How a Cape Cod Community College Student Found Her Family

by Olivia Williams

When Cape Cod Community College student Shanaz Petty woke up on June 8th, 2022 to two missed calls from Iran, she assumed that they must be spam calls. That was until she saw a Direct Message on her Twitter containing a photo that she had never seen. In it, there is a small baby sitting in a yellow swing, looking curiously at the camera. This picture was sent to Petty by a stranger, with the message “Is this picture you?” Petty’s first reaction was to reply “Who is this?” in capital letters, before waking up her husband. She was going to call the numbers back, she told him, and asked him to record the conversations. But when she did so, the language barrier stopped them from communicating. It wasn’t until Petty enlisted the help of her cousin, who then called a friend who could speak Persian, that they began to make any progress.

“Is this Shanaz Rigi?” the person on the other end of the phone wanted to know. Yes, Petty replied; it was her maiden name.

“I’m your sister,” replied the person on the phone, and Petty heard celebration in the background.

Shanaz Petty was raised by a single mother in Norwich, Connecticut. She never knew her father or his side of the family, only that he was part of the Shah’s Imperial Army for Iran. Her father, Albolghasem Rigi, met her mother while he was training at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut. He had been sent back to Iran along with the rest of the military when the Shah was overthrown in 1978. Shanaz Petty was about three months old.

Petty remembers her father calling once, but she has not heard from him since. She assumed he had fled and was missing or dead. She was well aware of how strained the relations were between the United States and Iran. Still, Petty scoured the internet for hints of her lost family, including sites like ancestry.com and 23andMe. She looked up her maiden name and even enlisted the help of an uncle to call the city of Mashhad in Iran, where she thought her family may have been from. Nothing turned up.

“I always searched for them… I thought maybe I’d find like a cousin or something,” says Petty, who always kept her maiden name in her social media accounts, even after marriage. That was how one of her brothers, who managed to get a Twitter account even through government censorship, found her. They confirmed her authenticity through a necklace that Petty’s father had given her, a symbol of Allah accompanied by his name in Persian. She wore it on her wedding day in 2010, and has worn it every day since.

“Come to find out, I have eight sisters and three brothers,” said Petty, who had assumed it was just her and her sister. Her Persian siblings, it turned out, had always known about their American older sister and were searching for her just as she had been them.

Her father “always wanted to come back,” but was never able to because of the political tensions between the two countries. Unfortunately, she discovered, he had passed only two years ago. “It was disappointing,” says Petty, “ but then the overwhelmingness of finding out that I had that many siblings was crazy.”

Petty is grateful for the role that she can now play in her siblings’ lives. “I think some of the love that they have for me could be mourning the loss of their father,” she says, but hopes that “finding me was a way to get some peace.” Even after his death, her father was able to “bring the family together,” which, Petty believes, “was a wish he had.”

 Her American family has been affected too. Her husband, who was originally in shock, is overjoyed for her. Petty’s children, ages ten and four, have aunts and uncles now, and she has nieces and nephews.

“I speak to them almost every day,” Petty adds, with the help of apps such as WhatsApp and Google Translate. She’s learning Persian, a language she describes as “so beautifully descriptive.”

“I feel like it’s totally changed my life,” says Petty, who admits that she “wasn’t expecting to feel so overwhelmed.” Parts of it are hard for her. “I think in a way I’m grieving a bit, but it’s a complicated grief, because it’s a grief of something that I don’t really know.”  But ultimately, she concludes, “It was definitely peace for me, because this was…a missing part of me.”

The experience has taught Petty to trust her emotions and herself more.

“This is your journey,” she’s realized. She’d never really given up on her family, always hoping that she would find them in the “back of [her] mind.” And they found her.

A baby picture of Shanaz Petty 

Courtesy of Shanaz Petty

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