85 years ago today a mystery was born

Longtime readers may recall that I’ve written a post or two about my father over the years, including some background about the rather… shall we say… unusual circumstances in which he was put up for adoption.

I was in my early teens when Mom told me that Dad had been adopted shortly after he was born.    What?!  My father was not the biological child of Grandma Tild and Grandpa August?!  This was pretty interesting news all by itself, but as I was to learn, there were details about this particular adoption that made it far beyond merely “interesting”.

To summarize the story for those of you who haven’t heard it before:  When my father was a two weeks old baby he was found in a hotel room in downtown Minneapolis, along with a note from his mother asking that a good home be found for him.

Imagine the effect such a story would have on a thirteen year old.  To me it was like something out of a silent movie melodrama.  Not exactly the baby left in a basket on a doorstep scenario, but close enough.    I was excited; instantly eager to find out everything I could about my dad’s birth family, but I soon learned that Dad himself was not.

You never know what you might find out, he said.   You might end up learning something you wish you hadn’t.  I know who my parents are.  I know who my family is.   Let’s leave it at that.

And so we did.  He never changed his mind; he really just never cared to know. After he died in 1979 [at the age of 54; heart failure], my mom and sister and I would sometimes talk about the adoption tale and  speculate about the  family we would never know. It was a way of holding on to Dad somehow.   We’d imagine what kind of people Dad’s birth family might have been, and consider the possibility that we could have aunts and uncles and other relatives living right here in town, right now, all unbeknownst to us.

All the information we had about  Dad’s birth family came from an article that we were told had been on the  front page of a Minneapolis newspaper  the day he was found, but none of us had ever actually seen that article.

The story we had always heard was that the baby was two weeks old when he was found.  What was the exact date he was found?   What did the article say, exactly? I wanted to see that article.   At the time, this was in 1980, the Minnesota History Center hadn’t been built yet,  but the main branch of the Minneapolis Public Library had the  Mpls Tribune and the  Mpls Journal on microfilm going all the way back to their beginnings, so that’s where I began.

All of the official documents  – birth certificate, Social Security card, his military service discharge papers, etc — had Dad’s  birthdate listed as May 23rd, 1925.   I always wondered: how did they know that May 23rd was his birthday? How could anybody know exactly what his birthdate was?  Did they just make a guesstimate?

Hmm, well, this baby looks around 2 weeks old. Let’s count back about 2 weeks and say his birthdate is….May 23rd!

Counting ahead 14 days from May 23rd  would be June 6th.   For leeway I decided to start with June 1st.   I started with the evening paper, the Minneapolis Journal.  Sure enough, when I got to Saturday June 6th, there it was in the lower right hand corner of the front page:

[click on image for full size.  Be warned:  it's big]

This was it.  This was the sum total of everything we knew about my Dad’s birth family.

Or at least the total of everything we knew until March 2009.

After I found the Minneapolis Journal article, I looked through a few more days of the Journal and several days of the (morning) Minneapolis Tribune, but didn’t find anything else. The library only had microfilm for the Journal and the Tribune, so I figured we had exhausted all the possibilities.  I assumed that was it; there weren’t any other articles.  Still, my sister always said that she’d heard there was a newspaper article which mentioned something about all the couples who inquired at General Hospital, wanting to adopt the “deserted” baby boy.   If there was such an article, what paper was it in, and when?

During the winter of 2008-2009 the spouse and I started going to the Minnesota History Center.  Usually on  Saturdays; usually spending most of our time in the microfilm library, which houses records of  newspapers from all over the state, including all of the Minneapolis and St Paul papers.   I decided  once again to search for articles beginning with Saturday June 6th 1925.  I’d never considered that the St Paul papers might have something about the baby found in a  Minneapolis hotel room, but I decided to take a look anyway just for the heck of it.     Lo and behold — on page 2 of the (evening) St Paul Dispatch for Saturday June 6th, 1925:

What?!

Chicago?!

“A young mother with blonde hair”!

“born May 23rd in Chicago, weighing 9 3/4 pounds”!!

I freely admit it:  I nearly fainted right there in the middle of the microfilm library.

So there you have it.  That was a little over a year ago.  In the ensuing months I’ve spent a good deal of time poking around at Ancestry.com, mainly comparing 1920 and 1930  census records for Cook County (Chicago).    In subsequent visits to the Minnesota History Center we found three more articles from various Minneapolis and St. Paul papers, from June 6th and June 7th.   And yes, two of those articles mentioned that many people inquired at General Hospital, wanting to adopt the “deserted” baby boy.

I’ve got hundreds of photos and documents that need to be scanned and catalogued; I’ve got a lot of research to do.  More than that, I’ve got a lot of research to do on what kind of research I need to do.

Bluntly,   I just don’t feel like blogging about anything else at the moment.    If there are any more details to be found out at this late date about the family of that baby who was born 85 years ago today, I’d better not wait much longer to search for them.  I’m pushing 60, for crying out loud!

Going forward, if you notice long stretches of inactivity hereabouts,  there’s a good chance it will be because I’m off somewhere tracking down something having to do with my Dad’s birth family.

So okay then.  Be nice, don’t pester each other, and talk quietly amongst yourselves til I come back.   Thanks.   See ya.

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