The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 4

Special report A-4 The Orlando Sentinel. Monday, November 27. 1989 Adoptees search for their past I'M k-vY 1 few SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL Jennifer Harris (right) meets with her natural mother, Rachel Lercari, and Rachel's Janet Fenton (standing, right) found daughter Joni St. Pierre (seated, right, with baby daughter Danielle) through the Navy, son John. Jennifer found Rachel through a lucky phone call to New York.

The family includes (from left) Joni's daughter, Courtney; Joni's grandmother, Helen; and Janet's daughter, Michelle. little luck. After 23 years, the daughter could find only vague clues about her mother. But she kept calling. She got some hints that Rachel might be in New York.

She called a missing-child agency in the state, and the woman who answered said she probably couldn't help. But a while later the woman called back, and, without explanation about how she found it, she gave Jennifer a name a lucky break. Jennifer called the number. It was the home of Rachel's mother-in-law. That was in August 1988, and it was followed by several missed phone messages, nervous moments and malfunctioning answering machines.

After missing each other's calls and a series of garbled communications, Rachel decided to write. "I can never explain the pain and grief involved," she wrote to Jennifer. "And I don't expect any sympathy from you, only forgiveness if you can ever find it in yourself to do so." Along with the letter and some family pictures, she sent a porcelain doll, the little dark-haired one, and a note that read: "I have never stopped loving you or thinking about you every day of my life." They met for the first time a few months ago. And Jennifer was stunned to see how much she looked like her mother and her two But Jennifer's search is only half done. She hasn't found her father.

Rachel said she can't remember much about him. She tried to put it all out of her mind. The only clue Jennifer has is that her father would be about 55 today. And Rachel says his first name is Doug. Forced to make choice Back in January 1942, the doctors called them the "coffee pot" twins babies so small they could fit into coffee cans.

That they survived was quite a rarity in those days before sophisticated neonatal wards. Calista Katherine Scribner named her twins Paul and Paula and wrote her mother about how eager she was for the twins to be released from Orange County General Hospital. She wanted to take them back home to Lockhart, that the pastor kept reassuring her no one could force her to see her mother. But that was exactly what Joni wanted. The two met for the first time a few months later, and Joni embraced Janet Fenton, a 40-year-old woman from Des Moines, Iowa.

Their bond was immediate. Janet had found her first daughter. Joni had found a second mother. And the young woman had discovered something else a past. She saw the reasons for nearly everything she couldn't explain about herself.

"My smile, my personality, my laugh, the funny ways I turn my body it's like somebody took a stamp out and validated my forehead and said, 'You're all right. This is the way you're supposed to "It told me that what I felt in my heart was true," Joni said, "that she loved me and that she hadn't forgotten me. I always felt an attachment to her. I always felt connected to her." Joni, 28, has since married, started a family, moved to' San Diego and, eventually, to Des Moines, where her two daughters and Janet have become like second families to each other. They enjoy a bond that enriches, but does not replace, the love of their first families.

A need to search "If you don't know where you come from, how do you know where you're going? What is my connection from the past to the future?" That is the adoptees' essential question as framed by Joe Soli. He is an adoptee, a spokesman for the American Adoption Congress and a psychology graduate student studying adoption at Ford-ham University in New York City. Because newborns can recognize music played outside the womb during the last months of pregnancy, and because they can recognize the smell of their mothers, Soil believes that a primal bond develops between mother and child even those who have never seen each other. The quests to find a parent, he believes, are motivated partly by a search for identity but also by an unconscious prompting to reunite a severed link. That might argue for open records in every state as a way to help nurture healthy adults.

But not everyone agrees that knowledge of origins is a deep human need. Some adoptees, like Suzanne Richardson, say they are perfectly satisfied with their adoptive parents and feel no need to search. Richardson works with the National Committee for Adoption in Massachusetts, a group that wants to keep adoption records closed. "Many babies are a result of incest," Richardson said. "They don't need to know that.

