East Bay man's search for biological father yields letter from long ago
DANVILLE -- On Father's Day, while most dads celebrate with a new tie or a day at the park, one Danville man has received the gift of a lifetime -- learning the identity of the man who brought him into the world more than 60 years ago.
Ten days after he was born, Loren McDonald was given up for adoption. Now, at age 66, Loren spent most Father's Days honoring his adopted dad, Donald. In the back of his mind, though, he always wondered where -- or who -- he came from.
"Literally, I spent my entire life from the age of five, thinking about my parents, particularly, for some reason, my birth father," McDonald said. "I don't know why but I always -- I think I had this innate sense that I was more like my father than my mother."
Eventually he learned, through government records, the maiden name of his birth mother but his father's identity was a complete mystery, only that he was from Sweden. Loren took a DNA test and got no results. but then he sent his DNA profile to MyHeritage.com, a genealogy service popular in Europe.
"I wake up on a Saturday morning and see that I have a 10 percent DNA match with a gentleman named Hakan in Sweden, right outside Stockholm," he recalled.
Hakan turned out to be his cousin but, when Loren reached out to him, he got a surprise.
"We did a Zoom call shortly after we found each other and the first thing he said to me is, 'I've been waiting for this call for 40 years.'"
McDonald's birth father, a man named Goran Moberg, confided to Hakan, his nephew, about the child he had given up for adoption.
There was something else. In 1980, Moberg sent Hakan an 8-page letter describing his life adventures and travels around the world including stops in Puerto Rico, New York, Ohio, Arizona and Mexico. Moberg said that he didn't intend to have any children because they didn't fit with his lifestyle. It was almost as if he was trying to explain his life to someone else.
"I mean, he was a writer, that's what he did," McDonald said. "So, there may have been this innate sense that maybe this letter could find me at some point, which it did, of course."
McDonald is fascinated by how many things he has in common with his biological father, including a love of writing. He says children given up for adoption often spend their lives searching for missing pieces in the puzzle of their lives.
"When you're adopted and you're in a search for your birth parents, you actually are searching for yourself," McDonald said. "'Who am I?' More so than you're actually searching for them."
At MyHeritage.com, they're used to connecting long-lost relatives but nothing like this.
"The matching isn't rare but what's rare is someone who says 'I have a letter written by your father and I've been waiting for you for 40 years. I've got something for you.' This is something. I haven't come across a story like that before," said the company's public relations director, Sarah Vanunu.
Goran Moberg died in 2002 never having met the son who has been thinking about him since he was five years old.
"The life lesson for me is don't put things off," McDonald said. "Whatever it is, don't procrastinate because if you do, it might be too late and, in my case, it was pretty significant. I was not able to meet the parents who were responsible for putting me on this planet."
The cousin had one more surprise for McDonald: a finished manuscript of a novel written by his father. It's full of mystery and international intrigue and feels suspiciously like the experiences of the man in the letter. McDonald is still deciding if he wants to try having it published.
Now that the secret has been revealed, it only raises more questions and the son of a globe-trotting father will embark on an adventure of his own. McDonald is planning a visit to Sweden to reunite with family that, just a few months ago, he didn't even know he had.
