"I'm really glad that I'm finally
finding all of this out, finding out who I'm related to. Because I
didn't want to get old and die and not know," Barnes, a laborer who is
now in his 50s, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.





Barnes
said he never really bonded with the mother and father who raised him.
They didn't look like him, and they just didn't seem like family.





"They
would say, 'Oh, you look like your grandpa so-and-so or your uncle
so-and-so.' But they never had any pictures to show me to compare it
with. ... I just had a hunch that something was fishy," Barnes said.





"I never asked them if they kidnapped me. I asked them why I was so different from them," Barnes said of his parents.





Asked about a possible abduction, the man who raised Barnes called the idea "a bunch of foolishness."





"I'm
his dad," Richard Barnes said. He shook his head and replied, "no, no,"
when asked by a reporter if he had kidnapped John Barnes.





John Barnes said the woman who raised him hinted before her death about a decade ago that she was not his biological mother.





"She
requested that I come over there by myself, and she wanted to talk to
me. I think that's what she was trying to tell me," he said.





Years
earlier, Barnes had started his own investigation and found some
potential answers on the Internet –– a few pictures that led him to
conclude he could be the missing toddler, Stephen Damman.





Barnes said pictures of the missing boy's mother when she was a young adult resembled what he looked like at the same age.





"I
thought I looked like her, so I had something to sink my teeth into,"
said Barnes, who has done farm and factory work but is currently
unemployed.





The mother, Marilyn Damman, left the boy and his
7-month-old sister waiting outside a bakery while she went inside to
shop on Oct. 31, 1955, according to police and news accounts at the
time.





Police in New York's Nassau County have said a Michigan
man contacted their office in the past few months, saying he believes
he is the missing toddler. Barnes said the FBI took a sample of his DNA
via a cheek swab in March, and he's now "waiting for the FBI to tell me
who I'm related to."





"I don't know if I'm related to the Dammans
or the Barneses. I'm just waiting for the DNA results," Barnes said
during an interview at his trailer home, located on a dirt road in
Kalkaska, almost 200 miles northwest of Detroit, where he lives with
his wife and a 12-year-old Labrador.





Back in 1955, Marilyn
Damman came out of the bakery after 10 minutes but could not find her
children. The stroller, with only her daughter inside, was found around
the corner from the market a short time later. A flier at the time said
the boy walked with his toes turned out and had a small scar under his
chin.





"Yeah, I do have a scar," Barnes told the AP as he pointed
to a faint line, less than an inch, that runs below his chin and
slightly up the right side of his face. "This story's really strange. I
can't believe it myself sometimes."





Barnes said he was born in
1955 –– the same year a 2-year-old Stephen Damman disappeared –– but
only saw his birth certificate once and no longer has a copy. He said
the FBI is looking into the discrepancy as part of its investigation.





Barnes
said he began his research around 1992, doing it the "old-fashioned
way" and not "getting anywhere." Barnes said he went to Florida, his
supposed birthplace, but did not make much progress until he was doing
online research within the past year.





Richard Barnes is retired
and lives in a rural subdivision just eight miles from his son,
although the two have not talked in about a year. Richard Barnes said
his son was born in a Navy hospital in Pensacola, Fla., on Aug. 18,
1955.





"We brought him home two days later, and he's never been
out of our sight," the elder Barnes said, referring to John's childhood.





During
his research on the kidnapping, the younger Barnes said he drove to
Newton, Iowa, where Jerry Damman, the father of the missing boy, lives.
But they did not meet.





"I didn't want to, you know, say, 'Well, I'm your long-lost son,"' Barnes said. "I just wanted to get a look at the guy."





Physically,
Barnes resembles somewhat the Iowa farmer he believes could be his
biological father, though they are far from identical. Both men have
fair skin with a ruddy complexion. Both have blue eyes and wide, round
faces.





Reached Wednesday in Iowa, Damman told the AP "it's almost too good to believe" that Barnes could be his son.





Barnes said he has become close with the woman who could be his sister, Pamela Horne of Kansas City, and talks with her on the phone each day. They did a home DNA test in March.





"We got a really high score on it," indicating that they two could be related. "That's how the FBI got involved," he said.





Associated
Press writers Frank Eltman and Amy Westfeldt in New York, Nigel Duara
and Melanie S. Welte in Iowa, and AP researcher Susan James contributed
to this report.