Back to Blog

Virginia: One DNA Match and a Woman Who Didn't Want to Be Found

america 250 podcast Apr 30, 2026

What must it feel like to grow up knowing your mother walked out the door when you were just three years old and never came back?

Nicole Palsa grew up staring at a framed photograph in her grandparents' house. It was of a woman holding an infant. The woman was Dessie Dulaney. The baby was Rushie, Nicole's great-grandmother. And the story of how those two became separated is heartbreaking.

Because here's the thing: Dessie didn't just disappear. She vanished on purpose. When her daughter was just three years old. And for nearly a century, she almost got away with it.

From a Middle School Project to a Twenty-Year Mystery

It started the way so many family history obsessions do — with a school assignment. Nicole was in middle school, filling out one of those standard four-generation family tree projects. She figured it would be easy. Her grandfather and uncle had already done a ton of research on her mom's side. She'd just fill in the blanks.

And then she got to her great-great-grandmother, Dessie Dulaney. No death date. Hmmm…

When Nicole started asking questions, she hit a wall she wasn't expecting. "We don't talk about that."

But Nicole is not the kind of person who accepts "we don't talk about that" as a final answer. After some “nudging” the story finally came out. Dessie had left Virginia in 1914, supposedly to visit her sister in Illinois. She sent word that she was coming back. And then she was simply... gone. Rushie, her daughter, was three years old. She remembered the coat her mother was wearing the day she walked out the door.

(That detail wrecked me a little bit, I'm not going to lie.)

The Search That Took Two Decades

Nicole spent the next twenty years trying to find Dessie. She went to the Library of Virginia. She scoured microfilms. She tried every variation of Dessie's name she could think of in the 1920 census. Nothing. A distant relative had been searching even longer, decades before Nicole was even born and he couldn't find her either.

The reason, it turned out, was sadly familiar. The census transcriber had misread Dessie's name as Jessie. One letter. One letter is all it took to make a woman disappear from the historical record for decades.

The Whole Story

Nicole shares the full story of how she finally found Dessie and what she discovered when she did. Spoiler: it's more complicated, more heartbreaking, and honestly more triumphant than I expected. Watch the whole episode here.

Prefer audio only? Click here to listen on your favorite podcast app.

🎧 Listen to the full episode to discover:

The middle school family tree project that started a twenty-year search
How a single DNA match that arrived the Friday before Mother's Day 2018 cracked the case wide open
Why Dessie left Virginia and why she could never go back
The unexpected connection to a future U.S. president that Nicole uncovered in a small Illinois town
How Nicole tracked down people who actually remembered Dessie, and what they told her
The heartbreaking difference in the circumstances Dessie's daughters were raised in and what one photograph on Nicole's wall captures about that

The Power of One Story

Nicole grew up in Richmond, Virginia, surrounded by history. Field trips to Mount Vernon. Grandparents who took her on what she calls "field trips" to Yorktown and the National Zoo. She had all four grandparents living nearby, plus two great-grandparents, and even a great-great-grandmother she has vivid memories of. A five-generation photograph of the women on her mom's side made the local newspaper when Nicole was a month old.

She grew up immersed in family. And yet, in the middle of all of that, there was this one woman (just one) who had gone silent.

What strikes me most about Nicole's story is what she said near the end of our conversation. She told me she went into this research with a lot of judgment. How could Dessie leave her daughter? But the more she learned about what Dessie survived — the stigma of being an unwed mother in a tight-knit Church of the Brethren community where she was related to half the county, the circumstances that kept her from going back to Virginia, the way she spent the rest of her life quietly protecting the daughter she raised in Illinois — the more Nicole’s perspective shifted.

Dessie wasn't a villain. She was a woman doing what she had to do to survive. And she left behind not just one daughter, but two. One grew up in near poverty with a widowed grandmother in the Blue Ridge Mountains. One grew up going to Sunday School in a fancy dress with her hair curled.

Both of them deserved to know each other existed. Neither of them ever did.

And the little girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains, I want to make sure she doesn't get lost in this story. Because Rushie isn't just the baby in the photograph. She's the woman Nicole sat with in a living room in her 90s, pulling out old photo albums and listening to her tell stories about the people in the pictures. She's the woman who mowed her own lawn well into old age and raised a family and lived, by every account, a good life in spite of everything.

