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Several years ago, before launching Birth of Adventure, I started a blog called “Searching for Smiths,” chronicling my attempts to search for my biological family. I was originally named Alison Smith, and my father, Wayne Smith, died in a tragic drowning accident when I was six months old. I wrote in my first blog post that “searching for Smiths in North America is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” and it really seemed that daunting. I wrote the blog hoping that one of my relatives would see it online and it would lead them to me. 

Although I had no memory of my birth father, I had known that I was originally a Smith my whole life. My mom remarried when I was eighteen months old, I was adopted by my new Dad, and I became Alison Wilcox.  My older sister Abbie and I knew that we had a different birth dad than the rest of our siblings, but we also knew we were our new Dad’s kids too. I had a crop of Wilcox cousins on one side, and Bing cousins on the other, with eight sets of aunts and uncles. I didn’t think much about the fact that the Smiths were not in my life – I had a huge family and didn’t really think anything was missing. There were pictures of Wayne in our family photo album, and his picture hung on our living room wall and I knew what he looked like, even if I didn’t remember him.  

My connection to my birth father became much more important to me after I became a mom. David and I had our wedding when Ben was four months old, and at our rehearsal dinner, our family went around the room sharing well wishes for our wedding. When it was my turn, I spoke from my heart, without really knowing what I was going to say, and I got choked up.  I was present to the love I had for everyone in the room, and my birth father’s absence felt particularly strong.  As I spoke, I shared that having a four month old made me realize how long six months really was. I realized that all of the love I felt for Ben, how amazed I was by him, by his face, by his little toes, his tiny, kissable feet, I realized that my dad probably felt that love and amazement for me too.  Although I was surrounded by loving family members, I felt the loss of my dad keenly right then, and saddened that I didn’t really know anything about him. I imagined what it would be like if something happened to me and Ben never got to know me, and I wished I could know more about Wayne.

It was a complicated feeling. If I wished that things were different, that my birth father hadn’t died, what would that mean for my family?  If my father hadn’t died, then my mom wouldn’t have remarried. I wouldn’t have the dad who raised me, who I loved, and who loved me.  If my birth father hadn’t died, then my three younger siblings – Ayron, Craig and Neil wouldn’t even exist.  Wishing for another reality would diminish the other.

Three years after our wedding, my mom passed away. On top of missing her, I lost the main connection that I had to Wayne.  I hadn’t asked her enough questions about him. I knew he was a nice man. He had red hair and freckles like me.  He was a photographer. I had some of his photos. Whole contact sheets he had taken of his daughters that when David saw them, he related to Wayne as a father and said, “he was fascinated by your faces”. Pictures he had taken of our mom. A professional published portfolio he had taken of images in Toronto in the 70’s. Beyond that, I didn’t really know anything at all about him.

That’s when I started googling Wayne Smith, and the only other name I knew, my uncle, Wayne’s younger brother.  I remembered meeting my uncle and his two daughters, my cousins, but the last time I’d seen them was when I was about ten years old. Over the next few years I tried searching online for any clue I had, and didn’t find any leads at all.

Eleven years after my mom passed away, in 2017, I started worrying that my uncle and any other relatives were getting older and I could be running out of time. I didn’t know if my grandparents were still alive. I started the Searching for Smiths blog, and after a few fruitless posts, David gave me an Ancestry DNA kit for my birthday, hoping to give me the gift of family. A few of our friends had found biological parents or other relatives that way, and we thought it was worth a try. I opened up the box, took the DNA sample, mailed it in, and about six weeks later the results popped up in my online account. I took a deep breath when I checked the matches, and saw my uncle’s name.

After staring at the computer for a few minutes, I texted David frantically, “I found my uncle!” I clicked on his profile, and wrote him a message saying I was his niece Alison. Within a few days, I got a message back. It was a weird sensation, like using a matching website, but instead of for dating, it was for reuniting long lost relatives. We messaged back and forth, and set up a phone call on the weekend.  When the call came, I was outside walking our new dog Louie around the block on a blustery, snowy winter day. I had a mixed up nervous-excited feeling, wanting to talk to my uncle, but also afraid, carrying the weight of expectations.  

