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Steve Jobs: adopted child who never met his biological father
Steve Jobs, who died yesterday, was the product of an unmarried interracial couple in the Midwestern United States in the mid-1950s.
Earlier this year, Steve Jobs took sick leave for the third time having survived pancreatic cancer in 2004 Photo: Reuters4:00PM BST 06 Oct 2011
2 CommentsHis biological parents met as 23-year-old students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
They were unmarried when his biological mother, Joanne Schieble, fell pregnant in 1954.
His biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian Muslim immigrant who later married Ms Schieble. He has said they did not want to put their baby up for adoption, but his girlfriend’s parents would not initially allow her to marry an Arab.
Under pressure from her parents and fearing scandal, Ms Schieble travelled to San Francisco to have the baby. Steven Paul, as his adoptive parents named him, was born on February 24, 1955.
“Without telling me, Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me," Mr Jandali, who never met his son, said in August. He described Ms Schieble’s father as a “tyrant”.
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His adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, were Armenian and unable to have children. Steve was later joined in the family by his adopted sister Patti Jobs, born in 1958. The couple divorced in 1962.
Though Steve did not know until much later, Abdulfattah Jandali later married Joanne Schieble and had another child, Mona, in 1957, whom they kept. Steve Jobs discovered he had a biological sister, the successful novelist Mona Simpson, at the age of 27.
In 1997 he described Ms Simpson as “one of my best friends in the world”.
Nevertheless, he was dismissive of his biological parents. ''They were my parents,'' he said, referring to Paul and Clara Jobs.
Paul Jobs was a machinist for a firm that made lasers in what became Silicon Valley, in Northern California. Steve described him as a “genius with his hands” and said the only he wanted to pass on to his own children was “to try to be as good a father to them as my father was to me”.
But he was also estranged from a child he fathered early in life. In 1978, his high school girlfriend, Chris Ann Brennan, had a daughter. Steve denied he was her father for two years, at one point swearing to a court that he was infertile. He eventually acknowledged Lisa Brennan-Jobs was his daughter, however, and she lived with him as a teenager.
Steve met his wife Laurene Powell while speaking at Stanford University. They married in 1991 in a Buddhist ceremony in Yosemite National Park and had three children.
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