I have told this at a conference and I have told it in a kitchen and both times someone has been uncomfortable. Fine. The uncomfortable version is the one that is useful.
In 2016 I met the side of the family that agreed to meet me. It was a house with a courtyard and a pool, exactly the tilework everyone describes, and within twenty minutes it had become an interrogation about what I had done with my life in Spain, delivered as though my leaving were a charge I had to answer. I stayed two hours because leaving would have proved them right about something. I flew home and did not write to anyone for a year.
People in that position are offered two sentences and both are wrong. They just need time. And you will know it is not meant to be. What I actually needed to hear was: a bad first meeting is data about them, not a verdict on the search.
How the second one happened
In 2019 a woman I had never spoken to messaged me in this directory. She was the daughter of my mother’s cousin. She had watched the 2016 visit from the doorway of the next room as a girl of nineteen, remembered my shoes by the door and had spent three years looking for the Spanish girl.
She is the reason I have photographs. She is the reason I know my mother’s name was written with a different spelling than the one I grieved. She is not a replacement for what went wrong in 2016 and I have stopped presenting them as one story with a happy ending.
So: if your first meeting was a disaster, keep the file open. There is more than one relative on that side of the family, and you have not met them.