A stranger contacted me through a genealogy site claiming we shared the same father, and within five minutes of reading his message, I knew something was very wrong.
I had been building my family tree for three years. Not casually — obsessively. Scanning old documents, ordering records from county offices, driving four hours to a cemetery in rural Ohio to photograph a headstone. I knew every branch, every name, every gap. So when a message appeared in my inbox from a man named Gerald, with a birth certificate attached and a photograph of a man he claimed was our father, my stomach didn’t drop the way it might have for someone who hadn’t done the work.
My father’s name was Raymond. He died in 2019, leaving behind a small estate that my sister, Loretta, and I split — about $94,000 between us after the house sold. There was no drama about it. Loretta and I had always been close, and we handled everything quietly and quickly. Raymond had never been married before our mother, had no children before us. I knew this because I had verified it, document by document, year by year.
So when Gerald’s message arrived, I read it carefully. He said Raymond had been his father too, from a relationship before my parents married. He said he had only recently learned this. He said he had documents. He said he wasn’t looking to cause trouble — he just wanted to connect with family, maybe understand where he came from.
The birth certificate he attached listed a mother I didn’t recognize and a father listed simply as “Raymond H.” — my father’s first name and middle initial. The photograph showed a man standing in front of a clapboard house, dressed in clothes that looked like the late 1960s. The man resembled my father vaguely. Vaguely enough to be unsettling, but not enough to be convincing.
I sat with it for two days. I didn’t tell Loretta right away. I wanted to think.
Here is what I knew that Gerald apparently didn’t: my father, Raymond, was born and raised in western Pennsylvania. He didn’t leave the state until he was twenty-two, when he moved to Ohio for work. The timeline Gerald was presenting — if his birth certificate date was accurate — would have required Raymond to be in a completely different part of the country at a time when I had documented proof, through military discharge papers and a landlord’s rent ledger I had found in an archive, that he was nowhere near where Gerald’s mother supposedly lived.
But I didn’t say any of that yet. I wanted to ask just one question first.
I wrote back to Gerald. Polite, warm even. I told him I was touched that he had reached out, that family history meant everything to me. I said I had spent years researching our father’s life and would love to compare notes. Then I asked him: “Can you tell me what town Raymond grew up in? Even a general area would help me connect the dots.”
A simple question. If Gerald had done any real research — if he had any genuine connection to my father — he would know the answer. It’s not obscure information. Raymond grew up in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s in every document. It’s on his draft card. It’s in his obituary.
Gerald’s reply came back within the hour.
“He was from somewhere in West Virginia, I think. Or maybe Kentucky. My mother never said exactly.”
That was it. That was everything I needed.
I didn’t respond with anger. I didn’t accuse him of anything. I simply replied that I had done extensive research and didn’t believe we were related, that I wished him well in his search, and that I was closing the conversation. Then I forwarded the entire exchange to Loretta, my sister, and to the estate attorney who had handled Raymond’s affairs, just to have a record.
The attorney, a calm woman named Patricia who had seen everything, confirmed what I suspected. Gerald had sent nearly identical messages to four other families in the region with deceased fathers named Raymond. Same photograph. Same birth certificate with conveniently vague details. Same story about just wanting to connect.
None of them had verified anything the way I had.
Loretta called me that night and said, “I can’t believe you caught that just from asking him one question.”
But it wasn’t really one question. It was three years of work that made the one question possible.
I don’t know what Gerald was ultimately hoping to get from those families. Maybe he thought a grieving daughter might be moved enough to offer money, or include him in something, or simply not push back. Maybe he had done it before and it had worked. I will never know.
What I do know is that my father was Raymond Harold Shuster, born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1941. He worked thirty years at a machine shop. He coached my soccer team when I was nine. He is buried next to my mother in a cemetery I have visited every year since I was a little girl.
And nobody gets to claim him who doesn’t know where he came from.
