Finding Family

by Richard Hill

  Bill would move in with Marion for months and then go back to his wife for awhile. The cycle repeated many times over a span of six years or so. In the end, Marie filed for divorce and Bill eventually married Marion in about 1951.

  During one of the times that Bill and Marion were living together, Marion’s daughter, Jackie, got pregnant and needed to find a home for her baby. Bill remembered that his Lansing niece, Mickey, wanted to adopt a child.

  So in December 1945, Mickey received a call from her Uncle Bill asking if she and Wayne would adopt this baby. Bill did not know that Mickey and Wayne had just adopted Carol, who was born that November.

  “You almost became my brother,” laughed Carol. “But my parents could not imagine having two babies only six months apart in age. Plus, my adoption had been anonymous and that was the way they wanted it. Adopting Marion’s grandchild would have been awkward.”

  Carol went on to explain that her parents recommended a good alternative. Wayne had a friend at Oldsmobile who wanted to adopt a baby. That, of course, was Harold Hill, the man I knew as my father.

  At last, one piece of my story fell into place. I knew exactly how Jackie ended up in a Lansing apartment with my adoptive parents. I could now connect the dots.

  Carol did not know if Jackie was dead or alive. Yet she was sure she could find out. Marion had died in 1969 and Bill was in a nursing home. But Bill’s ex-wife, Marie, and their daughters were still alive and would know more.

  Then Carol smiled as she remembered an incident from our high school years.

  “Do you remember a time when you and your parents dropped in to see us and then your mother made some excuse to leave right away?”

  I told her I did not remember it and Carol continued her story.

  In about 1963, Kelvinator closed the Detroit plant where Bill and Marion worked. Since both were without jobs, they came to Lansing and moved in with Bill’s sister, Fannie.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Wasn’t Fannie your grandmother, the one who lived in the house next to yours?”

  “That’s right,” chuckled Carol. “When you and your parents showed up that day, your biological grandmother, Marion, was living next door. She could have dropped in at any minute and would have been thrilled to see you.”

  Carol continued, “My mother took your mother aside to warn her. Then Thelma yanked you and your father out of here like the house was on fire. It was so funny.”

  We shared a good laugh about that story. Now I understood why I had not seen the Woods family after high school. Whatever relationship my parents continued to have with Carol’s parents, they never included me.

  Then I changed the subject.

  “I didn’t know you were adopted. Have you ever thought about searching for your birth mother?”

  She replied that she had always known and was not especially curious about her biological family. She understood that some adoptees felt a need to search, but she never did. We agreed that it should be an individual decision. In any case, Carol was quite willing to help me with my search.

  I told Carol about the rumor that my mother was a nurse and my father a Lansing doctor. She had never heard any such thing. The only nurse involved in my story was Carol’s mother. Mickey had worked at St. Lawrence Hospital until Carol was born.

  Rumors often have a kernel of truth that distorts as more people retell the story. I wondered if my parents finding my birth mother through a nurse morphed into my birth mother being a nurse. Maybe. But I still couldn’t imagine where the part about my father being a doctor came from.

  Carol promised to call Bill’s ex-wife, Marie, for details and report back to me. I got back in my car and drove home feeling pretty good that the pieces were falling into place.

  The next day was Sunday and I hung around home all day, not wanting to miss Carol’s call. In late afternoon, the phone rang at last and I heard Carol’s voice. She had reached Marie, who then called two of her daughters, Barb and Lorraine. They compared their recollections and then Barb called Carol with a summary. Carol took notes so she could relay the facts to me.

  My mother’s maiden name was Jackie Hartzell. The Hartzell name came from Marion’s first husband, whom they never knew. The marriage produced three daughters: Marilyn, Jackie, and Joyce. Marion’s second husband was Johnny Ratkewicz, but that marriage didn’t last long.

  Jackie left high school early to get married. Her husband was Leonard Bojanzyk. So her legal married name was Jacqueline Bojanzyk. She and Leonard did have a son, but their marriage ended in divorce. When Jackie found herself pregnant again in 1945, she chose to put me up for adoption.

  When I heard this, I wondered if Leonard might be my father, even though they had split up. If so, her first son and I would be full brothers. If there was a new man involved, we would be half brothers.

  As I took all this down, my mind raced ahead.

  “Was Jackie killed in an auto accident?”

  I held my breath as Carol provided the answer.

  “Yes, Jackie and her younger sister, Joyce, both died in the accident. Barb and her family can’t agree on the timing, but it would have been just a year or two after you were born.”

  Even though I had expected this news, I still felt a little pang of sorrow to learn that Jackie had died so young. I also felt guilty for even thinking that Mom and my grandmother might have made up a story about Jackie’s death. Thankfully, I had never shared that crazy theory with anyone.

  At least I did not have to waste any more time pursuing the doctor-nurse scenario. I now knew it was false. The best news of all was that I now knew my brother’s surname. He would be a Bojanzyk and, with luck, might still be living in the Detroit area. The universe of possibilities had shrunk dramatically.

