John Portmann, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, only found out he was born as Thomas James Delehanty a few years ago.
Portmann, who was born in Arizona in 1963, also didn’t know his mother’s name was Therese and his father was called Thomas or the fact that both were Irish.
Recounting his story to CNN, Portmann said his “pregnant mother was in trouble” when she “somehow got herself from Minneapolis to Phoenix”.
It was there that she was taken in by the Sisters of Mercy nuns, a religious order known for assisting unwed pregnant women.
They found her a room in the house of a Catholic medical doctor where she “seems to have been happy and well-treated,” according to Portmann.
However, just three days after giving birth she gave up her baby, according to Sisters of Mercy’s rules and travelled back to Minneapolis, where she carried on with her life.
The nuns cared for the baby for several weeks before the child was adopted by a couple who were unable to have children of their own.
Named Thomas James Delehanty at birth, the baby was called John Edward Portmann by his adoptive parents
Portmann, who had been aware from an early age that he had been adopted, only found out the details of his ancestry when he got a DNA test result in August 2019.
“When I got the result, I had no idea what it meant,” Portmann told CNN. “They just give you a bunch of numbers and you need a trained professional to interpret them for you.
“The one line I did understand, and it was at the top of the missive, was that I am 100pc Irish. I didn’t even know I was 1pc Irish.”
Portmann got in touch with Jennifer Harris, an English professor at Canada’s University of Waterloo, who acts as a ‘DNA detective’, a private investigator who helps identify people’s unknown fathers and mothers, in her spare time.
Harris who has helped hundreds of people find out who their biological parents are, explained that she is a “literature scholar who digs in the archives, finding lost historical subjects and bringing them back to life”.
“My academic research overlaps with my DNA detective work in the space of the archives.”
After using databases on websites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe, to find people with genetic matches to Portmann, she then trawled through obituaries, census documents and old newspapers.
“It took her a lot of time, Portmann said. “She spent around eight or nine days working very hard and she found my mother and father.”
Harris said it was “fairly easy” for her to determine John’s maternal ancestry, as there was a strong match to a family in Minneapolis.
She was gradually able to narrow down the siblings to identify Therese, however, she was only able to find one paternal DNA match for John in the United States.
“I managed to build out a family tree using his name. It was a matter of digging into everything I could in their family history,” she said.
After examining the immigration records to see whether any had travelled from Ireland to the US, she found a manifest, listing the cargo, passengers and crew of a ship travelling to America, which listed a Thomas Fitzgerald on board.
The DNA Detective found that Thomas FitzGerald went to Minneapolis, which “was not the usual destination for Irish immigrants”.
A newspaper article then placed him again in Minneapolis at the time that John would have been conceived, leading her to the conclusion that “John’s father was Thomas Fitzgerald”.
It emerged that Thomas Fitzgerald who had worked in a luxury hotel in Dublin, emigrated at age 25 to make his fortune in the US.
He ended up working in a luxury hotel in Minneapolis where he met Portmann’s mother at the Radisson bar.
Given both his biological parents were from the country, Portmann contacted the Irish embassy in Washington DC to see if he could get Irish citizenship.
However he was told that “there was no path forward,” as his evidence was deemed insufficient.
He went to court where a judge granted a “declaration of paternity” based on Harris’s testimony “that really swayed the day”, according to Portmann.
He sent the “declaration of paternity” to Dublin and waited a year before Irish government requested another DNA test in an Irish embassy or consulate with someone from his father’s side of the family.
“I had difficulty securing co-operation from one of my biological half-sisters,” Portmann said, adding that he was now left in limbo.
But one day in August 2022, he heard from an official at Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs that they had decided to accept his citizenship application. “It was a really joyous day,” says Portmann.
His passport was sent to the Irish embassy in Washington DC, where, according to Portmann, two of the embassy’s staff, whom he had come to know, sent him a picture of them smiling, while holding the passport, telling him that he had made it across the finish line.
A couple of days later, his new passport came through the post. “I want to thank the Irish Government,” Portmann says. “I’m very, very grateful to Ireland.”
He has also met his biological mother’s side of the family. Therese, who died in 2019 (the same year her son first got a DNA test), married a widower with five daughters, who is still alive.
Her husband’s children all adored their stepmother, according to Portmann.
