Shannon Peck was given up for adoption at 10 days old. After years of genealogical sleuthing and a couple of DNA tests, she is about to meet the father who never knew she existed.
Despite an idyllic childhood spent playing along the shores of Nitinat Lake with her loving adoptive parents, Peck yearned to unravel the mystery of her birth parents.
The 47-year-old Chemainus artist said she’s always felt that her identity was clouded in a fog.
“There’s a big sense of loss around losing your birth family, not knowing your true identity and not knowing your roots,” Peck said. “It’s the sense of having a hole and searching for something, but you’re not sure what you’re searching for.”
In 1996, after the B.C. government allowed both parents and children access to birth information, Peck obtained her records.
The 40 pages were heavily redacted, but left a trail of bread crumbs that Peck followed over the next two decades.
Her birth mother had asked for a veto, which meant her identity could not be revealed. Peck’s birth surname was blacked out, but she saw that her given name at birth was Kari Lee.
Peck read that her mother had known only her father’s first name. The two met while Peck’s mother was travelling in Europe, where her father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force.
They had a summer fling, and Peck’s father never found out about the pregnancy.
On April 3, 1970, Peck was born at Grace Hospital in Vancouver.
Her birth mother told Catholic Services, the agency that facilitated the adoption, that no one in her family knew about the child.
“She was 21 and she was from a very Catholic family,” Peck said.
Peck said she found out her birth mother’s possible identity by accident, although she didn’t want to go into the details.
She discovered the woman lived on southern Vancouver Island. Peck wrote more than 100 letters over two years, but did not send any of them. When she finally put a letter in the mail, she never heard back.
About four years ago, Peck opened an account with Ancestry.com, a family history website. Last year, she submitted a saliva sample for DNA matching and created a public profile, complete with her photo and a blurb about her quest to find her biological family.
In August, through genetic matching on Ancestry, Peck connected with two second cousins. She discovered they were related on her father’s side.
With that information, she identified her great-grandparents and found a family tree that narrowed down the possibilities to a few men born around 1947.
This time, Peck did not have to agonize over how to word a message to a likely parent. After another relative told him of her search, her father reached out in August with a simple email: “Hi Shannon, I hear you’re looking for me.”
They did a paternity test on Aug. 14. Ten days later, the results showed a match with 99.9 per cent certainty.
When Peck called her father with the results, they were both stunned into silence.
Peck’s father is an active 70-year-old who lives near Rochester, New York. He has one son and one grandchild — and now, a daughter.
She plans to travel to New York State to meet him.
Her adoptive family has supported her search, as well as her artwork, which she says has provided an outlet to express her complex emotions.
Peck said being able to slowly building the branches of her family tree has “lifted the fog” and given her a sense of clarity.
“I just feel like that hole that I had is slowly healing over. I feel connected to my roots. I feel connected to who I am.”