We talked for a while, about where we lived, about our families, he asked about Abbie, and about my mom. He sounded sad when I let him know Mom had passed away. After a long time talking and catching up on over 30 years of life, he asked me if I knew what had happened to my father.

I knew the story. It was a tragedy, for many reasons. From what I knew, Wayne had just gotten a new job, which was something he and my mom were excited about, because they were broke and this job would pay the bills. He was driving near my Grandma and Grandpa Bing’s house, and he stopped in to visit his mother and father in law. My grandpa was an avid boater and fisher, and he took my dad out with him on his boat. My dad couldn’t swim and he didn’t put on a life jacket.  At some point, my dad fell out of the boat and drowned. This was what I knew about the story.  I also knew that this accident caused a giant rift between our families, with my mom in the middle – losing her husband, and father of her two children, when he was 30 and she was 25.  Seeing the effect this had on her dad.  Seeing how it affected her in-laws – her husband’s and children’s family. 

When my uncle asked me if I knew the story, it was clear that the trauma of his brother’s death was still palpable. He said he would like to meet me and I said I would too. We decided to work out the details over email. I got another message through Ancestry from a distant cousin who ended up connecting me to more relatives – two aunts and another uncle. I had found multiple Smiths!

David, Ben and I planned a road trip to meet my uncle in Toronto, and then on our way home to Buffalo, we would meet one of my aunts in Hamilton. I had been searching for Smiths for over a decade and here were two, living within a few hours of me.

We met my uncle at a restaurant for dinner.  He looked a lot like how I remembered him, and he resembled Wayne too. He brought some photos of him and my dad when they were younger.  He told me that both of my grandparents had passed away.  I was sad that I would never get a chance to meet them. I let him know that I was going to see his sister on our way home, and he said he wasn’t in touch with his other siblings anymore. Towards the end of our conversation, he talked about the day that my dad died. He was 29 when his brother passed away, and he had driven up to identify his body. He was visibly shaken as he described what happened.  My mom had told me that my dad’s family blamed Grandpa, and I knew that was a big part of why they weren’t in my life.  My uncle shared details that I hadn’t heard, that he said he had been told by witnesses, including how two boats collided which threw my dad out of the boat, and about what happened in the early moments after. Just like mom had said, my uncle still felt angry about the accident, and at least partly, if not fully, blamed Grandpa for it.

His account troubled me.  We visited with my aunt next, and she was lovely – she was warm and welcoming to us, and also showed us some pictures.  I asked her what my dad was like.  Both she and my uncle said similar things – they loved him, he sounded like a good brother.  He liked the water but didn’t swim.  When they went to the beach, he sat under a tree with a book. I felt warm recognition – although I love to swim, I’m most happy on vacation sitting in the shade with a good book too.  

When I got home, the story my uncle told kept niggling at me, and I couldn’t let it lie. I searched online with the details I had about Wayne’s accident, and ordered a copy of the police report from 1975. The next day, there was an email in my inbox from the police department with the report attached. Reading the cold hard facts, I started to cry. Without any memory of my dad, his whole story throughout my life felt hazy, not quite real.  Reading the police report, it became real. He was a real man. He had lived, he was lost, and his death affected so many people. But besides the boat collision, the police report did not include the details my uncle had said he’d heard from witnesses. It was deemed an accident; it didn’t have any details that would have suggested anyone could have done anything differently to prevent it, besides the obvious – if my dad had worn a life jacket that day.

