Finding Family

by Richard Hill

  I asked if I could talk to the person who told him this. But his contact did not want to get involved and had made him promise not to reveal his or her identity. Dr. Campbell phrased his remarks carefully, so I couldn’t even tell if his source was a man or a woman.

  A doctor certainly fit Jim and Donna’s recollection that my father had been a professional man. And I liked the thought of my father being a prominent specialist. If he couldn’t be Clark Gable, maybe a brain surgeon would be a nice alternative.

  But this story didn’t fit at all with what I was hearing from others. If my birth mother had been living in Detroit, how would she have had an affair with a Lansing doctor? If she had died in an accident shortly after my birth, how could she have become a college professor?

  If this story were true, my birth mother would have taught at MSU during my undergraduate years. I could have walked right by her on campus. And my birth father would have lived and worked somewhere right around me in the Lansing area. The possibilities were fascinating.

  After hanging up with Dr. Campbell, I tracked down the wife of a high school classmate who worked as a nurse at a Lansing hospital. I asked her if she could think of any specialists that looked similar to me. No one came to mind.

  My next call was to Dorothy Kanouse. She and her husband had been lifelong friends of my parents, so she had to know something. I learned that Dorothy had met my birth mother twice during the months that Jackie lived with my parents. Dorothy and her husband had jokingly referred to the Lansing apartment as “Thelma’s Incubator.”

  She guessed Jackie’s age to be eighteen or nineteen and remembered her having dark hair. Dorothy was right there at St. Lawrence Hospital the day I was born. She was reasonably certain that my birth mother never saw me.

  Dorothy also had heard about a fatal accident involving Jackie. She even remembered some details. It was a Jeep with four passengers on board.

  Now I had two totally conflicting scenarios to research. In one, my birth mother died young. In the other, she might still be alive. There was no question in my mind that I needed to pursue both possibilities until one or the other proved to be false.

  6

  DEAD OR ALIVE?

  Was my birth mother, Jackie, dead or alive?

  Believing that every cloud has a silver lining, I found advantages in each alternative. If Jackie were alive, the advantages were obvious. I might still be able to meet her. She could explain why she gave me up for adoption and I could learn the identity of my biological father.

  Finding the silver lining in her death required a little more thought. Having spent months with my adoptive parents, Jackie knew enough about their family and friends to find me someday, just like Pat’s cousin, Pam, was trying to do with her son. Yet Jackie never contacted me, even after I turned twenty-one. Not wanting to believe that she didn’t care, I considered her death the only acceptable excuse.

  The time came for the December meeting of the Adoption Identity Movement and I drove to the suburban library where they met. There were about fifteen people present, mostly women. Roughly two-thirds were adoptees and one-third were birth mothers. A few people already had completed their searches and shared heart-warming reunion stories.

  I took notes and picked up various tips. For example, when visiting county offices to search for birth, marriage, or death records, you should never mention adoption. If you say you’re doing genealogy research, the clerks will be much more cooperative.

  Another tip: when you’re writing to government offices for information, enclose a five-dollar money order for photocopies. This makes it more difficult for the clerks to ignore your request. They have to copy something to justify keeping the money. Or they have to send it back to you.

  For me, the most fascinating part of the meeting was when each person described her situation and the status of her search. My turn came and I shared what I knew. When I mentioned my birth mother’s possible death in an accident, several people exchanged knowing looks. When I asked what that was all about, the group’s leader explained.

  “The number one story children hear from adoptive parents is that one or both birth parents died in a traffic accident. A logical explanation, it is designed to close the discussion. But it usually isn’t true.”

  I thought about that remark all the way home. Had my father told the truth when he said Jackie died in an accident? I didn’t think he would lie under almost deathbed circumstances. But his stroke-damaged memory could have confused a thirty-year-old lie with the truth.

  Then a more troubling possibility occurred to me. Perhaps someone lied to my father way back then. If my grandmother was paranoid enough to burn letters about my adoption, maybe she and my mother spread a false story about Jackie’s death to stop anyone from trying to contact her.

  The fact that “death in a traffic accident” was a widely used lie gave me a glimmer of hope that Jackie was alive. Maybe she did go on to become a college professor.

  I didn’t know what to think. Should I believe the people who were part of a lifelong cover-up who say she died? Or should I believe the anonymous source of a second-hand rumor who says she lived?

  My head told me that Jackie was most likely dead. But my heart told me I had to look into the doctor-nurse scenario before I could rule it out.

  I called Pat’s cousin, Pam, in California and filled her in on my progress. Since I was born in Lansing, she suggested I contact a Lansing search group. She gave me the name and phone number of a woman named Jeanette from Adoptees Search for Knowledge (ASK).

  When I reached Jeanette by phone, I learned that she had given up a baby for adoption and was still searching for her son. In the process, she met and began to help other birth mothers and adoptees reunite. Even after completing their searches, many of them viewed this as a noble cause and stuck around to help others.

