Ancestry test sparks a mystery
For 55 years, Mary Carpenter thought she was an only child.
Carpenter, a vice president at First Volunteer Bank in downtown Chattanooga, never suspected her single mother had hidden a pregnancy back in the 1960s.
Carpenter said she was just a little girl then, and adults were good at keeping secrets.
“I was 7 or 8 years old,” she recalls. “My parents had been divorced almost my whole life.”
Her mother, Annie Ruth Ellis, worked in a shirt factory in Middle Tennessee, Carpenter recalled, and her baggy work clothes must have concealed the out-of-wedlock pregnancy that would produce a secret baby brother.
Looking back, Carpenter remembers her mother going away to the hospital for a few days, but her grandmother said it was a mild illness. Nothing to worry about.
“I was so naive, I didn’t know,” Carpenter said.
The baby was put up for adoption, and over the years, family members pushed the whole episode into the shadows.
Now, fast-forward 47 years. Mary’s daughter, Carey Carpenter, a Tallahassee, Fla., travel agent and blogger, convinced her parents to use a testing service, Ancestry DNA, to put together their ancestral pie chart.
The Carpenters got back a common result for white Southerners: their forbears were mainly English and Irish, the Ancestry DNA report said, with a bit of Nordic blood mixed in.
With the results, though, came a curious piece of news. Another anonymous Ancestry DNA customer, the Carpenters were told, shared a striking DNA similarity to Mary and Carey. The next move was up to them.
Carey immediately reached out with an email to the mystery person.
“I’m a very outgoing person,” Carey said. “I didn’t second-guess myself.”
Marc Locke, a lineman with Middle Tennessee Electric Corp. in Franklin, Tenn., was cleaning out his email inbox when he came across a link from Ancestry DNA that contained Carey Carpenter’s email.
Locke, 48, had known he was adopted since he was 6 years old. Once, several years earlier, he had even reached out to open his adoption records, hopeful they might contain clues to his family medical history.
But the adoption records contained scant information about his biological parents: little more than his birth mother’s name and a few random personal facts.
Locke, who had used the Ancestry DNA test to test his suspicion that he was part American Indian, answered Carey Carpenter’s email. In January, he, Carey and Mary found themselves trying to solve the mystery on a conference call.
Everyone was nervous. The conversation was halting. Then, Locke thought to share his biological mother’s name from the adoption records.
He remembers hearing gasps on the other end of the line.
Locke looked over at his wife Michelle, who correctly surmised, “Marc, you’re talking to your sister.”
Soon afterward, Mary Carpenter and Marc Locke arranged to meet as his house in Franklin.
On reunion day, Mary walked up the sidewalk in front of the house and Marc walked down to greet her. They hugged. Mary had to crane her neck back to look up at her six-foot, seven-inch “baby” brother.
“I got you,” he said, as Mary slouched backward.
Mary would think to herself, “I’ve got a brother. How do I treat a brother?”
But any awkwardness was quickly set aside as Mary and Marc realized that their personalities dovetailed perfectly, their DNA bridging a lifetime of separation.
“We are carbon copies,” Mary said. “He likes the same stuff I do. We finish each other’s sentences.”
“We started looking at each other and our hands, our features, our mannerisms are all the same,” Marc said.
The siblings are also of the same mind about a couple of things: one, they strongly suspect that they also share a biological father, and, two, they both believe that divine intervention played a part in their reunion.
“There is a reason why it happened, when it happened,” said Locke. “The Bible tells us not to lean on our own understanding.”
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.