One evening in the middle of June last summer, somewhere on the road between San Jose and Hollister, pigs began to fly.
At least that’s how it seemed to Susie Sanchez, who remembers the exact spot on her commute home that night where she learned a family secret that was, in her mind, much more unlikely and fantastical than pigs flying.
She was on the phone with her sister Lisa, who lives in Colorado. Lisa, through tears, was trying to tell Susie something, but was having trouble getting it out. Then, in a flash, Susie was hit by the realization that has since upended her life—but in a good way.
Susie, Lisa and their older brother Chris (who, like Susie, also lives in Hollister) are the children of Dave and Kay Branon who raised their family in Morgan Hill and now are living out their retirement years in the mountain town of Groveland, near Yosemite.
The Branons were a fine, happy, upstanding family. But Dave and Kay kept a secret from their three children for more than 50 years.
In 1965, in the year she turned 20, Kay got pregnant before she and Dave were married. In December of that year, sequestered in Texas, Kay gave birth to a baby girl that she gave up for adoption. Soon after, she and Dave were married and they started their own family. But every year on the child’s birthday, not knowing what ever became of her, the Branons shared a thought and prayer for their lost daughter. They said not a word to anyone about it, until the summer of 2019.
Susie, 46, was the only one of the Branon siblings to have done the popular DNA test administered by 23andMe. Mainly she was curious about her Irish lineage. But on that drive home, Lisa told her that a woman in Texas had been communicating with other members of the family and, at least according to 23andMe’s data, she might be a fourth Branon sibling, the older sister none of them knew they had.
“They needed me to log on (to 23andMe) to confirm all this,” Susie said. “I get home and I’m shaking trying to log on. And I click on this bar and it tells me I have a sister named Laura Stephens in Texas. In the moment of me doing that, our entire existence, of everything you know to be true for your entire life, was altered. My first thought was, ‘Who’s going to call Mom and Dad?’”
Laura Stephens, 54, is a schoolteacher in Midlothian, Texas, a few miles south of Dallas-Fort Worth. She purchased the 23andMe genetic testing kit, mainly because it was on sale. But she did nothing with it for a year. In June 2019, under the mistaken belief that the kit was set to expire, she quickly submitted her saliva sample to the company.
Laura had known her entire life that she was adopted. Like the Branons, she had also grown up in a stable loving family environment with a mother, father and older brother (who was also adopted). She wasn’t sure what she would learn from the test, given that she knew nothing about the circumstances of her birth or her genetic heritage.
Within a couple of days, 23andMe had informed her that her results were ready, and within 23andMe’s messaging system, she received an odd message. 23andMe had found her granddaughter, a young woman in California named Lexi. Laura was convinced that 23andMe had made an error. For one thing, she had left her sample in a mailbox for 24 hours on a particularly hot Texas day and she assumed it had become tainted. Even more importantly, she had no grandchildren.
Laura decided to contact Lexi, to tell her that it was all a big mistake. The two women began to correspond and Lexi asked about Laura’s family background. Laura had to tell her that she was adopted and knew nothing.
“Once I told her that,” Laura said, “it was like a wildfire. It was all out of my control.”
Still unsure what to make of this troubling new revelation, the Branon siblings in Hollister decided it was up to the eldest, Chris, to make the call to their parents. Chris called his mother in Groveland. As delicately as he could manage, he asked Kay, “Mom, what happened on Dec. 5, 1965?”
Instantly, Kay collapsed in tears and said the words that buried everyone’s doubts.
“Oh my God, Chris,” she said. “Tell me she’s alive and tell me she’s OK.”
That weekend, Father’s Day weekend, Chris and Susie drove the three hours to Groveland and, with Lisa on speakerphone, the siblings heard the story from their mother for the first time.
