Searching for a Family Tree

Tags

Adopted daughter, adoptee, adoptive parents, CBI Theater, family tree, Iowa Teachers College, Ohio Adoption Agencies, Wartime correspondence, WWII

NOTE: This post was originally published last year. Adoptee Elaine Pinkerton is visiting her grandchildren (who turn four and seven this month), and she is happily immersed in family matters. In the midst of a new “family tree,” she feels the question of “roots” is more relevant than ever. Dear readers, adopted or not: please comment on what your family origins mean to you.

What does an adoptee do about the Ancestry Question and matter of ROOTS? While

Elaine asks, Will the real FAMILY TREE please become apparent?

others can trace their family trees, the adoptee has to choose between the birth family and the adoptive family. Do we adoptees even have a family tree? If you’ve grown up with adoptive parents, is THEIR family tree yours? If you’ve been lucky (or unlucky) enough to meet your biological parents and learn about that family, do you BELONG to IT? Could their family tree be yours?  How does one claim ancestors?
These are questions I’m no longer willing to sweep under the rug. I’ve decided that instead of a family tree, I’ll settle for family records, those of my adoptive mom and dad. The letters they exchanged (before they became my parents) during their long WWII separation reveal their search for me. In 2005, I gathered these letters together for a book: From Calcutta with Love-The WWII Letters of Richard and Reva Beard.
Richard and Reva Beard were separated by 6,000 miles and 18 months during WWII.

My Dad wrote home every day.

Richard served as a clinical psychologist in the China-Burma-Theater (CBI).  To imagine my mother’s search, I re-read the letters that deal with adopting a child. One of my favorites …
August 1, 1944

My Darling, We chose what turned out to be a very warm day to go to Toledo. I was very warm
and perspiring all day — to my amazement the big stores there aren’t air-conditioned. I got a purplish wine shade. I thought a red would be too bright. This is really a
pretty color but I’m afraid you won’t approve of the style. I couldn’t’ find a pattern that I liked in a fitted coat to use my fur to an advantage. So I got a tuxedo on the strength that you will like it when you see it. The fur will be down the front you know. I hesitated, knowing you don’t care so much for them but if it is really made to fit me maybe you will change your mind. I visited “The Child and Family Agency” 1035 Superior St. Toledo. They feel that they have to supply Toledo people first but said that their number is increasing so that they may be able to go outside of the city. I had a nice interview and they gave me an application blank to fill in which requires both our signatures. The first part is data concerning our religion, finances and references. I have copied the last two paragraphs which I think necessitates your signature. I suggest you sign it and send it to the agency, providing you agree. Of course they would probably like a letter from you too. I will sign the application and return it to the agency. Most of their children come from the Crittenton home. So naturally most of them are
young babies. (You have them 1 year before adoption is competed.) … I’m watching for the mail man these days.
These days certainly will make me appreciate days of common ordinary living. Goodnight My Darling and
Loads of Love and Kisses,

Reva

It turned out that my mother’s queries at various Ohio adoption agencies came to

Meanwhile, my Mom never gave up on finding a way to adopt.

naught. They waited until after the war ended and my professor dad started a teaching job. Amazingly, and lucky for me, my soon-to-be parents found me through a student (my birthmother Velma) at Iowa Teachers College. I was five years old and my brother Johnny was seventeen months. Products of a short-lived wartime wedding, we had lived in a series of foster homes. Our biological father had disappeared. During this drama, as revealed in this and many other letters, my adoptive mom-to-be was working hard to find a child. As it turned out, parents and children did not come together until after the war ended. The fact that we did was a miracle, one for which I will always be grateful.

Trying to find a family tree no longer, I’m settling for a grove of wartime letters.

From India with Love

Tags

adoptee, adoptive parents, army life, blended families, CBI Theater, clinical psychologist, Ganesha, India, long-distance romance, WWII

Was it the exotic nature of India that resulted in my adoption?

Note: In America, the 1940s were a peak time for adoption. Like other “Goodbye Babies,” I was a product of WWII. My army officer Dad, as relief from a seemingly endless assignment as clinical psychologist, wrote to my mother every night. I am convinced that it was their long-distance romance that strengthened my parents’ determination to create a family. At age five, after the war ended, my brother and I were adopted…

Ganesh, overcomer of obstacles, may have inspired my dad during his 18 months in Calcutta

