Following a Fox News interview, an Arkansas judge has ended his search for his biological parents.
Joseph Wood, who now serves as county judge of Washington County, Arkansas, recently commemorated National Adoption Month in November by publicly embarking on his own lengthy search for his biological parents.
Following his interview with Fox News Digital that discussed his journey from a Chicago orphanage to his state’s 2022 race for lieutenant governor, he received a call from CeCe Moore, a prominent genetic genealogist who specializes in cold cases.
In 2010, Illinois made it possible for adult adoptees to apply for their original birth certificates, and Wood was able to obtain his earliest record. This foundling certificate indicated he had been abandoned as an infant.
Wood had been left swaddled in a shoebox in front of an apartment building on March 20, 1965.
Moore reached out to Wood on Thanksgiving after hearing of his story, which had garnered media attention from media outlets. She explained how she has been doing extensive work regarding foundlings for a decade.
Moore also told Fox News Digital that these types of cases are “very special because there is no way to resolve those cases through records.”
“Even if you open up adoption records, it’s not going to help those people,” she said. “So we call this DNA-only cases. The only way to identify the birth parents in cases like that is to have their DNA tested.”
Wood agreed to accept her help, and that’s when she and her team of volunteer detectives worked tirelessly to build his family tree with the information they uncovered from his DNA.
“It’s always a race against time because you don’t know who might be passing away at any moment,” Moore said. “It’s always devastating when we find the family and somebody just died. We’re always rushing, but I will say, in this case, we were definitely rushing to get this information to him.”
Moore reached out to Wood on December 23 and told him her team had found a match.
“We were trying to get our arms around what she just said,” said Wood.
Wood’s mother died in 1978 at age 36, and his father died in 2007 at 68, along with one of his brothers who died in 2013 at 48. He has since reached out to his remaining brother and sister but hasn’t received a response.
“I want to connect with my brother and sister first,” he said. “My dad was one of 10 or 11 brothers and sisters. My mother was one of six brothers and sisters, a number of whom are still alive. And so I don’t want to start reaching out to uncles and aunts without trying to connect with my siblings first.”
“This is a huge family tree, oh my gosh,” he said. “To go from zero, with not having a single person connected to you, to looking at your family tree going all the way back to like 1790, that’s just a huge, huge family.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever have all the answers,” he added. “Clearly I won’t have some questions answered because my mother and father are not here to answer that. So everything I get will be through the eyes of my siblings and my uncles and aunts.”
Wood said the one fact he treasures the most from Moore’s investigation is that his birth mother lived only a street away from where he was left on the doorstep.
“I’m just blown away that I got this far. I thought I would not know anything for the rest of my life,” he said.
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