Search for facts becomes emotional homecoming

Tom Holowach sent the email and then waited. He had chosen his words carefully, including that delicate, brace-for-impact phrase: “Are you sitting down?” He was hoping to connect to a woman he had never met and tell her that she was his sister. Implicit in that information was that their mother had a secret — him — born before her marriage and put up for adoption.

It took weeks for him to hear back. The tenderly crafted email went into her spam folder.

Holowach, 67, is well known on Oahu as a versatile actor and the charming manager of Paliku Theatre. He doesn’t tell people he was adopted because he says it isn’t relevant to most conversations. He was raised in upstate New York, an only child with no close cousins, only one grandparent and adoptive parents whom he describes as “wonderful.”

When he was a teenager, his parents gave him his adoption papers, but he never felt a need to go looking. “I didn’t care,” he said.

“But about a year ago I reached the age where my doctor was saying, ‘Your cholesterol is high, your heart is OK, but what did your parents die of?’” Holowach’s initial motivation for taking the Ancestry.com DNA test was simply to get information about family health history.

The website matches people with possible relatives. Holowach initially matched with possible second and third cousins.

“I followed every lead — every branch, every leaf, every twig.”

He sent emails to people to try to figure out how they were related. Some shared their family trees. He knew his birth name, William John Zagrobelna, but that didn’t seem to connect anywhere.

“I started to realize that when you’re adopted you’re looking for what isn’t there. You look for holes in people’s history,” he said.

He started compiling what he called a “cousin cloud,” creating files of people who matched him on Ancestry and digging in to the genealogies of those families. He tried to find primary sources for his information, like ship manifests, census documents, draft records, church marriage records and newspaper archives. The research soon became his obsession.

“My wife, Holly, would come by my office at 1 a.m. and say, ‘Go to sleep. They’ll still be dead in the morning.’”

He eventually found a first cousin on his mother’s side who helped unlock the mystery and who became an ambassador to the family. This cousin told Holowach that his mother had died two years ago, but he had the email address of her oldest daughter. “He told me to walk on eggshells. He said, ‘Everyone loved your mother. She lived for the Catholic church. She was a staunch parishioner.’” Finding out she had a child out of wedlock would be shocking.

When his sister Mary did finally read his email, she immediately went to Facebook to look at Holowach’s pictures. She saw the family features in his face and knew his story was true. Then she called a family meeting with her siblings. Though the news came as a shock, they felt an immediate acceptance.

On his father’s side, Holo­wach managed to find a phone number for a woman he thought could be his sister. He left a message. She called back that same day, and they talked for four hours. “She was so excited,” he said.

“In the beginning it was just looking for facts. I didn’t have a great need emotionally. Then it became a puzzle to solve, and I became addicted. And then, all of a sudden, it became emotional for me. These are real people. These are my brothers and sisters. I never had brothers and sisters before.”

Holowach found out that his mother, Helen, and his father, William, were in love. His father, who had served in the Navy in WWII, believed he would be called up to serve in the Korean War. Facing this uncertainty, they decided to put up the baby for adoption. Holowach’s mother went away to a Catholic home for unwed mothers in Rochester where he was born in 1950. Both parents later married other people and started families. Both Holowach’s adoptive parents and his birth parents have died, but he has nine siblings on his mother’s side and two on his father’s. A reunion is being planned for this summer in upstate New York where his siblings live.

By the time he found siblings, after all that extensive research, Holowach knew more about his family history than his brothers and sisters did.

His sister Maureen from his father’s side has been going through her house finding pictures to send him. She hadn’t known their grandfather had been a fire chief in the Bronx until Holowach told her. Hidden in the back of a closet in her home was an NYFD dress coat. “She told me, ‘When you come here, you can wear it, and we’ll take a pictures of you wearing it and you can decide what to do with it since you’re the grandson.’”

Yesterday was National Siblings Day. Holowach posted a celebratory message on Facebook, and he tagged a lot of people.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.