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Finding DadFree Access

DNA test leads to discovery of new family


Search leads to discovery of new family

A father represents strength and selflessness to many people around the world, especially during this time of year as people reflect on the ways their fathers have molded them.

Many fail to cherish the things that they mutually share with their dads, like a sense of humor or a crooked grin. But what if finding your father meant exhibiting the strength and selflessness that you hoped to find in him? Boyd Mayor Rodney Holmes knows what this experience is like firsthand.

After years of being raised by his adopted father and believing he knew who his biological father was, Holmes was shocked when a DNA test led him to question the truth.

“Nothing was ever hidden from me, I was always told by my mom and everybody else that my father was Dave Warren,” Holmes said.

Holmes’ mother, Diane was married to Warren at the time of his birth but remarried Ronald Holmes, his adopted father in the early 1970s. Both Warren and Ronald served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. Before the war, Diane and Ronald were married but were torn apart by the stresses that military service brings. After being married to Warren for a couple of years, Diane remarried her first love and never looked back. Rodney was adopted by Ronald and raised as his own flesh and blood from the time he was a small child.

A LASTING BOND — Boyd Mayor Rodney Holmes stands proudly with the family he never imagined. (From left to right) Rodney’s brother, Wade, father, Dale, sister, Tonna and brother, Mark. SUBMITTED

A LASTING BOND — Boyd Mayor Rodney Holmes stands proudly with the family he never imagined. (From left to right) Rodney’s brother, Wade, father, Dale, sister, Tonna and brother, Mark. SUBMITTED

“Ronald was always my father,” Rodney said. “I always told him that if someone knocked on my door and said ‘Rodney I am your father.’ I would turn around and say ‘Hey dad, someone is here to see you.’”

However, Rodney began searching for paternal family members after experiencing heart issues that caused him to wonder about his medical history on his biological father’s side.

“In 2017, I decided to look into Ancestry.com DNA and nothing came back more than a second cousin,” he said.

He wanted answers to his medical questions and was not looking to connect to a distant relative so he let the search go. Until September 2020, when he received an email from a woman named Tonna Edwards, informing him that she was his first cousin.

“I emailed her back a couple of weeks later and we exchanged numbers,” Rodney said. “As we were talking, she asked me if I had any idea who my father was and I told her that my father was Dave Warren. The more we got to talking I put the story together.”

Edwards was born in Vietnam after her mother met an American soldier and fell in love. Unfortunately, she believed her father was tragically killed in the line of duty after a helicopter accident left everyone on board dead. Her mother found out that she was pregnant a few months after the accident.

“My mother got word that his helicopter went down and that it was blown up and everyone on board was killed,” Edwards said. “All these years, I have never known his name because she just really did not want to talk about it. It was just too painful.”

As Rodney pieced together the timeline of Edward’s mother’s story, he realized that their relation was much closer than he originally thought.

“I said ‘Tonna I do not think you are my first cousin,” Rodney said. “I think there is more of a chance that you are my half sister.’”

Edwards came to the same realization quickly after joining Ancestry.com. She too believed they were siblings. Rodney informed his newly-found half sister that her father was Dave Warren, a soldier who was not killed in the war but returned home to the U.S.

“The more we talked the more I knew and once we met each other it was a confirmation that Rodney was my brother,” Edwards said. “It was a total shock to me when I found out that my father was alive all these years.”

After finding family in each other, Rodney and Edwards began looking for Warren. Their research helped them locate his son that lived in South Georgia, a quick drive from where Edwards was living with her husband in Atlanta. One afternoon, the couple decided to meet the son at his home. Warren’s son informed them that Warren died in the early 2000s.

“Tonna met with the oldest brother and he had all Dave Warren’s military records and everything completely matched up,” Rodney said. “He was stationed at the airbase that Tonna’s mom worked at. His job was to drive the civilian employees to their jobs. Everything matched up perfectly, and all of sudden Tonna believed she had found her father.”

Neither Rodney nor Edwards expected the DNA test to show that they did not share the same DNA as any of Warren’s children. The news left them confused and with little idea about where to find their real father. Edwards went from years of believing that her father was killed in the service, to then thinking Warren died just a few short hours away from where she lived, to discovering that her father’s identity was still a mystery. Edwards fled Vietnam the day before the Fall of Saigon as a seven-year-old immigrant but she had never experienced an emotional rollercoaster as draining as the search for her dad.

