Sun City, SC man used DNA to find niece in Texas. They stayed in touch until the end
Thanks to a DNA test, Max Clements of Sun City discovered in 2019 that he had family he never knew about, and they kept in touch right up until his death earlier this month. Clements, who died of cancer, was 87.
Clements, “just out of curiosity,” decided to try a kit from ancestry.com. That decision to check out his DNA unexpectedly revealed a strong family match with someone else who used the same service — someone he didn’t know. His story was chronicled in a May 2019 story in the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.
The mysterious somebody turned out to be Marsha Mathews, of Haslet, Texas, who was Clements’ niece — the biological daughter of his brother, James Clements, who had died in 2015.
After their initial in-person meeting in the Lowcountry in 2019, Clements and Mathews stayed in regular contact, Kelly Clements, Max Clements’ daughter, said Saturday. In October, Mathews traveled to South Carolina for a quick visit after Max Clements came home from the hospital for the final time.
Initially, family members thought Clements had a bad reaction to a COVID-19 booster shot because he felt ill a week after receiving it, Kelly Clements said. It turns out he had lymphoma, she said, and he died Nov. 16.
Finding family
“He just said, ‘James Clements was my brother and he was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado’ — that’s where I was born — ‘and I would like to talk to you,’” Mathews told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette about the first phone call she received from Max Clements in February 2019.
As a young soldier, her father, James Clements, had been in an accident and spent six months in the hospital. Later, he tried to find Mathews’ mother without success because she had gotten married and had a new last name.
Sun City’s Max Clements, who was originally from Detroit, worked in the trucking industry, starting out as a clerk and moving his way up to sales and eventually overseeing sales all over the world, Kelly Clements said.
About four years ago, he began volunteering his time in the theater in Sun City, building many of the theater sets, Kelly Clements said.
In May 2019, after finding his niece, Clements told The Island Packet: “We’re very thankful to welcome her into the family.”
Mathews agreed. “It has been a good, good, good experience,” she said, “something that I never thought would happen.”