  Having seen the same attitude at the AIM meeting in Grand Rapids, I began to understand that adoption search was a national phenomenon with an army of foot soldiers anxious to help.

  Jeanette proudly told me her group had completed over three hundred adoption searches. Only three times had the birth mother refused contact.

  That was supposed to reassure me. But it raised an issue I had not even considered. What if I found Jackie alive and she wanted nothing to do with me? Or what if I found my brother and he rejected me?

  I tried to put myself in the position of my birth mother. Having a child out of wedlock was considered far more shameful in the 1940s than it is today. Girls and their families went to extraordinary lengths to hide the pregnancy. Most birth families were as secretive on their end as my mother and grandmother were on my end. If the girls later married and had children, many would continue to hide that earlier “mistake” from their new families.

  Jeanette told me that ASK met monthly at St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing. I promised to attend the next meeting and marked the date on my calendar. Since I was born in that hospital, I found it ironic that my search was taking me back there.

  On the day of the meeting, I took a half-day vacation and drove to East Lansing. I wanted some research time at the university library before the ASK meeting. December of 1981 had arrived and winter travel could be dicey. But the sun was shining and I felt invigorated by last month’s decision to begin my search.

  Michigan State University has one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation. Having spent four years there as an undergraduate and nearly two years getting my MBA, I knew the campus well. I took the East Lansing exit from the I-496 expressway and came in from the west on Kalamazoo Avenue.

  I passed University Village, the married housing complex where Pat, Jenny, and I lived during grad school. The apartments were tiny and home to the occasional cockroach. But I remembered our life there with fondness. MSU was a great place to be. The building where we lived backed up to Kalamazoo Avenue and I could still pick out the bedroom windows of our old apartment.

  The MSU Library is a huge, modern building wed
ged in among the ivy-covered buildings that mark the older, north side of campus. With classes in session, I knew there was a proverbial snowball’s chance of finding a parking spot anywhere close. So I parked in the big visitor lot by Spartan Stadium and took the footbridge over the Red Cedar River to the back door of the library.

  My research began with the faculty and staff directories from the 1960s. This was supposedly the era when my birth mother taught there. I wrote down the name of every woman professor or grad assistant with the first name of Jackie or Jacqueline.

  Then I checked the MSU catalog from the 1945/’46 school year. I found that MSU had offered a major in Home Economics and Nursing in cooperation with the Sparrow Hospital School of Nursing. Sparrow was Lansing’s other major hospital.

  I went through the commencement listings for the 1940s to see who graduated with that degree. I found and recorded the few names that began with Jackie or Jacqueline. Then I looked up the women’s photos in the corresponding college yearbooks and noted which ones had dark hair. As I looked at each photo, I wondered if I was seeing the face of my birth mother.

  Next, I compared the names from the 1940s nursing school with the 1960s faculty names. There were no matches. This did not, however, prove the story was false. There may have been another nursing college in the area. Plus, the nursing students were most likely single and listed under their maiden names. Many of the women working for the university twenty years later would be married with new surnames.

  I had hoped that something obvious would jump out at me—but nothing did. Checking my watch, I could hardly wait for my first meeting with Adoptees Search for Knowledge.

  7

  BREAKTHROUGH

  After leaving the library, I grabbed a bite to eat in East Lansing and crossed the city limits into Lansing, arriving early at St. Lawrence Hospital. I found the ASK meeting and met Jeanette. The woman glowed with energy and enthusiasm. It was easy to see that adoption search was her passion.

  Like the AIM group in Grand Rapids, almost everyone was female. It seemed reasonable that more birth mothers would be searching than birth fathers. Mothers had a lengthier and far more personal bond with a child they carried in their bodies for nine months. And some men might not know they had fathered a child.

  Yet even the adoptees in the room were mostly women. I wondered how rare it was for a man to be searching. Men keep hearing that we are more shallow and less in touch with our feelings. That may explain why I did nothing until two women ganged up on me.

  Like the AIM meeting I attended earlier, each person got a chance to tell her story and give a progress report. Others would chime in with questions and suggestions. It was a more productive use of brainstorming than anything I had seen in business. The difference, I think, was the genuine passion these people had for bringing about successful adoption reunions.

  My story started a flutter of comments. Since many of those present were from the Lansing area, they searched their memories for doctors who looked like me. A few names came up as possibilities. One person thought I looked similar to a certain anesthesiologist and I wrote down his name. But nobody proclaimed an obvious match.

  In the era of my birth, most doctors practicing in Michigan came from the in-state medical schools. Back then, that meant the University of Michigan or Wayne State University. Someone suggested I check the old yearbooks at those schools and browse the photos for men who looked like me.

  I asked if there was any way to access the hospital records for my birth date to find my mother’s full name on a patient listing. A woman who had worked at the hospital gave me the bad news. St. Lawrence Hospital routinely destroyed records more than twenty-five years old. Even the microfilm was gone.

  The discussion then turned to locating Carol Woods, the daughter of the deceased couple that Dad said was connected to Jackie. She was the missing link to my birth family.