Nicole told me she was "so kind and loving." That she was a great writer. But she also carried the wound of her mother’s abandonment her whole life. When Nicole asked to interview her about it, her grandfather pushed back. “It's just too painful for her.” And when Rushie finally agreed and sat down to talk, she was emotional. She had a few items that had belonged to her mother that she brought out to show Nicole. She never stopped feeling the loss of it.

Rushie died in 2006 at 95 years old. Nicole found Dessie in 2018. And that's the part that quietly breaks my heart. Nicole found answers twelve years too late to give them to the one person who needed them most. She found this story for Rushie. She just couldn't give it to her.

And then there's the detail that made me actually laugh out loud when Nicole told me.

Dessie ended up in Tampico, Illinois. Which happens to be the birthplace of President Ronald Reagan. And in the early days of her new life there, Dessie was driving a milk wagon for a local dairy, making deliveries around town. Wilma would sometimes ride along with her.

Ronald Reagan's mother used to ask Dessie to make sure young Ronnie was awake for school. And when he was running late (as apparently he sometimes was) he'd hitch a ride on the milk wagon.

I love this so much. Because here is a woman who spent decades being unfindable, who covered her tracks so carefully that she eluded researchers for nearly a century, who shows up in the historical record only in fragments and errors and name variations. And the whole time, she was just out there living. Delivering milk. Giving a future president a ride to school. Being a neighbor. Being a mother. Being a person.

That's what happens when we go looking for the people our families lost. We don't just find them. We find out that they never stopped mattering.

Your Story

Is there someone in your family tree who just... disappears? A name that appears in one or two census records and then vanishes without explanation? A relative no one talks about?

Nicole's story is a reminder that the silence in our family trees is often the most important place to start digging. And thanks to DNA testing, brick walls that held for decades are coming down every single day.

You might be closer to an answer than you think.

Story Seeds 🌱

Plant these conversation starters and watch your family stories grow.

For parents or grandparents: "Is there anyone in our family tree who you know very little about? Someone who seemed to just disappear from the story? What did you hear about them growing up, even if it was just rumors?"
For aunts, uncles, or older cousins: "Do you remember being told not to talk about a certain relative or a certain part of the family's history? What do you know now that you didn't know then?"
For any family member: "Who in our family do you think had the hardest life, the circumstances nobody would have chosen? What do you know about how they got through it?"
For yourself: "If you could find one person who has gone missing from your family tree, who would it be? What would you want to ask them if you could?"

Story Sparks 🔑

Unlock your family's hidden stories with these research techniques.

When a census search comes up empty, search for someone they lived with instead. Nicole couldn't find Dessie in the 1920 census because the transcription had her name wrong. The breakthrough came when she searched for Dessie's daughter Wilma, who appeared on a tree that her DNA match had built. If your ancestor isn't showing up, try searching for a spouse, sibling, parent, or child who might have been in the same household.
Get AncestryDNA tests for the oldest generation of your family. Nicole's grandfather wasn't interested in dealing with the computer side of DNA but he spit in the tube, gave Nicole access, and his results are what cracked the case. If you have parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles who haven't tested yet, their DNA could open doors yours can't. Don't wait.
When you get a promising DNA match, look at the tree they've built before you reach out. Nicole saw one name on Garth's tree that told her everything she needed to know: Dessie. She did her due diligence before she contacted him, which meant she could approach that conversation with confidence and evidence not just a hunch. Build the paper trail first, then connect.
Search for women under their maiden names AND married names and look for name variations. Dessie appeared in records as "Jessie" because of a transcription error. Women who remarried, changed their names, or tried to obscure their past (like Dessie did) may be hiding in plain sight under a name you're not searching for. Try wildcard searches on Ancestry (use an asterisk in place of certain letters, like *essie) to catch transcription errors and spelling variations.

If this episode moved you — and I have a feeling it will — I'd love it if you'd subscribe to Stories That Live In Us wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have a minute to leave a rating and review, that helps more family story seekers find us. It means more than you know.