‘What color were my momma’s eyes?’
After more than 80 years, Cypress man finds family
F or the better part of 85 years, Jack Terrell wondered who he was. Though he loved the family that adopted him when he was only a few days old, he had so many questions. At an early age, he decided one thing: The mother who gave up her own baby must have been an awful person.
Terrell knew only scraps of his past.
He was born Sept. 2, 1930, to Fannie Woodard at a home for unwed mothers in Pilot Point, Denton County. Woodard named him Kenneth Ray.
He was raised in Waco by Hazel Terrell and her husband, and after their divorce, by Hazel and Everett Taylor, who adopted Jack.
It was a happy childhood, Terrell says, anchored by loving parents and strict but loving grandmothers. Between U.S. Navy postings in Hawaii and Seattle (“Somebody had to do it,” he says with a wink) he met and, within nine days, married Betty, in Waco in 1953.
They, too, had a good life, raising three children while Terrell worked in Houston in the savings and loan industry — “before it went poof,” as Terrell puts it.
Though he never stopped looking for his mother, closed records and cumbersome search methods never gave Terrell much insight into his past.
Then came the Internet, and shortly thereafter, sophisticated and swift ways of analyzing DNA. So Terrell swabbed the inside of his cheek and sent it off to Family Tree DNA, a 16-year-old Houston company. Patricia Bond developed a passion for genealogy when she was in college, about 40 years ago. One day, doing dishes over the holidays, she asked her grandmother, a widow, about family history. Standing with her back to everyone, the grandmother said, “I don’t know.”
Finally, she turned around to show big tears running down her face. “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” she said. “But promise me that you’ll find my son.”
The grandmother, Fannie Woodard Davis, had never told anyone she had a child before she was married. “Find my baby boy,” she said.
At that moment, Bond’s mother, Ruby Winters,
remembered that her mother would sometimes take out a box holding tiny baby-boy clothes, rest them in her lap and sob.
Fannie Woodard met Robert Davis five months after her baby was born and given up for adoption. They lived on a 145-acre farm near Weatherford their whole lives and raised a son and three daughters.
Every weekend, Fannie and Robert would drive into Weatherford and stop at the orphanage to bring a different boy out to the farm for the weekend.
Every weekend, they would tell their four children not to go down to play in the Brazos River, but every weekend they did anyway. Seventy miles away, their half-brother was doing the same thing.
After the kitchen revelation, Fannie often reminded Bond that she had entrusted her with the task of finding the missing child. “Find my son,” she said.
“Life got in the way,” Bond says now. She was busy with career and family; records were sealed, and computers were crude.
In 1996, Fannie Woodard died.
Along the way, Bond never had any indication that Fannie’s son was looking for family. She had no idea if he was even alive.
She and her husband retired to Salt Lake City, a genealogy mecca. Someone suggested that Bond send her DNA to Family Tree DNA, just to see what might happen.
••• Bennett Greenspan, an entrepreneur, founded Family Tree DNA in 2000 in Houston, capitalizing on the growing understanding of the workings of human genetic material.
At first, the company could trace a man’s ancestry through his Y-chromosome, or men’s and women’s mitochondrial DNA, which passes through the mother’s line.
About six years ago, tests for autosomal DNA — the specific genes each person gets from Mom and Dad — became practical, Greenspan says. That type of test could match blocks of DNA from other people and predict the degree of relation, if any, between two people.
Greenspan often speaks to adoption groups.
“Everywhere people are desperate to answer the question why,” he says, as in, ‘Why did my mother give me up?’ “Biology is going to solve the problem.”
As more individuals enter DNA in databases, he says, more matches will be found.
••• On April 24, Bond got an email from Family Tree telling her a close family match had been discovered. On the site, she read that the match was someone named Jack Terrell, whose most distant ancestor was Fannie Woodard.
Fannie’s son? Bond emailed him. You have two half-sisters still living, in Fort Worth, she told him.
“What color were my momma’s eyes?” he asked. “Very blue,” she said. Both Bond and Terrell have very blue eyes.
Bond, the Terrells and the Davis sisters, Ruby and Jo, met the next Saturday, May 1, in Fort Worth. Many tears were shed from very blue eyes. Jack Terrell looks like his late half-brother, Robert. He has Fannie’s laugh and her love of dancing. His birth mother and adoptive mother shared a birthday, Jan. 27.
Most important, he knows his mother loved him.
“So much stuff I lost out on,” Terrell says. But so much he has gained. He and Ruby talk on the phone every day.
Bond looks back and sees one clue that seems important now. Unlike many unwed mothers, Fannie Woodard left her name on her baby’s birth certificate. On some level, she wanted to be found.
Bond and Terrell visited her grave together.
“This is huge,” Bond says now. “I finally feel that Fannie can rest. Jack has peace and knows his mother loved him. His children know their heritage.”