As I started watching the former HBO series, “Band of Brothers,” I recalled the time I experienced as a child during and after World War II. My father could not serve in the military as he had been born with severely twisted “club” feet and survived several surgeries to reshape them. He became a director of the San Francisco USO and our wartime neighborhood warden. I watched city blackouts from our home high on a hill off 19th Avenue. As a little girl, I often sat on my daddy’s lap during his work as a radio announcer and asked listeners to contribute to the war effort.
Now I am presented with a remarkable gathering involving relatives of Markley, my biological father, whom I didn’t learn of until a few years ago. At that time, I lived the miracle of finding, meeting, and loving my birth mother’s son—my half-brother—and biological relatives in Oklahoma. This has proven to be life altering, acquiring a “new” family who has warmly welcomed me.
Last year I received an unexpected call from another half-brother born several years after I was. I have now been invited to a reunion of cousins in my biological father’s children’s generation. We will meet in Oklahoma shortly after this column is published. Most of my new relatives are not, of course, in his generation, but they knew him as an uncle and will have some tales to tell. I have learned about some of his life and seen pictures of him, both in non-military garb and military uniforms, along with some of his 11 siblings raised on a small farm in Texas. You can well imagine that I will meet many from that family.
I have learned from several sources about Markley. He posed with brothers in their WWII uniforms in 1945, and military records show that he was considered a hero—a paratrooper in Europe who was a scout for the troops’ excursions. After a parachute failure, he broke his spine in three places. I am interested in more than what I see in the few words in his military record. Ironically, he spent a long time of recovery in the hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco and, at that time, my family and I lived not very far from where he was recuperating. He returned to Texas, married, and when that marriage failed, his son was adopted by his ex-wife’s new husband.
I have been blessed with the parents who raised me. I felt beloved as a child and believe that nobody could ever have meant more to me than Ted and Helen Gifford, my adoptive parents. Actually, I was never interested in exploring my genetic roots, adored my mom and dad, and only pursued my DNA in order to learn which genetic qualities my grandchildren may have inherited.
Come Memorial weekend, I’ll have a clearer sense of the other people I may have known as family. I am excited at the prospect.