As a birth mother, I hope my daughters I am raising will have opportunities like this with my birth daughter in the future.
Adopted man spends his first Thanksgiving with biological siblings
By MARY ANN ALBRIGHT
Gazette-Times reporter
Watching Yogi Blodgett sit around the kitchen counter with his sisters, teasing and bossing them around as only a big brother can, the family resemblance is clear.
Blodgett, Debbie Abramson and Diana Lancaster laugh gleefully as they talk about favorite Thanksgiving traditions, especially their mom’s glazed torte made with peaches and fruit cocktail.
Though they feel like they’ve known each other since birth, Blodgett only met his sisters in June, and today they have a lot to be thankful for as they celebrate the holidays together for the first time.
“I didn’t get to meet my mom, but I can see her through their eyes, and they can see her through me,” said Blodgett, 52, a data communications technician for the Oregon State University Extension Service.
When they first heard about Blodgett earlier this year, any disbelief Abramson and Lancaster experienced melted away as soon as he e-mailed his picture.
“He looks just like mom,” Abramson said.
Blodgett and his wife, Gail, live in the northwest Corvallis home in which he grew up. Blodgett, whose full name is Williams Ronnie (he goes by his childhood nickname Yogi), was born in Friedberg, Germany.
He was adopted by the late James and Margaret Blodgett when he was 1 year old. The family moved from Germany to Corvallis about five years later.
Blodgett still remembers the room in which he was standing when his parents told him, around age 12, that he was adopted.
The news was difficult to hear.
“You think you’re not loved, and it’s hard to swallow. I didn’t believe it at first,” he recalled.
But since that day, Blodgett has been curious about his birth mother. His birth certificate and adoption paperwork list her name as Ingeborg Dauth, and Blodgett and his wife searched for her without success for 20 years.
Last spring, a coworker of Blodgett, who knew about his quest, read an article by Oregonian columnist Margie Boulé about Angela Shelley, a woman who helps reunite adopted Americans with their German birth mothers.
“She said, ‘You’ve got to read this. It’s about you,’” Blodgett recalled.
At first skeptical, Blodgett contacted Shelley and gave her Dauth’s name and copies of the birth records he had. A couple days and $200 later, Blodgett found out he has five biological siblings, in addition to his sister Joyce Blodgett, who lives in Philomath.
Unfortunately, Dauth died in 2000. This Friday would have been her 73rd birthday, so Blodgett, his wife and his two visiting sisters will have a bratwurst dinner in her honor.
Blodgett doesn’t know who his biological father is. He suspects it was an American soldier. According to Shelley, whose parents live in Albany, many babies were born to German mothers and American fathers after World War II and were adopted by American couples.
Blodgett thinks his father was a soldier who was shipped out after Dauth became pregnant, and that his mother couldn’t afford to raise him on her own. Williams may have been his father’s last name, Blodgett said.
Although he’ll probably never know his birth father, Blodgett has no doubt about who his dad is.
“Jim (Blodgett) is my dad. There’s no other way of looking at it,” he said proudly.
In addition to Lancaster, 46, and Abramson, 43, Blodgett’s newfound family includes sisters Marion Gruschwitz, 54, and Pam Reed, 38, and brother Michael Toland, 31.
“My brother’s a month younger than my oldest son,” Blodgett said. The Blodgetts have two sons: Kelley, 28, and Eric, 31.
At a family dinner Tuesday, Kelley got to meet his visiting aunts, and Blodgett realized he’s gone from having no nieces and nephews to having 12.
“Christmas is going to be expensive this year,” Blodgett said.
Blodgett’s birth siblings are scattered across the country. Lancaster lives in Virginia, where she works as an accountant for a regional parks and recreation department. Abramson is visiting from Wisconsin, where she’s an auditor for a fitness center.
The date 06/06/06 is burned in Blodgett’s mind as the day he learned of his birth family, and Shelley sent him a picture of Dauth taken in 1956.
“It brought tears to my eyes. You’re always curious to see what your mother looked like. She’s beautiful,” he said.
Just a couple weeks later, he met all but Gruschwitz in Virginia.
“We actually felt like we’d known him forever when we met him,” Abramson said.
“It’s amazing how things just clicked. It’s meant to be. After we spent a few days together, they said it’s like I was always a part of their lives. I was just on an extended vacation,” Blodgett said.
Gruschwitz still lives in Germany, and Blodgett hopes to visit her in the spring and see the town where he was born.
All of Dauth’s children, except Blodgett, grew up together and were raised by Michael’s father. Marion has a vague recollection of Blodgett as a baby, but none of his birth siblings knew he existed, Blodgett said.
“If we did, we’d have been looking for him,” Abramson added.
Abramson and Lancaster are making up for lost time this week, going with the Blodgetts to the Civil War football game, the beach and the mountains.
For today’s Thanksgiving dinner, Gail, a semi-retired OSU student loan manager, is serving two turkeys, a ham, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and all the other holiday favorites for a gathering of 14 of the Blodgetts’ closest family members and friends.
Gail is enjoying meeting her husband’s biological family, and seeing his dream come true.
“I just listen to them and they’re all squabbling back and forth like they grew up together,” she said.
With November being National Adoption Month, Blodgett is encouraging other people in situations similar to his to not give up searching for their birth mothers.
“Even in my town of 55,000, I bet there’s a few others like me. Time is running out, since the birth parents would be in their 70s and 80s, and people probably don’t know where to turn,” he said.
I found this article at this website:
http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2006/11/23/news/top_story/4aaa01_familyholiday.txt