Kay’s mother had been scandalized by her daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sent away the young woman to Texas for the birth. Kay delivered a healthy baby girl, but at the last minute, she reconsidered her decision to give the baby up and decided to keep it. She and the infant were together for three days, until Kay’s mother issued an ultimatum. Kay’s father, she was told, had just recently suffered a heart attack. He knew nothing of the pregnancy. If Kay kept the baby, her mother told her, it might kill her father. So, reluctantly, she gave up the child.
But why the secrecy? Susie said her mother admitted that “selfishly, I’m going to want to come find you. But I let you go. What if you don’t want to be found? It would be wrong for me to impose on you. You have to reach out to us, and if you do, we’ll embrace you with open arms.”
Back in Texas, Laura Stephens was trying to enjoy her own family’s Father’s Day weekend (she and her husband have four children, ranging from 28 to 16). But she was distracted. She not only wanted to learn the circumstances of her birth, she wanted to get a sense of how the Branons were feeling about her. She had been in communication with Chris’s wife Christine about the Branons’ impromptu family conference. And a couple of hours had come and gone.
“I was a nervous wreck,” she said.
Finally, Christine calls.
“She told me on the phone, ‘I can’t tell you the story right now. It’s a gut-wrenching story. But everybody is feeling great about it. Kay and Dave are ready to talk to you.”
A couple of weeks later, Laura found herself on a plane to San Jose. It was the first trip she had ever taken to California. As the plane crossed the Central Valley and approached the South Bay, she looked out over San Jose and realized it was somewhere in that vast sprawl where she was conceived. She began to cry.
She already had phone conversations with her birth parents and her three newly discovered siblings. They all shared social media photos of themselves and their own children. They marveled at the physical similarities between them, as well as a couple of astounding coincidences. (Young Kay was sent to Texas with a relative who was named Laura; and, in the three days before she gave up the baby, she decided to name the girl “Tracey Lynn.” Years later, Laura, unaware of any of this, married a man named Tracey Lane).
Laura landed in San Jose and met in the flesh, for the first time, her birth brother Chris. The plan was for the two of them, along with Susie and Lisa, to meet at their parents’ house for the long July 4 weekend. Except Dave and Kay had no idea that Laura was coming.
Laura got here only after assurances from the Branons that she would be welcome. Even more important was the blessing of her dad back in Texas (her mother had passed away a few years before). He was worried about her being hurt but, to Laura’s amazement and gratitude, he supported her connecting with her birth family.
When she got to Dave and Kay’s place near Pine Mountain Lake, she told her husband later it was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen. And then, after more than 50 years, Kay got to hug the child she gave up. She grabbed Laura by the face and, through tears, apologized.
Laura told her then, and she tells anyone now who asks her about the story, that Kay had nothing to be sorry for.
“No mistakes were made,” she said.
In fact, considering the loving parents who adopted her and the fulfilling life they gave her, she was grateful things happened just as they did.
If anyone in the family was struggling with this new circumstance, Laura was ready to withdraw with no ill will.
“I just wanted to have a picture or two,” she said. “I wanted to know the circumstances (of my birth) and I wanted to tell them all how thankful I was. If I only got that, it would be enough.”
She got much more than that. To a person, the Branons have embraced her as family. Since last June, Laura has traveled twice to California. In December, Susie took her teenaged son Nolan to Texas to surprise Laura on her birthday. A month later, Laura’s birth parents visited her in Texas as well. This upcoming summer, she, her husband and children will all travel to Vermont for a once-every-five-years reunion with the extended Branon clan, an event that attracts several hundred family members.
The Branon revelation came during a summer that was otherwise tragic for Laura and her family. Her (adopted) brother died suddenly just a few weeks later, and her father, her father-in-law and her sister-in-law all faced life-threatening challenges that summer.
As much as she is excited about the possibilities of her new family in California, Laura’s thoughts often return to her 88-year-old dad.
“My mom’s gone, my brother’s gone. It’s just me and him now,” she said. “And I know he may not be around much longer and I think he’s thinking, ‘Laura’s going to be OK because I’m not all she has.’ No one’s taking anyone’s place. But I now have this bonus family and that’s a relief for him to know.”
