same smile as the twins. The same nose. The same eyes.
Lou used to hold up a photo of Tom Rogulski to his face and ask his wife if she saw any resemblance. “You always think you look like somebody — people would say, ‘Oh, you look like your uncle Cosmo.’ So do I look like this guy? It was always like, ‘Eh, no.’”
Jakobot looks like them.
Within a week, Jakobot went from being a stranger — an East Lyme native who went to school with Rix’s mother, came back to Connecticut often and had even maybe visited Joe’s bar — to being part of the family.
The three men spoke on the phone — feeling one another out, trying to understand.
“We had a lot of questions,” Lou said. “He never knew about us. I think we were all shell-shocked.”
“First of all, I’m wondering, ‘What are they like?’” Jakobot, 63, said in a phone interview Sunday. “Geez, I hope I’m not getting a call like ‘Hey, you’re my dad, can’t wait to meet you when I get out of jail.’”
The twins were not in jail. After a difficult, transient childhood, they both found stability. They were happy. They had thought little about their paternal family since Rogulski died in 2012. Plus, if you asked them, Malarkey was their dad.
But after a paternity test confirmed it, Jakobot was their father. At first shocked, then thrilled, Jakobot flew to Connecticut from his home in Texas with his sister and niece. The families organized a party at Lou’s house in Lisbon. They stared at each other, recognizing mannerisms, speech patterns, neat-freak tendencies.
“I was just so happy,” Jakobot said. “They looked like me.”
The family is looking forward, not back. The 44-yearold Joe and Lou still have a dad — it went without saying, but their bond with Malarkey hasn’t changed. They just now have a father, too.
Jakobot said he had no idea he had become a father at age 17. He had a son, Stephen, who died in a 2013 car crash in Broward County, Fla. The crash left Jakobot alone with his dog and horses in Texas, managing an oil and gas business but wondering who he would spend the rest of his life with.
“He was my whole world,” Jakobot said. “All my dog wants to talk about is what he wants to eat tonight.”
Now he wants to take Joe and Lou to Beverly Hills, where he used to live. He wants to fly the twins and their families to Texas. He wants to take them on cruises.
“Now,” he said. “I have grandchildren. Now I got a family.”