It won't help them." Richardson said the majority of reunions between birth parent and child might seem gratifying, but that's because the disappointing ones are never publicized. But Donna Littlefield, a counselor with Catholic Social Services in Orlando, said that even if an adoption involved tragic circumstances she would not withhold that information from adult adoptees who wanted to know. She would make sure through counseling sessions, however, that the adoptee was slowly prepared for any shock. Even in normal cases, however, both sides should be prepared and encouraged to have realistic expectations. Littlefield recently counseled, and then helped to reunite, a 39-year-old mother and her 21 -year-old son after both expressed interest in finding each other.

But the recent case involving Tracy Earnest of Orlando and Tim Hobbs of Lakeland did not involve any horrible circumstances. "I was 17," Tracy said. "I wasn't married. I couldn't give him a life. All I could give him was a mother's love." When they met last year, Tim, a student at the University of Central Florida, thanked her for her sacrifice.

Tracy, who had been worried about her son's resentment, cried. They talked, got to know each other, and now Tim works part time in a pub Tracy owns. Tracy says she always sensed that her son was in the Orlando area and might one day find her. Many birth mothers have those feelings. Judith Meyer did, even though she had moved hundreds of miles from where her son was born.

Last Mother's Day, Judith a 49-year-old Coca-Cola worker in Orlando got a surprise phone call. It was from Dave Folk, the son she gave up in 1959 in Garden City, Mich. Dave, a 29-year-old Detroit automobile worker, relied on the help of several adoptee support groups to trace his mother. He admits that he had built up some hate for a mother he never met, who gave him away for reasons that had never been made clear. "It was like something being hidden from you." But meeting her last summer, he said, "was a peaceful feeling of putting the fantasies out of mind and facing reality." "She had to do what she had to do," he said.

"There's a peace of mind in knowing where you came from." Judith said, "He is my son in my heart. But he's like a newfound friend." Dave said, "It's like we're both missing pieces of each other's lives." A "If The Scribner children have never 1942; (from left) Jim; Bob, holding ADOPT From A-1 Jacksonville, she kept asking herself the same question she had asked as a little girl: Where do I come from? Back then her adoptive parents would tell her all they knew. They told her about a woman who did not have the means to raise her and so gave her away at birth to give her a better life. They told her the woman had gone on with her life, had forgotten about her. They told her without anger or jealousy that there was no reason to dwell on her natural mother.

We love you, they said, and want you to be happy. So Joni, who never lacked for warmth from her adoptive parents, could only look at herself and wonder: Why was she different from the family who loved her? They treated her just like their natural children, but they all knew she thought differently and went about things differently. They never let it fester into deep family conflict; it was just "Joni's way." But what was Joni's way? It was a lonely puzzle, and it lingered into young adulthood. Even as a little girl, though, Joni had felt a strange attachment to her natural mother. She could not envision her and did not create a saintly dream mother, for she had no need to do that.

She loved her adopted family. It was just a baffling emotional tug from someone she never knew. After she turned 18, she made a few attempts to find her natural mother. Her parents, truly, knew little. Like most adoptive parents, they had not maintained contact with Joni's natural mother.

Only in recent years have agencies routinely started taking detailed histories of natural parents and offered to act as lifelong intermediaries between adoptive parents and natural parents' even if the birth parents see only photographs of their child. So Joni's search quickly led her into an impenetrable maze of sealed records, legal barriers and baffling clues. Finding little encouragement, she soon resigned herself to never knowing the origin of "Joni's way." She graduated from high school in Nebraska, joined the Navy and went to Jacksonville, trying to figure out what road her life should take even though she would never know what direction her natural parents had imparted to her. What she didn't know, though, was that her mother was searching for her. Janet Fenton had been a 17-year-old high school student when she was pregnant with Joni, and 23 years later, having reared another daughter, she wanted to find her first child.

Janet had moved to another state and had no idea where Joni's family had gone. She started calling people she thought were either old neighbors or knew the, adoptive family. It was a slow process. Some people who could have helped didn't, Others, out of misguided allegiance, misled her. But after hundreds of telephone calls, questions and blind alleys, Janet finally got a message to Joni's Navy chaplain in 1983.

