When he was 5 years old, Dayne Sherman overheard an aunt from Tickfaw telling someone that he was adopted.
“That brought up all kinds of questions,” the Southeastern Louisiana University professor told members of the Edward Livingston Historical Association at their June 7 meeting.
For one thing, although he had many Sherman-related cousins in the Hammond and Tickfaw areas, “I don’t look like any of them,” he said.
The cousins average about 5-feet, 5-inches in height, while Sherman is 6-2.
“I was the sore thumb in the whole family,” he said.
The aunt’s unexpected revelation eventually disclosed that he was born on Jan. 7, 1970, at Seventh Ward General Hospital in Hammond and given up for adoption several days later.
His adoptive parents did not tell him much about his birth mother, he said, and all he knew was that she was “an older woman from the North.”
“That didn’t narrow it down much,” he said.
When he was adopted, Sherman said his adoptive parents had been married for 11 years but were told they could not have children.
He believes that his adoptive great-grandmother, who was a housekeeper for a local doctor, arranged for the physician to broker the adoption.
In one of life’s little twists, his adoptive parents conceived a child of their own four years after Sherman joined them.
As he grew older, the identities of his birth mother and father and why his mother came South to Hammond to give birth and then disappeared were questions that lingered in the back of his mind, he told the group.
Although he dropped out of high school and got a General Equivalency Diploma, Sherman eventually got two master’s degrees and joined the SLU faculty, where he is a professor of English and head of the Sims Memorial Library’s reference department.
In 2008, Sherman began looking for answers in earnest, submitting DNA samples to several genealogy sites to look for clues as to his family history.
The results were not encouraging, however, until a colleague, Beth Stahr, took an online course in genetic genealogy and took him on as a “class project.”
By this time, Ancestry.com had become a big force in genealogical research, and Stahr used it and GEDmatch to show that he had many relatives, most of them in western states.
Mixing humor throughout his talk, Sherman joked that GEDmatch is not a dating site for people with equivalency diplomas, but entering his raw DNA data into it helped him in his quest.
Sherman outlined the steps he and Stahr took in tracing his family tree, including learning that his birth mother, an Oklahoma native and the widow of a prominent Wyoming man, had an affair with a local rancher and became pregnant in 1969.
“Obviously, there was a lot of shame involved,” Sherman said, and his mother, to get away from the Wyoming town, went first to stay with a sister in Arkansas, then to another sister’s home in Hammond where she gave birth.
Learning that he has roots out West, Sherman wonders if that somehow explains his love of all things Western, including restoring and reselling old saddles.
“I buy and sell anything Western,” he said, noting that the television series “Yellowstone” has benefitted him in his hobby.
“‘Yellowstone’ is the second ‘Urban Cowboy,’” in terms of sparking interest in Western clothing and gear, he said.
The speaker for the history group’s July 5 meeting will be Lt. Col. Alden Thomasson, a retired Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office deputy. The 10 a.m. meeting will be at the Livingston Parish Library on Iowa Street in Livingston.
Thomasson spoke to the group last year on the 1890 ambush slaying of Deputy George C. White. His July 5 topic will be four “extra-judicial executions” in Livingston Parish.