India

February 18, 1945
Dearest Ritter: Everyone is so despondent tonight that it is very pitiful to behold. Groups meeting in
disconsolate clusters, dissatisfied expressions, and various mutterings occasion concern on all sides. The reason? Well, it is Sunday evening and there is no movie! Someone slipped somewhere and we are left to our devices — and very poor devices they are.
Tonight I joined one of the poker playing groups and played for a couple of hours, but grew bored after awhile — I did win ten rupees! despite poor hands. (But then, I always get poor hands!)
So when old Sturke came wandering along looking like the wrath of God incarnate, I joined him and returned to the basha. There I found Frank and John comfortably ensconced under the light. Our generators are working again, but asthmatic coughs indicate that all is not well.
It is difficult to know when one is well off, but at the moment I am very dissatisfied with my position. Of course, I have had a nice vacation, but it is hard to work at 20% of your potentialities all the time. Then there is the question of toadying to officers with a fourth of your (my) background, education, and ability. There is hardly an officer in the place, outside of their technical training, who comes within a mile of me in ability to organize, analyze, and explain. As I say, it is a little difficult to remember, month after month, that the U.S. government has seen fit to utilize a highly trained man as they have me — and reward him proportionately. If our country and homes were in desperate straits, and I had a rifle in my hands, and grenades in my pocket, and were battling to save my home and your honor and safety, it would be a different matter, indeed. But when the need is so great for trained educators and men who can speak a piece well and convincingly, and the government sees fit to throw all that away — then indeed, I question the wisdom and fruitfulness of the policy.
Now that I have that hot chestnut off my hands — let me hasten to add that I know you are aware of the folly of the whole business and that you agree. It just does me good to let off a little steam to you occasionally. If I don’t you will question whether my personality has not changed and I assure you, it hasn’t.
It has been cloudy today, and is definitely warmer out. Even at 10:00 o’clock in the evening it is still too warm for my sweater! More rain, I suspect.
My sweetest gal — how pleasant it is to dream of you and your treasures.

Ever in love,

Dick

Love Letter Straight from the Heart

Tags

adoption, CBI Theater, Gratitude, Letters, Love, reunion, WWII

White roses were my mom’s favorite flower

My adoption history begins with a 1930s love story, that of my adoptive parents Richard and Reva Beard. They’d been teenage sweethearts in Findlay, Ohio, they married in 1937, and they put off starting their family until my father-to-be earned his doctorate from Ohio State University.

For six years, while Richard earned his PhD in clinical psychology, Reva taught elementary school. When it turned out that they were not able to have children, they decided to adopt. The outbreak of World War II, however, further delayed the formation of a family.

Richard wrote about Calcutta, life at the 142nd General Hospital and missing “home, wife, and love”

Richard was drafted and sent to India. He served as a clinical psychologist in charge of a neuropsychiatric ward at the 142nd General Hospital in Calcutta, part of the China-Burma-India theater of the WWII. For 18 months, my future adoptive parents were separated by 6,000 months. My mother-to-be lived at home with her parents in Findlay, Ohio. She continued to teach school and inquired into adopting a baby. Without a dad in the home, however, adoption proved impossible.

Reva waited at home for the war to end

Devoted to one another for a lifetime, Richard and Reva exchanged letters every day of their wartime separation. Sometimes they alluded to adopting a child; Always they reaffirmed their strong love and devotion for one another. My divorced birth mother attended college where Richard was a guidance counselor. As far as I can tell, she asked him to help her by taking my brother and me. I was five and my brother nearly two.

Years later as I read through my parents’ wartime letters, I was moved and inspired by the depth of their love.

Here is one of my favorite Richard and Reva epistles:

Calcutta, India
May 29, 1945
Dearest Reva,
You asked why I had white roses delivered to you on May 16. It was a sentimental and romantic gesture in which the traditional meaning of the colors of flowers was invoked. But to my way of thinking I could as well offer a white rose upon the altar of my love for you each day. Purity is as much a lovely characteristic of your being today as it was the first time I touched your hand in 1930. By some miracle, your contact with life—with me— has not coarsened you. I reflect upon you and me in the car under the moonlight, in the front room listening to “Moon River,” and in the bed we have shared, I am aware that I have approached you each time as a man who knows his love for the first glorious union of body and soul

How much our separation has meant to me I dare not put on paper. Perhaps, just before I sail for home, I may try. But rather by far that I be permitted to demonstrate in a real way what I mean. You will not have to cling to me, you are me.

Perhaps in all this I am idealizing, but I think not. this low, weary year has given me time to consider many things, the significance of which has been blurred in the past. Clearcut, sharp and pure, etched against the certificate of our union as a palm tree silhouettes against the blue of a late Indian evening, is the world-crashing, world-engulfing, between-you-and-me eternal fact: I am so glad that you married me.

Goodnight, precious Ritter. I’ll help moisten that pillow soon, from which I have so often seen your large brown lovely eyes watching me. They are looking down on me now, Reva.

In devotion,
Dick

I’ve recounted my adoptive parents’ story in From Calcutta with Love-The WWII Letters of Richard and Reva Beard. Their love for each other became a gift of love for me.