  “What about Jackie’s older sister, Marilyn,” I asked. “Does anyone know what happened to her?”

  “As far as they know,” Carol replied, “Marilyn is still alive and somewhere in the Detroit area. But no one can remember her married name. So that is not much to go on.”

  I then asked Carol if anyone knew the identity of my biological father.

  “This is where it gets awkward,” replied Carol. “There was a rumor at the time that your father was a relative of Marie’s. That man is still alive and married. They won’t tell me his name.”

  “Do you have any idea who they might be referring to?” I asked. Carol did not. But she had a bunch of old family photos tucked away somewhere in her house. There would be pictures from family reunions and other events. She promised to search for those pictures, go through them with a fresh eye, and check for men who looked like me.

  Even though Carol wasn’t curious about her own birth parents, my mystery had captivated her. She had even called the Lansing nursing home where her Great Uncle, Bill French, resided. They told her that he had good days and bad days. If I could catch him on a good day, perhaps he might remember something helpful.

  A few days after that call from Carol, I decided it was time for me to make another trip to Lansing.

  It was still December and I burned another half day of vacation. My first stop was Bill’s nursing home. When I said I was there to visit Bill French, someone directed me to a man in a wheelchair, sitting idly in the hallway. He was thin and frail looking.

  Kneeling by his chair, I asked if he was Bill. He nodded. I had been hoping he might recall something about his wife Marion’s daughters. But his mind was so far gone that he didn’t even remember Marion.

  I had not known this man. Yet I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It had to be tough when your mind failed years before your body did.

  From there I went to the state library on Michigan Avenue, where they had the Detroit newspapers on microfilm. I started with my birth date and reviewed the papers going forward for nearly a year.

  I didn’t know if Jackie’s accident would be front-page news or not. So I scanned the most likely sections of each daily issue. It was tedious work. After several hours, I gave up
and went home.

  Even though this trip had been a bust, I reflected on the drive back to Grand Rapids that I had made a lot of progress in less than thirty days. I now knew the identity of my birth mother and the last name of my brother. And with Carol’s help, we might be able to figure out which of Marie’s relatives was the man suspected of being my father.

  9

  ETHNIC SOUP

  Dad had described Jackie as Irish, but her maiden name, Hartzell, didn’t sound Irish to me. I had never heard the name and could not associate it with any particular country.

  Her married name, Bojanzyk, was also unfamiliar to me. It sounded like it might be Polish, but I couldn’t be sure. In any case, it was the name of my brother’s father, who was unlikely to be my father.

  Growing up with an unknown ethnic background is something that bothers many adoptees. In my case, I grew up not even knowing about my adoption.

  Moreover, I could only describe my adoptive family as ethnically neutral. When I first realized that my genes came from an unknown family, I had no sense of a missing ethnicity. My parents had already infused me with an identity that was purely American.

  I remember a grade school assignment where my teacher asked each student to share something about his or her family’s ethnic background. I had to go home and ask what we were. I didn’t have a clue.

  Mom told me that Dad’s father was English and his mother was German. As for her ancestors, Mom had heard they were Welsh and Irish with a touch of American Indian. But nobody could identify the specific Indian ancestor or the tribe.

  I questioned Dad that weekend and he just joked that I was a Heinz. When I asked what that meant, he said “57 varieties.”

  In truth, the genealogy bug had never bitten my family. Ancestors prior to my great-grandparents were nameless. We had no family Bible handed down with carefully recorded births and marriages. While many families could trace their ancestry to “the old country,” my adoptive family’s tree couldn’t even get out of Michigan.

  My wife, Pat, had a more distinct ethnic background. While her mother’s side was another mixed bag of Western European ancestries, her father had been 100 percent Croatian. His parents had immigrated separately to the United States in the early 1900s.

  They met in the Croatian community of East Chicago, where Pat’s grandfather worked in a steel mill. Ultimately, they saved enough money to fulfill an immigrant’s dream and buy a small farm. This one happened to be in Michigan.

  Pat grew up with a lot of Slavic neighbors, including Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles. Those in her grandparents’ generation, who spoke little English, were able to communicate through similar native tongues.

  In the twentieth century, Croatia had been part of Austria and then part of Yugoslavia. Outside of certain cities with large Croatian communities, Pat’s ethnic group was virtually unknown in Middle America.

  Whenever Pat said she was Croatian, most people responded with blank stares. So my mother started introducing Pat as her “Polack daughter-in-law.” Since Polack jokes were making the rounds, Mom thought this was hugely funny. Although Pat made it clear she did not appreciate the humor, we could not stop my mother from saying it.

  The Monday after I met with Carol, I received a letter from the Ingham County Probate Court with my non-identifying information. They said my mother was five feet three inches tall and weighed 110 pounds with brown hair. My father was five feet eight inches tall, weighed 155 pounds, and had dark blond hair.

  Jackie’s description was consistent with what I had heard about her. But the description of my birth father was a shock. According to this, he was an inch shorter than my adoptive father! Where on earth did my height come from? I had always visualized my mystery father as a tall man.

