I was brought into the Ozak family by marriage of course. I wasn’t looking for love when I met Phillip. I had just come out of relationship but I met him when I was still dating the guy from the first relationship. I thought he was very handsome and I couldn’t believe that his girlfriend at the time was sitting at the opposite end of the room. He thought I was too cute to be with a “burnout” like my ex-boyfriend.
Fast forward to about about a few months later, December of 1992, two weeks before Christmas. I didn’t have my driver’s license at the time. I walked up to a local shopping center to do some Christmas shopping. Not finding anything, I decided to walk over my friend Traci’s house. Traci was Phillip’s step-cousin. He was there getting a hair cut. He was newly single. I was newly single. I thought he was drop dead gorgeous and way out of my league. He flirted big time. I was super shy. I ran out before he could even ask for my phone number. He asked Traci for my number. He called me and I began to realize that maybe this handsome young man was really interested me. He asked me for a date on his day off December 17th, 1992, a Thursday night. We went out to dinner at a restaurant called Chesters and then went a house in Cuyahoga Heights and looked at beautiful Christmas lights . It was magical. I knew Phillip Ozak was special then.
About one year later he asked me to marry him. On August 6th, 1994, I went from Dana Ann Markosky to Dana Ann Ozak.
I had been honest with Phillip from day one about my adoption. He would tease me that he wanted to know what my biological mother looked like to find out what I looked like when I got older. I didn’t really consider looking too much until I became a mom myself. I wanted to know more about where I came from for the health history for my child. I wanted my child to know if they had other family out there too. When I got my first link to my identity, my original birth certificate, it was my husband who did the first real digging. The family I married into, my late mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my step-mom-in-law have always supported me in my quest to connect to my roots.