It happens every year around Valentine’s Day. We get a couple of calls with specific requests from a spouse in finding birth parents. And that is exactly what happened with Lorraine. Her husband wanted to know how to find a birth father. His mother was involved in a short relationship and he was the result of it. To find a biological father is a lot easier due to the surname and men rarely change their last name. All the information she had was his first name and a possible last name. She never told him their relationship produced a child. She was from a very well-to-do family and her parents hid the fact that she was pregnant from their friends and convinced her to marry a man known to the family, which she did. Lorraine explained that her husband was given the last name of a man who was not his father.
He learned the truth when he was involved in an auto accident and the doctor needed to test his parents for a kidney transplant. So for years, he called a man father that he was unrelated to. He wanted to find his biological father and let him know he had a son. Finding a missing person takes a well-qualified and experienced missing person investigator. Sometimes databases don’t have enough validated information, even as sophisticated as the ones use, to assist us in a missing persons investigation, especially when you don’t have a verified last name and the encounter happened over 30+ years ago. Living in a mobile world, a person could be on any continent without a trace. His mother knew the biological father was from Indiana, southern Indiana and he joined the Armed Forces straight out of high school and she never saw him again. She did, however, have a photo of him playing football with some friends. Our Missing Person Investigator observed in the photo a street sign, which we used with his surname and found a person with a sound alike name in an old Polk Directory.
From there we made several phone calls to various individuals and companies that were still in business and learned additional information. We learned he had returned from serving our country and was well known in the area. He had received a purple heart and for a while took a job in a factory outside of town. From there they didn’t know what happened to him, until we located him. Our databases proved the information we needed to locate a missing person. He was single, his wife of 20 years had died and he had two daughters, ages 17 and 15 he was raising on his own.
This is where experience comes to play. We made contact with him; he had a very soothing voice and listened to our investigator. He calmly stated that something inside him was missing and he had an inclination that his family was more extended than a deceased wife and two young daughters. We provided him with the name and telephone number to reach out to Lorraine, which it took him a couple of weeks to do and we finally received a call from her telling us she and her husband were on their way to meet his father and his two half-sisters. Many times there is a happy ending and in this case, we felt much honored to have united a father and son.
-Brenda McGinley, CEO, All in Investigations, All in Investigations
