DNA test uncovers D-Day love story

LUDRES, FR A NCE» After decades of searching, Andre Gantois had lost hope.

The retired French postal worker figured he’d likely go to his grave without ever knowing who his father was, unable to identify the U.S. serviceman who had fought his way across France after the D-Day landings, taken a bullet to the skull and been nursed back to health in a military hospital by Gantois’ mother.

Into his 70s, Gantois still had no clues to pursue, no name to work with, no paper trail to follow.

As a consequence, he also had no peace.

“Throughout my life, I lived with this open wound,” he said. “I never accepted my situation, of not knowing my father and, most of all, knowing that he didn’t know about me, didn’t know of my existence.”

Soldiers on all sides also fathered tens of thousands of children, some of them unable to ever answer that most existential of questions: Where did I come from?

Until a few months ago, when what he calls an unexpected “miracle” changed his life and filled in one of these missing pieces of wartime history, Gantois was among them.

Having married and with plans to start a family of his own, Gantois felt compelled to put a name, a face, to the patchy story and to fill what his wife, Rosine, now says was “a huge hole” in his life.

“He had no name, nothing to go on,” she said. “He told me, ‘I’ll die without ever knowing who he was.’ ”

Visits to U.S. offices in France produced only frustration. Gantois recalled that an embassy official told him: “‘A lot of people are looking for their fathers, because they want money, they want to be compensated by the U.S. government. But you have to have proof.’ I had no proof.”

Other avenues also proved to be dead ends.

Until last June.

Urged on by his daughter-inlaw, Gantois took a DNA test.

Weeks later, in the middle of the night, she called him with the earthshaking results.

“‘You have an American brother, a sister, a whole family,’ ” Gantois recalled her telling him. “I didn’t know what to say.”

His dad, the test helped reveal, had been Wilburn “Bill” Henderson. From Essex, Mo., the infantryman landed on Omaha beach seemingly just after DDay, fought through Normandy, suffered a head wound in the closing months of the war and met Irene Gantois at a hospital in occupied Germany.

After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, when the soldier came to visit her at home in eastern France, she apparently didn’t tell him that she was carrying his child. He returned to the United States, started a family and never spoke to his children about her before his death in 1997.

The trail would have ended there for Andre Gantois had his American half brother not also taken a DNA test. By chance, they both picked the same testing company, enabling it to put them together. The two men and Gantois’ half sister, Judy, met for the first time last September in France.

Allen Henderson took the test on a whim, because the company had a special offer on its prices and, he said, because “I thought, well, that would be interesting.”

Both Gantois and Henderson acknowledge how lucky they are not only to have found each other but also that their father survived Normandy and its aftermath.

“When I was little, he was always telling me stories about being in France and he’d speak a little French and kind of talk about how it was like to lay in a foxhole and guns, bullets flying over your head and guys dying all around you,” said the 65year-old Henderson, who lives in Greenville, S.C. “Amazing that he survived.”