Next Century's Child

Last month marked the 6^th anniversary of Jehanah’s passing.      Of course her friends and family remember her, and this blog continues to commemorate her life in pictures and poems. While we all need to eventually move on and recognize that this life is for the living, it can be grounding to pause for a moment once in a while to remember loved ones.

More and more these days I am cautious about feeding personal info to social media and commercial data aggregators, and I'm increasingly concerned about data security and privacy. Can you think of any unintended consequences of sharing your personal information with the Borg? And why is it that young people in the 21^st Century don't care about personal privacy? Don't tell me you have nothing to hide. Well, just this once I want to share a personal story...

Earlier this year something amazing and unexpected emerged from the ether of the internet. The Jehanah blog apparently provided a trail of breadcrumbs to long-lost children of Jehanah. These children then confirmed what they suspected through a DNA match to my first cousin, provided by a common genealogy website. The match was further confirmed by facial recognition of each of the children.

The closed birth records system in Texas was supposed to prevent this from happening - and yet, just like systems everywhere - it has been disrupted! We have been identified and correlated through data aggregation and digital media. This is an unintended consequence that has made Jehanah's dearest wish come true.

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Jehanah was forced to put two daughters up for adoption in her early life, long before she conformed to the normal societal role of Midwestern bleach blonde housewife. She spent a lifetime trying to recover from and make sense of this trauma, and we know that she made a lot of progress. Jehanah had always hoped to find her lost babies one day, but I’m sure she never could have imagined how the story would play out.

When her daughter and grand-daughter found us, we became acquainted through email and text messages over the course of several weeks. I wanted to meet them in person, and took a trip to visit them in their home state of Texas in October. Though I don’t fully know their impressions of our short visit (I was on my best behavior), I found them to be beautiful people, and I felt as though we had known each other for a long time.

The second long-lost daughter lives on the East Coast. She found Mom and had the opportunity to meet her back in 1988. She and I have corresponded and been good friends over the years, though I have only seen her three times in the last 28 years.

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