When the chaplain told Joni what had happened, she cried so hard ptwwwiMy iiiii.iiiwiiiiiii 1 1 iiiii so her other children could see them. The twins were progressing, she wrote to her mother 2.5 pounds at birth but within a couple of weeks they were up to almost four. Though deeply loved, they were going to be a burden on a family already strapped to the other four children. The Scribners had fallen on hard times. They were getting govern ment support, and the welfare department saw the premature twins, as an overwhelming problem.

Her other children remember that their mother said she was given a hard choice: Give up the twins or give up the government aid that put food into the mouths of her other children. There seemed no way out but to give the twins to someone else. Calista never brought then Soon after the adoption, her husband left her with no support. Two of her children went to orphanages, and two went to what was then called a home for boys. But in 1946 she remarried, go! her life back in order and brought her four children home.

They settled down in Alabama all but the twins. She always hoped for reunion, and even her children from her second marriage came to share that hope. Her daughters of: ten would find the names, Paul and Paula, scrawled across pages of newsprint their mother's only way of honoring their mem: ory. Calista died in 1979, never knowing what happened to Paul and Paula. But her children have kept alive her dream of finding them.

Her daughter, Jean Taylor of At-talla, and Jean's daughter, Gena Urbanek of Daphne, have some old letters that give tantalizing clues, but, so far, they've led only to frustrating obstacles. They've had some dogged help from Barbara Vesely, an amateur genealogist in Orlando who got interested in the quest. Vesely, found the name of the doctor who apparently took care of the twins. Unfortunately, Dr. Bernard Harter has died.

His wife, however, was a nurse at the hospital, and she told Vesely that she faintly remembers some talk of the twins, but she could offer little else. The key to the puzzle is, in ac-, cordance with state law, locked away from public view. But the Scribner children, hav-, ing been separated once them-, selves, know what it is like to" dream of reunion. And so they, wonder if the twins ever think' about their own origins. "Just the thought of having someone out there" keeps the.

family searching, Gena said. Jean says her 47-year-old brother and sister would probably bear, a close resemblance to the rest of the family because the Scribners have all carried strong traits' through the generations blue-green eyes, fair skin and hair that' ranges from bright red to reddish-brown. But Paul and Paula, if those are, still their names, may not know that there are people out there searching for lost twins, Or may: be, like many other adopted children, they have some persistent inner prompting to know past and are searching, as well. 7 Maybe Paul and Paula are searching for each other if they know they have a twin. I National Adoption Week is an annual observance that coincides with Thanksgiving week.

For more information: Florida HRS Adoption Registry: 904-488-8000 Advocating Legislation for Adoptees Rights Movement (ALARM): 813-542-1342 or 813-549-9393 American Adoption Congress: 904-398-4269 or 212-988-0110 Concerned United Birth Parents: 515-263-9558 National Committee for Adoption: 202-328-1200 Mother meets daughter The dark-haired doll was special. It reminded Rachel Lercari of a dark-haired daughter, the one she gave away more than 20 years ago in Orlando. Back then she was Rachel Santera, 21, and she had two daughters already. Her husband was in the Navy overseas, and she was pregnant by another man whom she knew only briefly. And she didn't know what to do.

Some friends, however, knew a couple who couldn't have children, and they arranged for her to give them the baby girl. It wasn't actually a legal adoption. But it worked out well for the little girl known as Jennifer. Jennifer's new family, the Harrises, moved to Lakeland, and Jennifer grew up well-loved and happy. Rachel moved to New York.

She remarried, became Rachel Lercari, reared a family and started a catering business in Jackson, N.J. She also had acquired a collection of porcelain dolls all lustrous and shiny figures but the dark-haired one always brought back memories. How did that child fare? she wondered. But she was afraid to search, afraid to intrude, afraid to be hurt by a young woman who had every right to be angry. What she didn't know was that Jennifer with the full support of her adopted family was looking for her.

Jennifer, however, was having seen their twin brother and sister, Joy; Jean, with arms around Sue; -T- -I 4 1 "1 1 4 if SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL who were given up for adoption in and Herbert, holding Butch..