Did you know John Barclay? Colorado woman wants to solve family mystery

YORK, Maine — Baffled and mystified, Marci Radin stared at the unfamiliar surname that appeared on the list of genetic matches that Ancestry.com had sent her.

Barclay.

It was everywhere, this name Barclay. It dominated the first dozen names on the list. But Radin did not see her own maiden name anywhere among them.

“I found nobody’s name from my dad’s side,” Radin said during a recent interview.

Barclay? Radin thought. I don’t have any Barclays in my family.

That’s what she thought. Ancestry begged to differ.

According to the organization, Radin, who lives in Colorado, had all sorts of Barclays swinging from the branches of her family tree. One of them, a John Barclay, is even buried here in Maine, and is presenting Radin with a mystery she hopes someone will step forward and will help her solve. More on that in a moment.

These revelations surfaced last year. At that point, Radin had been registered for quite some time with Ancestry, the Utah-based genealogy organization. She knew a lot about her mother’s side of the family. She knew that some of her ancestors had arrived here alongside all the other pilgrims on the Mayflower.

But she knew little about members of her father’s side of the family. To Radin, they were a mystery – one that only deepened when Ancestry told her about those Barclays.

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DNA detective leads to startling news about father

Naturally, Radin decided to do some digging. She hired a professional genetic genealogist – a DNA detective, if you like – to look into those unknown roots in the ground underneath her family tree. In just 48 hours, the genealogist got back to Radin with revelations that turned her identity and sense of self upside-down.

Lyle, the man she thought was her father, was not her father.

Truth be told, Radin had considered that possibility for a “nanosecond” when she saw all those Barclays listed, with her maiden name nowhere in sight. She quickly dismissed that idea, though, and instead tried to imagine other scenarios. Perhaps a relative on her mother’s side gave birth out of wedlock, for example.

There was one thing Radin did not question, though: the DNA results Ancestry had provided.

“Science doesn’t lie,” she said.

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Lyle was there for Radin since day one. When she was born, he told her mother, his wife, Charlotte, that Radin was the “most gorgeous thing on earth,” according to a baby book that was around the house while Radin grew up. He raised Radin and, towards the end of his life, after her mother had died, she served as his caretaker.

“We were very close,” Radin said.

Lyle went to his grave believing Radin was his own flesh and blood.

But she was not.

Instead, Radin was the daughter of a man named Gordon Barclay, a widower who had one son, John, or “Johnny,” as his loved ones called him.

The DNA detective scoured records and produced the half of Radin’s family history that she never knew. In the late 1940s, Lyle and Charlotte lived in Maryland, where he was a professor at a university. In October of 1949, Lyle flew to Germany to help the university establish a branch for American soldiers serving there after World War II.

Radin had always figured that her mother traveled with Lyle to Germany. Not so, Radin said the geneticist told her. Instead, her mother stayed behind in America for a few months and only joined Lyle in Europe in February of 1950. Radin was born nine months later, in November.

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According to Radin, when her mother reunited with Lyle in Germany, “she was, like, five minutes pregnant with me, from another man.”

That man was Gordon Barclay, who lived in the same community in Maryland as Lyle and Charlotte, according to Radin.

A family she never knew

Radin said she was “shocked” by the news at first. Lyle and everyone else she grew up with – her brother and sister, her paternal grandparents, her cousins – were “suddenly erased from my life.”

“There was no biological connection to these people at all,” she said. “My maiden name does not belong to me at all.”

Also erased: her German heritage, about which she had been so proud.

“I felt I was bereft,” Radin said. “I had this German heritage just ripped out from underneath me. That was the worst thing ... That felt physically ripped from me. But I didn’t go into histrionics. I didn’t gnash my teeth. It just was what it was. I can’t change how I was raised.”

She now knows she is predominantly Scottish and Irish.

“But I don’t feel Scottish,” she said. “I don’t feel Irish.”

Radin has an old picture of her biological father – and, yes, she sees a resemblance. In fact, she placed the photo side by side with one of Lyle and thinks the two men look alike.

Radin said she believes Gordon Barclay never knew he had a daughter. She also said her mother might have believed – or willed herself to believe – that Lyle was truly Radin’s father. After all, said Radin, the timeline of the pregnancy could have pointed as much to Lyle as to Barclay, and there was no Ancestry.com around back then to set any records straight.

Thanks to the widow of a Barclay cousin, Radin learned that her biological father and her half-brother were beloved family members – smart, charming and likable fellows to be around. Radin said she would use those same adjectives to describe Lyle.

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Family-tree revelation leads to York

Through some online research, Radin was able to find the grave of John Barclay, her half-brother, in First Parish Cemetery in York.

That was a surprise. Radin and her husband, Howard, have been vacationing in Maine for years. To her knowledge, though, Radin did not have family ties in Maine. Only her husband did.

John Barclay died in his early seventies in 2008. Radin first visited his grave in York in the summer of 2021. She noticed, then and last week, that someone continues to plant fresh flowers at Barclay's grave. She had no idea who, which added yet one more mystery to her increasingly mysterious life.

“This is killing me,” Radin said as she approached Barclay’s grave last week and saw new, fresh flowers there. “I’m going to cry. Someone else keeps coming here, and I don’t know who.”

But that was then. This is now. On Wednesday, Sept. 7, Radin discovered that the individual planting flowers at her brother’s grave is the widower of the woman buried next to him. According to Todd Frederick, the cemetery’s superintendent, this individual started taking care of Barclay’s gravesite when he noticed nobody else was.

While Radin said she was hoping the mystery caretaker would turn out to be someone who knew her brother personally, she added that she was “thrilled” to finally know the identity of this thoughtful individual.

Yet a mystery surrounding John Barclay remains: Why is he buried in York, Maine?

“There is not one shred of information about him being here,” Radin said at his gravesite last week.

According to Radin, the Barclays had roots elsewhere in New England, as well as in New York. John, she said, went to boarding school in Switzerland, attended college there, and worked for the international Olympics committee there. He married a woman from France. They settled in Spain and adopted two girls.

“They’re all over there,” Radin said, meaning Europe.

So again: why is John buried in Maine? Radin said she and Frederick worked together last summer to try to find the answer and came up short. On Thursday, Frederick confirmed that no records about Barclay’s grave exist. He even added that the Portsmouth-based business that handled the burial does not have any records, either.

Barclay’s widow – Radin’s sister-in-law in Spain – very likely has the answer. According to Radin, however, she either has not received or is choosing not to answer Radin’s attempts to reach her.

Radin is hoping anyone who knew her half-brother, or knows how he came to be buried in a state to which he seemingly had no ties, will reach out to her. She can be reached at marciradin1118@gmail.com.

"Any insights would be appreciated," Radin said from her home in Colorado on Wednesday.

Radin said all of these revelations would have unfolded quite differently if they had been revealed to her when she was much younger – particularly if it happened when both Lyle and her mother were still alive. She would not have wanted to discuss the situation with Lyle, and in fact would not have wanted him to know.

Her mother is another story, though.

“I would have liked the opportunity to talk to my mom about it,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Ancestry.com family-tree revelations lead Colorado woman to York, Maine gravesite