The Quest To Find My Biological Mother | What We Really Found Is Simply Astonishing

As a sort of introduction and to bring everyone up to date quickly the following is all about my adoption in the mid 1930’s and a bit of what has transpired since then.  Fast forward to November of 2018 when my daughter Sally found a historical blog link in “You Know You’re From Grinnell Iowa When” titled “Illegitimacy and Abortion…

An epic journey to find my roots has happened at exactly the right time. The search came in earnest some 83 years after my adoption in Grinnell to an unwed mother from Wisconsin. The birth was at the St. Francis Hospital December 6, 1935 and the adoption was immediate as far as I know. My adoptive parents were a…

My daughters had always encouraged me to continue the quest for finding my birth mother for family history background. My heritage, health and possible hereditary conditions, living half brothers and sisters and of course my biological father. November of 2018 daughter Sally was reviewing a local Grinnell website named “You Know You Are From Grinnell When” when she ran…

As mentioned in the previous “Some Years Later……” heading category on the birth certificate and in the St. Francis Hospital register of admissions of the the 1920’s and 30’s, Margaret Madison was my biological mother from Madison, WI. In this article  “Illegitimacy and Abortion in 1920’s -1930’s Grinnell” was mention in the list of of admissions the names, reason for…

We had arranged with Ancestry.com to make contact with the match (Mary Jo Everson Feuling) on the way to Naples that January 6, 2018. Mary Jo was more than open and warm about the match and indicated a willingness to find out more about me and my family. Sara and I talked to Mary Jo for approximately three hours…

Mary Jo Everson Feuling

One thing that advanced us to far in the search for the maternal side once we found that my mother was Margaret Voges was my new sister Mary Jo Everson Feuling. Bear in mind that Mary Jo was from the paternal side. Mary Jo was on a short term leave from her job because of a meniscus repair and…

As this journey is documented you will find some redundancy. One of the reasons is that the segment that you are reading has a relationship with material in other segments. Early after our initial conversation with Mary Jo on January 6th I talked with her sister Karen and of course my new sister of Greenbay, WI. Karen is married…

Please take note that this recap of the journey was composed in several segments so there is some redundancy. On Wednesday September 25th Sara and Sue flew into Madison as Judy, Sally and I drove from Des Moines. We came together at 11:00 in the evening, went to the Hampton Inn in Monona for several hours rest then had…