Episode 2 of Secrets from My Twilight Zone
Echoes in the Coal Dust
If you’re coming to this story for the first time, you might want to read the initial episode here: Secrets from My Twilight Zone.
Unearthing the past wasn't just about lineage; it was a pilgrimage towards self-discovery, a journey to reconcile the relative sanctuary of my dysfunctional family with the perplexing enigma of who I truly was. The faded family photos piled on my desk, a silent chorus of unknown faces, offered few clues to my own story. They were frustrating reminders of a past I couldn't access, a dead end in my search for truth after verifying that Dad was not my biological father. My amorphous feelings of estrangement in childhood finally made more sense.
The initial thrill was beginning to fade—the tantalizing possibility of my connection to Rod Serling. The DNA test results pointed to a different name, one I still can't disclose just yet —a secret shrouded in a darkness that would soon unfurl, revealing its daunting truth.
My quest became a journey backward through time. Starting with the faint genetic echo in upstate New York, near Serling’s hometown of Binghamton. I traced my paternal line backward, not with cracked and yellowed photos, but with the cutting-edge technology of DNA testing websites and forensic genetic genealogy. These newer digital platforms hummed with a cold logic, unearthing ghosts of the past to solve mysteries long forgotten or intentionally hidden. The burgeoning forensic DNA science held solid and reliable answers. As a psychotherapist, I was intrigued. The sterile efficiency of these consumer DNA platforms mirrored the unsettling reality they unearthed, much like stories from The Twilight Zone. Except now, this was my personal Twilight Zone.
My initial hope resided with a second to third cousin, a man named Tesla, (No relation to the famous scientist) a genetic match revealed in several of these DNA websites. Sadly, illness made him inaccessible before we could connect. Yet, amid the desolate landscape of family secrets, there was a lifeline —his wife, a narrow beacon of hope piercing this sea of unknowns. Through her confirmation, another branch of the family surfaced. Cvetkovich. That surname was the key, but to what door it unlocked remained a mystery.
The names pulsed with a strange duality. Cvetkovich and Tesla had connections to the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory nestled near Serling's hometown in New York. But then, the path took an unexpected turn, leading not to the rhythmic clatter of machinery and the smell of shoe polish, but across the state line south, down through the suffocating darkness of the Pennsylvania coal mines.
Seeking escape from the backbreaking and dangerous labor in the central Pennsylvania coal mines, even before the Great Depression, branches of my genetic relatives followed many families in the region. They traded the choking dust for the relative comfort and security of the nearby Endicott-Johnson shoe factory. This factory wasn't just a workplace; it fostered a strong sense of community, offering a sense of belonging many craved.
Digging through the region’s history, I discovered several tragic accidents and family deaths in Pennsylvania mines, a stark contrast to the relative safety and security of the factory in New York. This choice to literally move away from death and poverty mirrored the social pressures and themes of entrapment plaguing the region. It felt like a desperate escape from a real-life Twilight Zone, a place where the lines between hope and despair blurred with every passing day.
A second consumer DNA website yielded a crucial piece of the puzzle – my highest match was a woman with that surname, Cvetkovich. This Eastern European genetic echo was closer than any match before. In fact, we shared a grandmother. Anna Cvetkovich. Finding this link felt like a victory, but an unsettling one. I tried contacting her but it seemed she wasn’t interested or never received my messages. The closer I got to the truth, the more I felt like an insignificant fly caught in a massive web, ensnared by the past's sticky filaments. Unfortunately, Anna Cvetkovich died in 1929 due to complications giving birth to her final child after having several miscarriages, according to the death certificates I found.
I also learned that my genetics were over 80% Slovak. I discovered that Mr. Serling’s paternal grandmother was also named Anna. Anna Shacolsky, from Poland. There were plenty of Slovaks living at Poland’s ever-shifting southern border in the Carpathian Mountains, so there was a sliver of a connection, complicated as it was, with the famous screenwriter, and I do have a tiny smidgen of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry according to one of the websites. Clearly, I am mostly Slovak.
What?! 80%! Slovak? That’s unusually high. I was Irish and German. Well, not anymore.
Slovakian heritage likely shaped how the impoverished coal-mining community handled widowhood. After my paternal grandfather's wife died, leaving him with four children, the Slovakian Church arranged a second marriage. His new wife, also named Anna (confusingly for genealogists), was a widow from a local coal mining family. She'd returned to her hometown with her daughter following her steelworker husband's death from leukemia.
This, it seemed, was a practical solution in a bleak time, but the records hinted at a painfully difficult life for the artificially blended family. Their house, more of a shack in the coal mining town, had a wood floor, a hand pump for water, and an outhouse. They had electricity, but little else— maybe the luxury of a radio where they could hear ads for cars —status symbols they couldn’t afford— on WJAC in Johnstown, or on a good night, KDKA in Pittsburgh.
My search for a deeper belonging and identity had taken on a bizarre twist. Instead of a famed Sci-Fi writer's connection, the trail led to a story of hardship and escape, a family fractured by one tragic circumstance after another and bound by secrets. Who was this family named Cvetkovich? And what connection did this hold to my biological father, the man who forever remained a stranger? The answers, I knew with chilling certainty, would slowly but methodically revise the narrative of my life, but by how much and at what cost?
The journey took me not to the bright lights of television studios and psychologically tantalizing scripts from the Twilight Zone, but to the grief-stricken heart of Pennsylvania coal country. This was where the truth resided, hard scrabble lives buried beneath the layers of dust and darkness of time, waiting to be unearthed by some curious but foolish writer. Through digital records available on the internet, I was able to trace two sons of my genetic grandmother who eventually escaped to southwestern Pennsylvania, to the economically booming smoke-belching city of Pittsburgh, both joining the National Guard just after WWII. With mathematical certainty, one of those sons had to be my biological father, and I now had a paternal surname. Sedlák.1
Cvetkovich and Sedlák were not the actual names I found, but close to them. I am still protecting family privacy while exploring their secrets.
Ha! Thanks. It’s not “almost” for me though. I’m literally living in it.
I can almost hear the theme from The Twilight Zone playing in the background while I read….