Heir Unapparent

But according to Fernandez, 44, the family learned of the possible link to the Kenedys only a few years ago, well within the permissible legal window for an heir to file a claim.

And, he said, the exhumation and genetic testing now must go forward to settle things once and for all.

"If he's not my grandfather, then I guess we'll have some finality to this, but right now, there's a high probability he is," Fernandez says. "No matter what the outcome, I'll still continue to do what I'm doing. I'm just trying to sort out some accurate history for my mom. We're not out to destroy those charities and foundations. This is a family matter."

Early last week, however, the 13th Court of Appeals in Corpus Christi issued a stay of the February 28 exhumation after lawyers for the two nonprofits challenged Herman's jurisdiction in the case.

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In the annals of South Texas ranch history, two pioneering giants tower above all others: Captain Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy. In the late 1800s, the one-time steamship partners created adjacent ranch empires that together still cover well over a million acres.

King is the best-known South Texas rancher. His in-laws and descendants are still involved in the fabled, internationally known ranch that has its own brand name for goods from authentic Western wear to customized pickup trucks.

Kenedy, the son of Pennsylvania Quakers, came to Texas during the Mexican War of the 1840s and quickly found his niche providing boats to the U.S. Army for patrols on the Rio Grande. Afterward, he and King formed a shipping partnership and later began to acquire grasslands on the Mustang Plains to the north. During the Civil War, the partners reaped huge profits shipping embargoed Confederate cotton.

By 1882, after some buying and selling of land, Kenedy acquired a 400,000-acre spread south of King's even larger ranch and named it La Parra, for the wild grapevines that grew there.

Each huge, self-contained cattle operation was supported by large numbers of Mexican-American vaqueros and their families, who lived on the ranch and were dependent on the Anglo patrons. To this day, ranch workers are either known as "Kineños" or "Kenedaños," depending on which ranch they are attached to by generations of tradition.

Kenedy chose a high spot of ground south of Baffin Bay for his ranch headquarters. Decades later, one of his sons built a huge Spanish fortress-style "great house" there, complete with a mounted Gatling gun to ward off attackers.

Kenedy and his wife, Petra Vela de Vidal, had six children, but the bloodline proved unreliable. By the beginning of the next century, only two grandchildren remained on the ranch: John G. Kenedy Jr. and his sister Sarita Kenedy. Both were thought to be incapable of having children.

It was in this rural feudal context that beginning in 1925 John G. Kenedy Jr. and maid Maria Rowland Saenz allegedly conceived at least one child, a baby known as Anita.

A year or two later, Rowland, a beautiful fair-skinned woman, married Disidro Peña. She would later marry Tom Goates. The alleged affair with Kenedy was kept a secret almost to the very end of her life.

According to her grandson Ray Fernandez, the first clue of a clandestine lineage came with a chance remark uttered by an ailing Rowland, 93, just four years ago.

"It was Mother's Day 2000, and I was in town visiting my mom, and we went over to visit my grandmother at a nursing home center. She died two months later," Fernandez recalls. "She made this comment in Spanish. She said, 'You look like your grandfather John Kenedy Jr.' She also said the name 'Johnny.' I thought she was talking about the president or his son.

"It didn't make sense. We kind of laughed about it. Then we talked about her, if she was feeling OK, how she was sleeping," he says.

But the baffling remark lingered and later returned when Fernandez began trying to retrace his family roots, only to encounter questions and enigmas.

A baptism certificate for his mother, issued by a church in Waco, named Rowland as the mother, but where Fernandez had expected to find the name Disidro Peña as father, the space was blank.

"I said, 'Why doesn't it say Peña? Why did she tell me Kenedy? Why did she say that name?' That's when I said there might be something more I need to look into," he says.

Other things didn't add up, such as Ann Fernandez's birth date.

The baptism certificate revealed she was born in 1925, a year earlier than she had always claimed.

Eventually Ray Fernandez, who was working as a medical examiner in South Florida at the time, learned of the prominent Kenedy family with deep roots just south of Corpus Christi. When he received a mailed copy of John G. Kenedy's 1948 obituary, complete with a photo, he first began to sense the presence of a missing ancestor.

The picture showed a hatted, jowly man with a small nose. It bore a startling resemblance to Fernandez, according to his wife.