The discovery has led him to a pair of half-sisters in Houston (where Farrell also played) and an aunt in Boston with three nieces where Farrell was born. There are also many relatives in Ireland Dotson has discovered where Farrell's family originated.
The parents Dotson knew divorced twice, once shortly after getting married. They remarried, then divorced again when Richard was 13-years-old. His mother never told him and the man he knew as his father, Jimmy Dotson, apparently never knew.
After his mother passed, Dotson and his daughter had found a Turk Farrell baseball card in a box of her belongings where she lived in Reno, Nevada. Before Jimmy Dotson died in the spring of 2019, Richard took a photo of Turk Farrell on a visit.
"I showed him this picture and all he did was point at me," Dotson said. "He said, 'That's you.' I go, 'That's not me Dad.' I just left it at that. If he didn't know, which is the reason I asked. He didn't know so I didn't say anything."
A month after the Anderson podcast with Albers and Ellis, Dotson's story went public via Jayson Stark of The Athletic. Before the 2020 season culminated, he was able to use his White Sox connections to buy cardboard cutouts of himself and Farrell to be placed in the seats at Guaranteed Rate Field on the south side of Chicago.
He has actually known of his father's identity for two years and has been sorting out the information since.
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