“When I met Rodney for the first time, I looked at him like I was looking into my father’s face because I thought he was the closest that I would ever get to being near my dad,” Edwards said.

After a disappointing discovery, Rodney felt a responsibility to find the truth, not for himself, but for his sister. Edward’s devastation pushed Rodney to visit his mother and ask her who his father was once again. Diane responded with the name Dale Lusk but Rodney was skeptical because of his mother’s dementia. Nevertheless, he persevered in his search and found a Robert Dale Lusk from Pennsylvania.

“Meanwhile, Ancestry.com has been saying the whole time that Tonna and I have relatives from Western Pennsylvania,” Rodney said, “I emailed all the cousins asking them if they have heard of Dale Lusk. One of them gives me access to their family tree, and as I am looking at it, I find a picture of Dale Lusk and pull it up next to a picture of Tonna when she was seven years old. The resemblance was uncanny.”

Rodney knew the next step was to reach out to Lusk and confirm that he was his father. However, Edwards was much more guarded and did not believe she could go through the process again.

“I told Rodney to prepare himself for the fact that he may reject us,” Edwards said.”I just wanted him to be on the cautious side. Rodney stepped up and determined that we were going to get to the bottom of this, he was encouraging even when I felt like throwing in the towel.”

One night, Rodney made the call to the phone number associated with Lusk that he found online. After confirming that he was speaking with Lusk, Rodney informed him that his reason for calling was unusual and unexpected. Rodney asked him if he had ever known his mother and Lusk said he briefly dated her after a helicopter accident left his knee severely damaged and he was shipped back to the U.S. concluding his service in Vietnam. Rodney knew he was speaking to his father.

He told Lusk that he was his son and that he had a daughter that was born in Vietnam. For over 50 years, Lusk had no idea that two of his children existed.

“I told him that we did not want anything,” Rodney said. “My sister would really like to talk to him to ask him some questions but that was it. I told him that he had my number and if he ever felt like talking that he could give me a call. I waited about a week and I did not hear from him but I sent him the picture I found of him next to a picture of Tonna as a child. That afternoon, he called me and said ‘Yeah, you are my kids.’”

Rodney and Edwards were scared to hope for a father that wanted a relationship with them, but Lusk immediately stepped up and took pride in the children he never expected.

“It opened up a whole world for me, there was no remorse or guilt because life is what it is,” Lusk said. “I wanted to accept what was mine and I knew that they were mine.”

Rodney decided that he and his wife would make a trip to Georgia where he could visit Edwards and her husband. In a conversation with Lusk, Rodney asked him if the two couples could travel down to see him in Florida while they were visiting. Lusk told Rodney that he would be glad to meet them in Savannah, several hundred miles from where he lived.

“It was about six hours to Savannah in this traffic, but I would not have cared if I had to drive all day,” Lusk said.

Finally meeting the father who Rodney and Edwards never believed they would have a relationship with was a surreal experience.

“I had to go down to the front desk to get something and I opened the elevator door and my Pops was standing there. He hugged me and he said, ‘You got my five-head and you got my teeth.’ It was amazing to spend three or four days with him,” Rodney said.

Similarly, Edwards was thankful to learn the things she mutually shared with her dad, but she was in a continuous state of shock to have reached the moment where she could see him face to face.

“The day that I met him, we had just gotten to the hotel and I heard a knock on the door,” Edwards said, “I was expecting it to be Rodney but when I opened the door it was Dale and he said ‘I am here kiddo.’ I was in tears.”

Since initially meeting their father last year, Rodney and Edwards have remained close and the bond they share with Lusk has only strengthened. They continue to talk on the phone frequently and visit each other whenever an opportunity presents itself.

“The guy will just crack you up and I have learned a lot about why I am the way I am,” Rodney said. “While I did not think it would really matter to me who my father biologically was, now that I met him I am glad that I did.”

A relationship with a father is reflective and it challenges a child to look beyond themselves and to see the value of family.

Together, Rodney, Edwards and Lusk can now see that a father’s impact goes far beyond his identity.

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