DNA kit brings long-lost child back to local family
By Samantha Lyles, Staff Writer, slyles@newsandpress.net
A $99 gift turned out to yield priceless rewards for one Darlington County family, as the Davis clan recently welcomed a long-lost child into the fold and put to bed a decades-old mystery … all thanks to an Internet DNA kit.
In January 2019, the News & Press reported on the 100th birthday of Lydia resident Johnny Davis, a father of 13 and grandfather (and great-great grandfather) to scores more. All of Johnny’s kids had kids of their own, except for his son Ronald, who died in a workplace accident in 1987.
Or so the family thought. Even as this birthday party drew cousins and aunts and nephews from all across the nation to Hartsville for a warm reunion, Tanesha Mitchell sat in her Raleigh, N.C., home, unaware that this party was where she belonged.
“The whole story for me started when my younger sister Stephanie Mitchell bought me the Ancestry.com kit for my birthday in 2017. … She knew I always had this longing to know who my father was,” says Tanesha.
She submitted her DNA sample to the service in 2017, but suffered serious health problems soon after and never logged on to see if any matches turned up.
“I had a stroke and aneurysm surgery, and had to stay in the hospital for a month, then the nursing home for a month. … It was a long struggle just trying to get my life back,” Tanesha says.
What she didn’t know was that right there, in her website inbox, was the answer she had longed for her whole life.
Johnny Davis’ granddaughter, Stephanie (Davis) Teel of Jacksonville, Fla., has long been her family’s designated historian – a duty she takes very seriously. As part of her investigations into the Davis lineage, Teel earned a genealogy researching certification from Boston University, did countless hours of research through family documents and public archives, and became a member of Ancestry.com.
“I joined to see if I could expand our family tree beyond what we had learned through oral histories and documents,” says Teel.
Stephanie’s daughter, Jenari Middleton, says her mom’s interest in genealogy began long before her birth. She notes that before apps like Ancestry, this hobby took up large swaths of time.
“We used to have to go to the library and look at (microfiche) reels and newspaper clippings for hours and hours. I was like, can we please go home?” Jenari recalls, laughing. “It’s so much easier now because of the technology.”
Apparently, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Jenari and her husband Bernard also have a keen interest in genealogy. They’ve established a “wall of ancestors” display in their home and can trace their forebears back to the 12th century – something Jenari hopes will inspire their children with respect and love for their heritage.
One of the Davis family’s longstanding mysteries centered around the late Ronald Davis, who many thought had passed away without fathering any children.
Teel knew, in a hazy, half-forgotten way, that this was possibly untrue. When she was living in Queens, N.Y., as a child, Uncle Ron looked out for her and her siblings, taught them the street smarts they needed to steer away from trouble in the big city.
Teel remembers Ronald Davis as a funny, kind, athletic man who served as a second father to her. Evidently the trust ran both ways, and Ronald trusted her enough to share a closely guarded secret.
When she was a teenager, Ronald confided in Teel that he had a daughter. She recalls that she asked to meet the child, but for reasons unknown that meeting never happened. Teel says years passed after this revelation with no meeting arranged and no real discussion about the child’s identity. Teel never even knew her baby cousin’s name.
Shortly after Tanesha joined the site in 2017, Teel’s Ancestry.com account notified her of a potential new match and her hazy memories snapped into focus. She suspected this new relative could be Ronald’s daughter and reached out to her via e-mail … and received no response for almost two years.
“Then one day my daughter Jenari called me and said, ‘Mommy! Tanesha Mitchell responded to our message!’ I said ‘What?’ and she told me that (Tanesha) had sent us her phone number,” says Teel.
Tanesha says that once she logged onto her account and read Teel’s message, she knew she had to summon her courage and reach out.
“(On the DNA report), right under my sister’s name was listed my cousin, named Stephanie Teel. I was like, whoa! Who is this lady? I saw her family name was Davis, and my mother had always told me my father’s name was Davis,” Tanesha says.
“I instantly started shaking and crying. I clicked on the message (Teel) sent and she said, ‘We’ve been looking for you! I think your dad’s name is Ronald Davis.’ And I don’t even remember what I typed back. I just remember crying and sending her my phone number.”
During that initial phone conversation, both women collapsed into tears while connecting the dots. Tanesha assured Teel that she held no ill will against her father or his family and only wanted to get to know them.
With that barrier cleared, her phone blew up with calls from aunts and uncles and cousins all eager to welcome her into the Davis family.
Tanesha arranged to visit as soon as possible, and on May 3 she drove down to her grandfather’s Lydia home and was instantly embraced by several new relatives waiting for her arrival. She says the sense of rightness surprised her, and seeing her own eyes and facial features on so many smiling strangers eased her anxiety.
“It was beautiful, the way they treated me. … It’s hard to put into words how it felt,” Tanesha says.
“Everybody welcomed me, everybody hugged me. They told me I was beautiful. My grandfather, even though he is up in age, he told me, ‘You have a home now. That room back there is your room and you don’t even have to call if you want to come visit.’”
She spent the weekend meeting everyone, hearing stories about her dad, and learning about her new family. Tanesha says she felt somewhat overwhelmed only twice: once when visiting her father’s grave, and again when an uncle gave her Ronald’s Butler High School basketball jersey.
“He told me that my father would want me to have it. I didn’t even know what to say, so I just cried,” Tanesha says. She plans to display the jersey alongside a tiny framed T-shirt that Ronald gave her when she was a baby.
Diagnosed with systematic lupus in 2000, Tanesha has endured frightening health scares. Compounding her woes, she struggled to understand exactly how she contracted the lupus because her mother’s family showed no trace of the heritable disease. But after her meeting with the Davis clan and learned about that half of her medical history, the picture came clear: Her dad’s family has struggled with lupus for generations.
“After I got home, I had a doctor’s appointment and I was able, for the first time, to fill out my father’s health information. Before I had always had to leave that blank. It might seem like a small thing, but that meant so much to me, having answers after not knowing for so long.” Tanesha fights back her tears and sighs. “I’m 38 years old, and I finally feel complete.”
That feeling of bittersweet completion is shared by members of her new family, especially those who remember Ronald Davis with great fondness.
“Uncle Ron was a very loving man,” says Teel, “and now we get to show his daughter all the love he didn’t get the chance to give her.”