It all felt so sad to me.  Not just my father’s accident and death which were tragic on their own, but the unraveling of the family too. The Smiths blaming my grandpa. My grandpa feeling guilt for what happened. My mom hurt and angry at how the Smiths treated her and Grandpa. Abbie and I growing up without our Smith grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

When I first started searching for the Smiths, I knew that not everyone in my family was happy about it, either from trying to protect me, or from loyalty to my mom, my grandpa, or the Wilcox side of the family. I was conflicted too – I was searching for Smiths, but it didn’t seem that they were searching for me. I was driven to find them for many reasons – primarily to find out who my dad was, but also to close the hole that losing an entire branch of my family tree had caused. In meeting the Smiths, and learning more about Wayne’s story, I learned that no matter what happened, everyone involved was a person who was hurt. The people impacted lost a son, a husband, a brother, a son-in-law, and a dad. There was no point blaming anyone for it – it was a terrible situation.

This whole experience was a profound one for me. I had set out to learn more about my dad, and I instead found peace knowing I had finally found his family. I think he would have wanted us to know each other. I meet three of my aunts and uncles and some of my cousins. They know Wayne’s daughters are doing well, and that Wayne has four grandchildren. They now know where we are, and we know where they are, if we ever want to connect further.

I didn’t find out a lot about my dad from the Smiths or from others I asked, but everyone told me the same thing, which I think is the most important thing. He was kind, he was loving, and he was loved.

In my mom’s early 50’s, she started writing a book about her life which was left unfinished when she passed away. I read through the chapters she had completed, including her description of her life with Wayne. She wrote:

“Wayne’s artistic endeavors helped me more than I at first realized.  I began to become reacquainted with all the beauty around me. In a wild flower by a fencerow, the setting and rising sun, or a simple smile on a stranger’s face.  I began to open up more and more and realize how wonderful my life was.”

This was a beautiful description of how he had affected her, and about his way of looking at the world. In her words she described how Wayne had a dream to get his photography published, and they would take walks together and visit the sites that he was capturing on film. They were excited when his first portfolio was published and sold in Toronto area bookstores. He hosted a cable show on photography and my parents were hopeful about what lay ahead. Wayne was a man living his dream. He was a man who saw beauty in the world.

A few weeks ago, my nephew Kodie, Abbie’s son, texted me to say he was getting into film photography, inspired by his grandfather Wayne, and wondering if he might discover he had inherited some natural talent. We talked on the phone, and Kodie told me his apartment in British Columbia is decorated with the published photos from Wayne’s portfolio. It reminded me that in my college years, my rooms were decorated with Wayne’s photos, and I took his 35mm Canon on my backpacking trip around Europe, also hoping to tap into an innate photographer’s gene. I smiled thinking of Wayne’s legacy living on, through his two daughters, through his grandchildren, through his love of photography, and accomplishing his dream to publish his photos that the next generations could enjoy.

In a stroke of serendipity, a few days ago my dad (Brad Wilcox) reached out to me asking if I wanted Wayne’s 35mm camera. I think of this camera belonging to both my fathers as Dad often used Wayne’s camera throughout our childhood to take a plethora of family photos. I had brought this camera on my travels overseas but given it back to Dad because I thought he would use it more than me. I reached out to Kodie, offering it to him as the next photographer in line and he said he would be honored to have it. I look forward to seeing the world through Kodie’s eyes.

This story is connected to my inspiration to write this blog. As I wrote in my first post – The Birth of the Birth of Adventure: “A main theme of this blog, a lesson learned from losing my parents and brothers and others too young, is that life is short. Too short to leave passions and dreams dormant. Too short to be looking back with regrets.”

Write your book. Publish your photos. Love boldly.

The search for Smiths helped me to find some peace and connection about my birth father, and in solving this mystery through Ancestry DNA, I found something else; Scottish ancestry that leads back to generations of ancestors who lived on the small island of Coll. David and I will be spending a week on this island in April 2022, and I’ll make sure to stop and sit and tune into the world around me. And do my best to write about it, and to tap into my innate photographer to capture its beauty. I look forward to sharing the stories with you soon.