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A Lakeway Area man, estranged from his family by tragedy and its after effects, has connected with a cousin that he never knew he had thanks to a genealogy website and some good old fashioned sluething.

Mark Lent, Digital Media Teacher at Morristown-Hamblen High School East, met his second cousin Michael Carter from Minnesota for the first time recently.

Lent was originally born a Carter, but his father had died tragically before his son was born.

After his father’s death, a family disagreement over life insurance led to an estrangement, Lent said.

“My mother had a falling out with my father’s family because when he died of a heart attack he had a small life insurance policy,” he said. “Well after he died, his mother took all the money and mom was here with four kids and me on the way. It was a big deal for her and she never forgave them for it.”

After she remarried, Mark’s last name to Lent after the only father he’d ever known.

“Our last name was Carter,” Lent said. “When my father, who is really my stepfather but he’s the only father I’ve known, married my mother his last name was Lent and they wanted all of our last names to be Lent so they legally had all of our last names changed to Lent.”

As Lent grew up, he asked about his father and his family and his mother told him that all his family were dead.

“I grew up thinking the family on my dad’s side were dead, so I didn’t think to ever dig deep or try to find them,” Lent said.

Instead his family found him.

It was Michael Carter, of Minnesota, who got curious and went looking for the missing branches of his family tree.

“I was building my family tree,” Carter said. “I knew quite a bit about my family beforehand, but I didn’t know a lot. So when Ancestry.com came up I started to fiddle around with that.

“It wasn’t until I got to Mark’s father that I realized something was missing. There were no records of any kind about Mark so I didn’t know if his father had any kids.”

However, after finding an obituary for Lent’s mother, Carter’s investigation began to progress.

“In her obituary there was no mention of kids, but it did mention a sister or Mark’s aunt,” he said. “I looked her up and found she had a daughter (Mark’s cousin). I found her on Facebook and reached out to her.

“As I was talking with her I asked if Mark’s father and mother had and kids and she told me they did and I was shocked and immediately wanted to know more. She sent me pictures of them and I started to learn they were all over the place.”

Lent, at the time, was in China teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and his sister, Rosemary, was in Egypt, but that didn’t stop Carter from reaching out.

Contact, at first, was difficult. Lent was suspicious, but the two still managed to connect.

“I was a little skeptical because when you get an email from someone claiming to be your cousin you think it’s a scam,” Mark said. “But I realized he knew too much family history for this to be a scam.

“We then tried to talk over email but I could only receive his emails, he wasn’t receiving mine. I kept wondering why he would send me basically the same email over and over. With Chinese emails the USA blocks a lot of them from entering US servers and that’s what we believed was the problem.

“He then found me on Facebook and we were able to talk to each other and get to know one another.”

Although they had only known each other briefly, the connection was there.

Carter proved it when he stepped up to help his cousin Rosemary – Lent’s sister.

During the pandemic, Rosemary was living in Washington, but she was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. She made the decision to move to Texas to live out her life surrounded by friends, but she needed help moving.

With Lent in China, a country that at the time had very strict COVID travel restrictions, it was nearly impossible for him to help his sister.

Carter stepped up and drove to Washington from Minnesota to help his cousin.

“You know I was really appreciative of Michael,” Mark said. “My other brothers and sisters didn’t try to help and then Michael, who is basically a stranger to us, traveled all that way to help a cousin who he had never met. It was really touching.”

Their bond doesn’t end there. Michael is planning his wedding.

His best man?

Lent, his long lost cousin.

“It just shows how strong a family bond is,” Michael said. “When I met Mark it was so crazy to see how similar we were. We got along instantly. Now he’s going to be my best man at my wedding.”