  There was a section on educational level, which said my mother had finished the eleventh grade and my father, the twelfth. Her information was consistent with the fact that Jackie had quit school early to get married.

  Under religion, they had my father as a Protestant while my mother’s religion was “not indicated.”

  The status of termination could be voluntary or court-ordered. Mine was voluntary.

  There was a section about age and sex of siblings at the time of my adoption. It said “Boy, 2½.”

  There it was in black and white: legal proof of what my father had told me and Carol’s family had confirmed. I did have a brother! And now I knew the difference in our ages. He must have been born in the fall of 1943.

  There was nothing to indicate the age of either parent. So I would not be able to use age to confirm a suspected father.

  The medical information section had nothing on either parent. It did give my weight and length at birth with an update of those numbers at nine months. They also knew I was cutting teeth at ten months and allergic to acids, fruits, and tomatoes.

  There must have been a social worker checking up on me. The report described me as “creeping and standing in a playpen at nine months and a very happy child.”

  Pat and I were standing at the kitchen table reading this letter together. Suddenly, Pat started to laugh so hard that she could hardly catch her breath. Wondering what would trigger such a response, I moved my eyes to the bottom of the page.

  Under ethnicity of biological parents, I saw what Pat found so uproariously funny: my father was Polish.

  When Pat was composed enough to speak, she said, “For thirteen years your mother has been calling me a Polack. Now this shows that her little boy is the real Polack in the family. I should call her right now and tell her the good news.”

  Pat would not make that call, of course, because Mom was still unaware that I knew about my adoption and was searching for my brother. Still, I noticed a satisfied smirk on Pat’s face that lingered for days.

  Personally, I never cared what my ethnic background turned out to be. I just thought it was nice to have one.

  10

  LIES

  A couple days after the letter from the Ingham County Probate Court arrived, I received an envelope from the Michigan Department of Public Health.

  I had been wondering how the bureaucrats in Lansing would respond to my request for a birth certificate. It was highly unlikely that they would provide my actual birth certificate with the names of my biological parents. The most likely response, I imagined, would be a certificate of adoption listing my adoptive parents. Or they might just give me some excuse that my birth certificate was lost or otherwise unavailable.

  As hard as I thought, I could not imagine any other possibility. Then I opened the envelope and discovered a full-fledged birth certificate listing Harold and Thelma Hill as my biological parents.

  Embossed with the official seal of the Michigan Department of Public Health, it included the signature of the state registrar who declared: “I hereby certify that the above is a true and correct transcript of the record of birth on file in the Michigan Department of Public Health.”

  This was an outright lie. Two days earlier I had received a letter from another government entity, the Ingham County Probate Court, which proved it was a lie.

  In an instant, I realized that the vast conspiracy to cover up my adoption had even included the state of Michigan. I was speechless and outraged at the same time.

  Adoptees routinely complain about the injustice of not letting adults see their own birth records. But somehow, this seemed much worse. In my opinion, the state had crossed the line from secrecy into outright fraud.

  I wasn’t a genealogist then. But I knew that people building their family trees depended on the government’s vital records of birth, marriage, and death. Hundreds of years from now people would be digging through these records expecting them to be the gospel truth. How could the state of Michigan falsify the history of its citizens?

  With all this new information and a sense of moral outrage, I got on the phone and called Jeanette, the founder of Adoptees Search for Knowledge, in Lansing. When I started spouting off about the false birth cert
ificate, she stopped me.

  “I could have told you that’s what you would get. It happens all the time.”

  Calming down, I relayed my non-identifying information. I also filled her in on the details I received through Carol, including my birth mother’s name, Jackie Hartzell, and the name of her husband, Leonard Bojanzyk.

  Jeanette got out the Detroit area telephone directory she kept in her personal research library and looked for his name. There were seven listings for Bojanzyk, but Leonard was not among them.

  “I’ll bet that one of these names is your brother,” she said. “I know how to make these inquiries without scaring people off. Would you like me to locate your brother?”

  Knowing I would be too nervous to make those calls myself, I told her to go ahead.

  Like a sergeant in the adoption search army, Jeanette then proceeded to give me my marching orders. She had two things she wanted me to work on while she was probing for my brother. I agreed to do both.

  First, she wanted me to write again for my birth certificate. I was to give them the same city and date of birth. But this time, I should sign my name as Richard Bojanzyk. Since Jackie had been a Bojanzyk by marriage, my real birth certificate was probably in that name. If my birth certificate had a first name other than Richard, this might not work. But it was worth a try.

  Second, she wanted me to get phone numbers from Carol for Barb and Lorraine, the daughters of Bill French who had provided the details about Jackie. I should call them myself and see what else they remembered. Moreover, I should share the non-identifying information on my birth father and ask if it matched the man rumored to be my father.

  Carol only had the number for Barb, the one who had called her. I called Barb and she gave me Lorraine’s number. After talking with each of them, I did acquire some additional information.