TCNJ

39 WINTER 2018 was June 14, Flag Day, her 56th birthday. When she arrived, she observed her Uncle John, a "very dapper looking " man, carrying a small American flag. At his home he presented to Jones his brother's writings, photographs, and an eight-inch wood carving of an owl. "He said to me at one point, 'I think if he had met you, it would have made his whole life make sense,'" Jones says. "There isn't anything that anyone could have said any better." Of course, Jones might never have heard those words had Lenehan not been willing to help her piece together the missing link in her family history that led to her father. "She was very welcoming and really helpful," Jones says. Lenehan first met Jones at a restau- rant in the West Village. Since then Lenehan's mother drove with Jones, her first cousin, to visit Je Murphy's gravesite in upstate New York. And last Thanksgiving Jones was a guest at the home of Lenehan's parents in Cranford, New Jersey. "It felt," Lenehan says, "as though we have all been family for years." understand if he was not comfortable talking with Jones, he agreed to do so. A phone call was arranged for June 12. Murphy dialed Jones from his home in Mineola, then listened as she unspooled what she knew of her mother's life. "I think I said to him that my mother had worked for the airlines and lived in Queens," Jones recalls. "He said, 'Stop right there.' He said this was making sense." They talked some more, and when he'd heard enough, Murphy was convinced that Jones' father was, in fact, his beloved older brother, Gerard, known to all as Je. "Let me tell you about your father," Murphy said. "And I'll never forget those words," Jones says. "I thought, 'This is it. This is the end of the road.' And he said, 'Je Murphy was a mountain of a man, and everybody loved him, and there was no one else like him.'" He told Jones her father had lived in Woodstock, New York. He was a wood carver and writer who left behind a stack of notebooks when he died in 2005. "A poor man's Thoreau," John Murphy says. Two days later, Jones boarded a train bound for Mineola, en route passing the hospital in which she was born. It Ask Prof. Nayak WHAT SHOULD STUDENTS TAKE AWAY ABOUT DNA TESTING? I tell them to make sure that this information is valuable to them. If you're going to hunt for relatives, be prepared for the surprise, the shock. They may be fun. They may be crazy. Or they may be alcoholics. NOTHIN' BUT A HOUND DOG? When Bradley Bennett adopted a 4-month-old dog in 2014, he was told Arya was a mix of Labrador and hound. "But what did hound mean?" says Bennett, a program assistant in TCNJ's Department of Residential Education and Housing. So he enlisted Wisdom Panel, an online service that relies on a dog-breed database of more than 12,000 samples to analyze potential pedigrees. Swabs taken from Arya's cheeks revealed she's one-quarter each of Basset hound, Labrador retriever, and American Staordshire terrier, with the rest evenly split between Chinese Shar-Pei and a mix of other breeds. Says Bennett, "That science can detect that was pretty interesting and kind of exciting." CHRISTOPHER HANN, who has not yet spit into a test kit, is a former senior editor at New Jersey Monthly and a frequent contributor to TCNJ Magazine. Arya and Bennett " I think if he had met you, it would have made his whole life make sense." Jones' birthfather Jeff Murphy

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