How sad… But it was never going to be a story with a wacky punchline ending. It sounds like he was very lucky to end up with the family who raised him instead of his biological family.
I thought it was common knowledge that she died as a result of a tragic fall.
By the way, just so I can be sure I’m following along here, am I correct that:
would mean three European-Jewish great-grandparents?
It would mean approximately 3/8 so it could mean 3 great grandparents or 6 great great grandparents, etc.
This is a very sad story. Now, I guess he has two missing kids to try and locate. I wonder how his parents are coping with everything.
How many people actually know any of their second or third cousins? And there might be dozens of third cousins on one side of the family, but you’d have to track down the descendants of your 15 other great great grandparents.
And another mystery rears its grotesque head from the murky depths …
The part I quoted makes it rather clear that his supposed bio parents probably aren’t. Or at least the threatening husband of his bio-mom probably isn’t his bio-dad.
So now he needs to find whoever his bio-mom was adultering with.
As **aceplace57 **said 2 years ago in post #2: “Some questions are best left unasked and unanswered.”
Why do you assume that?
My assumption was that Dad was saying these things while the twins were still at home with them. Sort of a soft version of the folks who lock a retarded child in the basement and pretend the kid never happened. If you start with that assumption, it becomes easy to imagine Dad had a hand in the disappearance as well. Which leads pretty quickly to what might be his motive.
You’re right that if instead Dad started saying such things only after the twins had disappeared that would be more plausibly due to grief and a desire to spare the later siblings the trauma about the missing & presumed dead kids. In which case there’d be no reason to assume a different bio-dad lurking in the deeper shadows.
This hiding family tragedies isn’t so rare. We’ve had threads about it with folks sharing their stories. e.g. I was about 40 before I found out I was the #2 child, not #1. The real #1 had died of pneumonia a couple days after birth and my parents had concealed that from us later kids with the cooperation of all the relatives.
Overall, given the messy nature of the whole story I thought the first option at least plausible. And definitely the more entertaining one.
Okay, I see your point now. Yes, I read it as if the dad’s comments came after the twins disappeared, but I assumed it was done out of guilt and a desire to cover up crimes and not grief. Clearly neither of the parents made any attempt to find the children, since there weren’t any police reports about them going missing.
Well, I seem to recall that when “Paul 2.0” was found in Newark, NJ, he was noted to appear “well taken care of”, nicely dressed, in an expensive, clean but older-model stroller. Clothes were clean, no bruises or malnutrition. Hair was cut, nails were trimmed.
None of that really points to abuse in the home so bad that the twin sister was killed somehow. (Who knows, though?) Maybe the parents (or someone the parents handed the twins off to) arranged an informal adoption for Jill, and left Jack in his stroller in Newark and hoped for the best.
She might not be dead, but it’s going to be an uphill battle trying to prove it either way, unless they just get lucky and she submits her DNA.
The third cousin he located had submitted their DNA to a genealogy database. People who do that are far more likely to have knowledge of their third cousins than the general population.
I don’t know how many other people know these relationships. But I know a number of second cousins, and am acquainted with, or know the addresses of, some third cousins. This guy would be called a third cousin five times removed. John A. Kasson - Wikipedia Yes, my family has members who are “into” genealogy, why do you ask?
For those not sure about how cousin relationships work, here’s a primer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM79Epw_cp8
That’s not so odd. I know several of my 2nd cousins. Those 2nd cousins, in turn, have various children, who are all 3rd cousins to each other, some of whom know each other. And some of those have children who know each other – those are 4th cousins to each other. I think the major factor that determines if you know your relatives (or at least know them well, or know them well enough to track them for several generations like this) – had to do with living in one nearby geographical area. All of those particular 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cousins I know of live in one region, so we’ve all grown up knowing each other since childhood, and we all see each other as “fambly”.
Now I have some other 1st cousins who have moved to various places throughout the United States and even some internationally. I know who some of their children are, and some of their children’s children (even though I have never met a lot of them). So I know, or know of, a bunch of groups of 2nd, 3rd, and possibly 4th cousins, who quite probably don’t know of each other at all.
Unless they study their fambly genealogy. It so happens that some relatives (quite distant to myself) have maintained extensive and detailed genealogies since the 1930’s or so – One on my father’s father’s side, and another on my father’s mother’s side, and more recently, one on my mother’s side, and these (especially my father’s mother’s family tree) have been circulating around the family, and kept up-to-date, since like forever.
ETA: And even that’s nothing, compared to people like Shagnasty who claims to know his family’s American genealogy since back to colonial times! All of my genealogies only go back to mid-to-late 1800’s.
Sure, but even granting that, I don’t think it’s remarkable that that person wasn’t able to locate all of their cousins and find out who was missing a kid. That’s a potentially huge number of people, and that’s even without throwing in the situations where the DNA doesn’t line up with the official genealogy, like affairs, unofficial adoptions etc.
Sengoid, that’s interesting, but I don’t think I’d say it’s “not so odd.”
The free DNA testing that FTDNA did for them would have really helped to push their enquiries further.
I guess to begin with they wouldn’t know which of the cousin’s eight great-great grandparent couples was shared with Paul. DNA testing either the cousin’s parents, half sibling if they have one, or first cousins should narrow that down to four couples. Finding a member of each family who would agree to testing shouldn’t be impossible, and you’d simultaneously be enquiring of all the family lines “Did anyone live in this state/city/neighbourhood in the fifties/sixties?” as well as asking if anyone had mysteriously lost a child. It’s still a long shot - as you say, illegitimacy, deception, estrangement, faulty memory and more can play a role in obscuring the connection, but with DNA telling you whether you’re getting hotter or colder you can build up a picture of where they fit in.
I know exactly 2 of my second counsins, whom I haven’t seen in 30 years or more. I know none of my third cousins.
On my dad’s side, as far as anyone knows there are zero second and third cousins - I have one first cousin, who never married and has no children. It is just barely possible I have such cousins in Europe, but so far as we know the entire family was wiped out in WWII. It’s possible the Nazis missed one or two of them, but it’s been a long time and no sign of them.
The lack of police records also made me think the parents were involved somehow. Back in those days it was a lot easier to let things like this slip by official notice.
[quote=]
The Fronczak saga began in 1964 when a son was born to Dora and Chester Fronczak at a hospital in Chicago. A day later, a woman dressed as a nurse kidnapped the baby, setting off a nationwide manhunt and media frenzy.
More than a year later, a child was found abandoned on the streets of Newark, NJ. The boy was assigned the name Scott McKinley. The FBI thought it might be the missing Fronczak baby. Eventually the Fronczaks adopted the boy in the belief he was Paul. He was brought up in a loving family but always suspected he did not fit in.
[/quote]
Why would they need to adopt their own son?
I think that the writer intended “adopted” as “raised him as his own son”, rather than “went through the formal and legal procedures to adopt a child ex novo”. Although I would agree with you that putting “adopted” there sounded odd.
No, they actually did adopt him, because there wasn’t absolute certainty that he was the real Paul.
Warning: Autoplayer. This link has a copy of the original article announcing his parents intent to adopt him.