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DNA helps reconnect McCook man, father
McCOOK, Neb. — David Braun of McCook had searched for years for his biological father with no results. But a DNA test finally brought the two together in a matter of months.
Originally of North Dakota, Braun grew up never knowing who his father was. His mom didn’t want to really talk about it, Braun said, but it was something he wanted to know.
“It kinda sucked, especially when I’d see a father and son throwing a ball or something,” he said. In addition to wanting to know about possible genetic health issues, finding his father would also fill a hole he felt in his life. “That was a full half of my life I had no clue about,” Braun said. An uncle filled in as a father figure, whom Braun loved and looked up to, but there was still the nagging question about his real dad. “I always wanted to figure it out...every time I walked in a mall or some big place with lots of people, I wondered if there was a brother or sister there that I didn’t know about. That drove me nuts.”
He finally found a clue about 10 years ago, when David and his girlfriend, Amanda, helped his mother move and he came across a photo album with a picture postcard he’d never seen before. The picture was of a man with a mustache, sitting on a motorcycle parked under a pine tree, wearing a black baseball cap and holding a mug of beer. A cat was sniffing behind the tail light.
“I just got a weird feeling about it,” Braun recalled and immediately asked his grandmother for details. She hesitated, then told him that he might want to ask his mom.
“My grandma was never short for words, so I knew something was up then, “ Braun said.
His mother told him it was his father. The postcard was addressed to his mom and signed by “Mike,” who said he was going to a VA hospital in Helena and would be there for about a month.
His mom couldn’t really remember Mike’s last name but said that it may be Shepherd. It wasn’t much, but it was all Braun needed to start combing the Internet.
“Did you know there are literally thousands of ways to spell Shepherd?” he laughed. Braun launched into his detective work, searching online for a Mike Shepherd. He obtained a telephone book of Helena, Mont., and for about an hour every night, after he got home from work, he’d call all the Shepherd’s — or Shephard’s — listed. It was awkward calling people out of the blue, he said, but most people were very nice and wished him luck in his search.
Still, nothing came up and Braun conceded to himself that maybe he’d never get an answer. Every now and then, he’d scrutinize the picture of the man on the motorcycle, looking for clues he may have overlooked.
He and Amanda married and she joined the search, even posting the picture on a Helena Facebook swap site with no results.
Then, the detective work took a back seat for the next couple of years, as David and Amanda grew their family with two children.
But Amanda knew how important this was to her husband. Having saved some money from her job, Amanda surprised David this year on Father’s Day with a DNA test from an online ancestry company that matches DNA among its members. Results of his DNA would link David to others with similar DNA, as well as identify his ethnic background.
He was willing to give it a shot, although “I was nervous about it,” Braun said. “At this point, everything I did had failed miserably. So I figured at the least, I would get my ethnic background, which I already knew was 100 percent German.”
Amanda felt the same way. “I didn’t think we would find David’s dad with the DNA test. I wasn’t exactly sure how it all worked but I figured the DNA would at least give him his ethnicity and that’s more info than he had before.”
So he sent off his saliva sample to the ancestry website and forgot about it.
About a month later, they got the results. His ethnic heritage was not 100 percent German as David believed but only two percent German. Instead, his DNA showed 40 percent of Eastern Europe (Russia, Slovakia and Poland) with a lot of Irish and a little bit of Scandinavian thrown in. And they got 150 matches for his DNA with members who shared his genetic background.
Amanda started creating her husband’s family tree and after ferreting out all the names on his grandma’s and mom’s side, there were about 10 names left that were unfamiliar.
Amanda emailed one of those names, a second cousin, and supplied the only information she had: a Mike that had spent time in a VA hospital in Helena in the 1980s. “I didn’t really think I’d get a response,” she said.
After sending that message in the morning, that night they got the news that the uncle who was a father figure to David passed away unexpectedly, a loss David struggled to process.
But things were moving fast on the other front. Two days later, the second cousin emailed Amanda back, told Amanda she had a cousin named Mike and that she would “do some checking” about the VA hospital. And about a week after that, she contacted Amanda again, asking for her phone number.
“When she asked for my number, I knew he had been located,” Amanda said. Still, doubts lingered. “I did have thoughts that maybe it would be bad like he had passed away or he wanted nothing to do with David,” she said, and briefly contemplated not telling her husband about the contact she made. “If it turned out bad I didn’t want his heart broken again, but I knew I could never keep this from him. After all, he just wanted answers.”
She gave the second cousin her cell phone number and told David about it, but also that she didn’t know exactly if or when someone would call.
That night, David and Amanda were eating at a local Mexican restaurant when she got a phone call from an unfamiliar number. It was Mike, David’s father.
Choked with tears, Mike told her that he was very happy that he had a son and to let David know how sorry he was for not being there for him. And that he loved him.
Amanda, in tears herself, told him she would have David call him.
After getting off the phone, Amanda told David who had called. Stunned, David hesitated about calling Mike back. But Amanda encouraged him.
“I knew David was just nervous and scared so I told him, he waited 31 years for this, he wasn’t going to wait another day!” Amanda said.
So David called Mike on speaker phone and for the first time in his life, heard his father’s voice. Everyone was in tears by this point, Amanda said, and after getting through the first few minutes, David and Mike tried to figure out where the wires first got crossed.
According to Mike, he had met David’s mother in Montana in the 1980s. She later called him and said that he might be a father, but wasn’t sure. Since he never heard back from her, Mike figured that he was out of the picture.
Mike, of Altoona, Pa., was a retired ironworker and in his younger years, had traveled across the county on his motorcycle. The picture of him on his bike that David had looked at for years was instantly familiar to Mike, as he had kept a copy of it in his den.
“He knew that picture, down to the cat by the tail light,” Brauns said.
And his dad’s last name wasn’t Shepherd, but Flanagan, the reason for the Irish ethnic results.
As they talked, Amanda wrote down every bit of information she heard, including all the little things father and son had in common, such as the same work history (welding for David, ironwork for Mike), same interests and even the same breed mixture of dog (both have a Rottweiler/shepherd mix).
After talking for awhile, Mike wanted to fly David and his family out and meet them as soon as possible.
It was overwhelming, Amanda recalled. “After David and Mike talked, we just kinda looked at each other and said, what now? We never imagined we would get this far.”
But a month later, in September of this year, that’s just what they did. David got off work from his security job at McCook Community College and Amanda got time off from her job and climbing aboard a plane with their kids in tow, they landed in Pennsylvania.
Once there, the nervousness Braun was feeling dissipated as Mike and his family welcomed him with open arms. “At first it was like, all these new people, what would they think of me?” Braun said. “But they had just as many questions as I did.” At an impromptu family reunion, Braun remembers a “calm” feeling, looking at all the relatives he never knew he had. All the pieces of his life had finally come together.
Mike and his wife, Deb, took the family sightseeing and Braun even got to do something he never thought possible.
“Finally, at the age of 31, I can say I went fishing with my Dad,” he said proudly.
Father and son keep in touch, with plans to meet up again sometime in the future. Until then, Braun is content in knowing that the other half of his life, once lost in a picture of a man on a motorcycle, has now been found.