  Since the Woods family had lived on the west side of Lansing, Carol went to Sexton High School. A year ahead of me, she would have been in the Class of 1963. A graduate of that high school said she would try to contact the class officers from Carol’s class. Someone had to have an alumni mailing list for class reunions.

  Another suggestion was to check the Polk’s City Directories to confirm the address of the Woods home and track the family through the years. After the parents disappear from the alphabetical listings, I should use the section organized by street listings to find the next owner at that address. If Carol inherited the house, it might show her married name.

  As I drove home that night, I realized that this last suggestion was brilliant. I was quite familiar with city directories. When I was still a toddler, Mom retired from the beauty shop business to be a full-time homemaker. But when I was in junior high, she took a temporary job gathering data for the Ionia City Directory. She would go door to door and interview people about their families and jobs.

  In addition to paying her wages, the company sent her a copy of the new directory. I remember browsing the book, amazed at how it allowed you to snoop into people’s lives.

  Mom used her city directory experience to get a job as a census taker for the 1960 US Census. After that, she took a full-time job at Johnson’s Drugs in Ionia. Her cosmetology background qualified her to advise people on cosmetics.

  She also discovered a knack for picking products that would sell and she liked working with customers. The owner/pharmacist soon made her the manager of the entire store beyond the pharmacy, a job Mom held until she retired.

  When I arrived home from the ASK meeting, I filled Pat in on what I learned. I vowed to follow up on the city directory tip and find Carol Woods.

  The following Saturday, I headed back to East Lansing, intent on checking the city directories at the university library. On the way there, I decided to detour through Lansing and cruise the street where the Woods family had lived. With luck, Carol might still be there. Or maybe the home’s current owner would know where she went.

  I remembered the street was behind the Oldsmobile Forge plant where Dad and Wayne both worked. To my amazement, it was gone. Not just the house; the street was gone. In fact, the whole neighborhood had vanished. As far as I could figure out, it had disappeared under an expanded factory parking lot.

  When I found the old city directories in the library, I had a sudden idea. What if Jackie had been living with my parents when the survey taker stopped by in 1946? That person may have included her name as a boarder. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that World War II had interrupted the directory publishing business from 1941 to 1946, at least in Lansing.

  Returning to my original task, I found the Woods family in the 1958 directory. The residence was 220 N. Alger Street. They listed Wayne’s employment as tool and die at Oldsmobile.

  I moved forward in time. In 1964, about the last time I had seen them, Wayne and Mildred were still in the alphabetical listings at the same address. The next directory was for the year 1967. The parents were gone. But I found a listing for Carol Woods with the same address. She had indeed inherited the house.

  The next directory was the 1970 edition. I needed Carol to be there still and married. For that matter, I needed the house to be there still. I had no idea what year the wrecking ball arrived.

  There was no Woods among the resident listings. Anxiously, I turned to the street listing section and found 220 N. Alger. Their old house was still standing in 1970. The owners were a Carl and a Carol with an unfamiliar last name.

  That had to be it! Carol Woods married a man named Carl and I now knew her married name. I found a current Lansing telephone directory and said a silent prayer that they were still in the area. Sure enough, I found the address and phone number.

  Since it was Saturday afternoon, I reasoned that I might be able to catch her at home. It was time for Carol to get a surprise visitor from her distant past.

  About thirty minutes later, I parked on the street in front of Carol’s home. It was only a few miles west of her old neighbo
rhood and I had no trouble finding it.

  I remained in the car, a little nervous about going to the door. How would Carol react to my showing up unannounced after nearly twenty years? Would she know anything at all about my adoption? And if she did, would she be willing to provide the information necessary to connect me to my mother and brother?

  As I walked to the front door, I pumped up my courage and rang the bell. Fortunately, Carol was home and promptly answered the door. She looked like a slightly older version of the young girl I remembered. I knew right away that she recognized me, too, as a knowing smile appeared on her face. She spoke my name and invited me in.

  Carl was out, so I did not get to meet him. Carol and I sat down in her living room and chatted for awhile, catching each other up on the spouses and children we had acquired since last seeing each other. Before I could get to the purpose of my visit, Carol beat me to it.

  “You didn’t drop by after all these years just to make small talk,” she said. “You’re here for a reason and I think I know what it is.”

  8

  CAROL

  I had found Carol and it seemed clear that she did know something about my adoption. Getting excited, I summarized my situation. I began with the 1964 revelation in the doctor’s office and concluded with Dad’s 1978 tale about Carol’s parents, Wayne and Mickey, knowing my birth mother.

  “I always knew you were adopted,” volunteered Carol. “But it was a huge secret and my parents warned me never to tell you.”

  “Now that the secret is out,” I asked, “what details do you know? How was my birth mother connected to your family?”

  Carol paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. And then she told me. Her mother, Mickey, had an uncle in the Detroit area named Bill French, who had a wife, Marie, and three daughters. Bill worked at the Kelvinator plant and began having an affair with a divorced coworker named Marion.