A search for a biological father, and the surprise of a lifetime

Matt Katz is a longtime Mets fan. Playing ball with his son, Reuben, is the stuff Father’s Day memories are made of. But as he grew up, Matt’s Father’s Day experience was as complicated as a triple play. “My biological father liked baseball? Does he like baseball?” Katz asked. “And because I had no contact with my biological father for many years, I wondered about little things like that.”

Matt was raised by his Jewish mother, Roberta, and Richard, his Jewish stepfather, who said, “As far as I’m concerned, he’s my son.”

“His father was out of the picture and he felt rejected,” said Roberta. “He tried to see him, but it didn’t work out.”

Richard said, “No matter how much of a father I am, he still needs to know where he came from.”

But as a boy, Matt rarely got answers to this question: “Why isn’t he interested in hanging out with me? Why isn’t he interested in meeting me? Where is he?”

When he was about the age his daughter Sadie is now, Matt realized something: “I looked different from the other people in my family and also a little different from the other people at Hebrew school. I had lighter features and redder hair.” “.

Matt’s wife, Deborah, is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent; so does Matt’s mother, and his supposed biological father as well.

Deborah recalled: “My elderly grandmother was like, No, he is not Jewish.”

So where did these righteous characteristics come from?

“I took a DNA test, as did my wife, just to see if we could, you know, find out a little more about our people,” Matt said. “I expected to discover that I was one hundred percent Jewish. Instead, I discovered that I was only half Ashkenazi, Eastern European Jewish, and half Irish.”

It seemed inconceivable, but it made sense. “I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: Wow, you know, damn, you look like a half-Jewish, half-Irish guy!” he laughed.

Just like a four-leaf clover, Matt’s family tree began to blossom. He discovered that he also had three half-siblings. Deborah said: “It’s crazy to be middle-aged and suddenly have sisters-in-law and cousins ​​who never existed before.”

But here’s the thing: none of them knew their father either. But one of them knew something the others didn’t: “She told me she was conceived through a sperm donor,” Matt said. Which probably meant he was too.

And yes, that led to an awkward conversation with his mother. “I was really nervous about it,” he said.

We should preface what follows by saying that Matt is a Peabody Award-winning journalist at WNYC Public Radio in New York City. He’s used to looking for answers and asking difficult questions… but not his own mother.

Roberta said: “I remember sitting on the couch and he prefaced the conversation by saying how much he loved me and how much he loved Richard. And then, he dropped the bomb!”

“I said, ‘Did you ever get fertility assistance when you were trying to have me?’” Matt recalled. “She says yes, they tried to get pregnant for many years and it was difficult.”

She said they actually saw a doctor, who discovered the problem wasn’t hers, but his. “I wasn’t hiding anything from anyone,” said Roberta. “The only thing I hid was the fact that I had artificial insemination. But I thought it was with my ex-husband.”

“I told her, ‘That’s not what happened – it was donor sperm that you were inseminated with,'” Matt said. “And she put her hand over her mouth and could have used the S word!”

What Roberta didn’t know was that, at that time, doctors treating male infertility sometimes mixed her husband’s genetic material with that of an anonymous donor, supposedly to help improve the couple’s chances.

Matt was born happy and healthy, but the secret of it all left him unaware of his real father, and his mother wondered who she had a son with: “I could have walked down the street and he could have been there and, you know, I wouldn’t know,” she said.

He was a shadow of 1970s Manhattan—a ghost who, it seemed, didn’t want to be found.

Some of Matt’s friends even questioned whether Matt should keep trying.

Cowan said, “The devil you know might be better than the devil you don’t know, right? You had no idea where this was going?”

“No, there’s a risk there,” Matt said. “You don’t know what you’re going to find. You don’t know if there’s more pain.”

But Matt and his half-brothers doubled down. A professional DNA detective was brought in, and eventually a photo emerged of a man with the same long face, the same eyes, the same hairline, like all of them. His name was Vincent McNally.

But Matt needed more proof. “He must have been in New York City the day I was conceived,” Matt said.

Sure enough, in an old New York phone book from 1976, a Vincent McNally was listed with an address on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. It was just brick and mortar, but for Matt it was gold. Outside the building, Matt said, “I feel it in my body, I feel it, I feel a sensation; it was here and it was in my presence in some way.”

It turns out that Vincent McNally was a professional stage actor; he donated sperm as a way to earn extra money. Matt found photos of him, theater reviews and posters, including a lurid description of one of his last performances, in “A Sea of ​​White Horses.” “In one of these plays, his estranged children, adult children, come back and find him,” Matt said.

But the ghost Matt has chased his entire life has escaped him one last time. Just before Matt called him to tell him the news, he found a death notice. Vincent McNally had passed away just four years earlier.

“Maybe we should never meet in person,” he said.

Just yesterday, Matt celebrated his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Two of his three half-siblings were also there – a long-overdue mix of a now-extended family.

His smile makes it clear that Matt has finally made peace with his past, in part, he believes, because talking about it has been healthy. He turned his journey into a podcast, “Inconceivable Truth,” which has found an audience of others whose search for ancestors is still ongoing.

For Matt, he’s very grateful for the stepfather he’s celebrating this Father’s Day – the only man in Matt’s life, it seems, truly worthy of the title of father.

Cowan said, “You don’t have to keep looking anymore.”

“I don’t know,” said Matt, “but I can keep telling the story, because it’s a cool story!”

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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: Steven Tyler.