Coming Home: Polson woman reunited with birth family
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POLSON — An extraordinary story:
A baby girl adopted at two months, three siblings who had no idea they had a baby sister and Ancestry.com all combined through a series of miraculous consequences to reunite a family.
That baby girl, Marie Fong, 56, had grown up and was living in Polson with her family, when last March, she “really felt like the Lord spoke to my heart and said to start taking care of unfinished business.”
“Members of my adopted family came to mind,” Fong said, That motivated her to get in touch with relatives she’d been out of touch with for 30 years. After a hiatus from Ancestry.com since 2008, she also started working on a family tree for her children. She felt so grafted onto her adopted family that they were who she included in her tree. In fact, her husband, David, thought it was strange there was nothing about her birth family on the tree.
Fong had always known she was adopted and noted, “I was not one of those (adoptees) obsessed with finding their birth families.”
Lisa, Fong’s daughter, was cleaning the garage and came upon an old scrapbook, given to Fong by her adopted mother. Sorting through the flotsam and jetsam of the garage, Fong almost threw the scrapbook into the bin of things to discard.
Instead she decided to look at it. Along with items from her infancy, Fong found an envelope with juvenile court receipts.
The court receipts had a case number for “Baby Girl Coffman” from Denver, Colo. That evening Fong ventured onto the Denver Juvenile Court site and found a link to adoptions. A new law had been passed in Colorado, and since she was within the window of time specified, she could request her original birth certificate. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that.
“I always felt in my heart I was not to go looking,” Fong said.
But Fong said her daughter, Lisa, believed, “That was for then, it didn’t mean it was forever.”
So Fong sent off her for her birth certificate and received it three long weeks later. Since she had been adopted through Catholic Charities, Fong obtained all the non-identifying information available. She knew she had three siblings and her birth mother was divorced. When her birth certificate arrived, her mother’s name, Betty Ann Coffman, was on the document along with her birth father’s name. Fong immediately went to Ancestry.com and found an obituary dated December of 2010 for her mother. The obituary also contained the names of her three siblings.
A link on the obituary connected to the mortuary, “and her (my mother’s) picture popped up,” Fong remembered. “We look almost like twins, we look so much alike.”
After finding her middle brother’s address and phone number, her daughter Lisa called the number and left a message. The brother, Mike, did not call back. So Fong thought to herself, “I guess I write a letter, but how do you write a letter about this.”
In her letter she included her birth date, who she was, and the statute changes allowing her to get a copy of her birth certificate. Fong also expressed her condolences, adding that she would really like to talk to the siblings and included her contact information.
She heard nothing for three weeks.
“. . .It was the Thursday night before Mother’s Day in May. I was sitting at my computer thinking they are not going to call me,” Fong remembered, so Fong clicked onto Ancestry.com.
“A neat feature” of the genealogy website is that you can make your tree public so people can compare notes, Fong explained. Fong’s tree was public, and now another tree just recently on the site listed Jack Bushman as this person’s great grandfather. Jack Bushman was also Fong’s grandfather so she knew they must be related. There was also a Coffman listed in their family tree.
Fong emailed the person and told her she was looking for information on Betty Ann Coffman Kelso.
One hour later, Fong said, striking her desk in her excitement, an email came back.
“Guess who it was?” Fong said, smiling.
The email came from Fong’s oldest brother Pat’s daughter.
“’My name is Dawn Marie, your niece,’” the email read, according to Fong. “’I can tell you anything you might want to know. I’m curious how you are related.’”
“Do you have the chin?” Dawn Marie asked since all the women in the family have a distinctive chin.
The two women emailed, then had a four-hour phone conversation and exchanged photos. Dawn Marie told Fong she elongated her vowels as her grandmother and Fong’s birth mother had and said the pictures of Fong looked more like her grandmother than the other three children.
The siblings, including Dawn Marie’s father, had not answered Fong’s letter or even discussed it with Dawn Marie so she took things into her own hands. Dawn Marie made the 90-mile journey to Denver and took her computer along with Fong’s photos, to visit her father, aunt and uncle. Nobody said anything about Fong’s letter at first, but then her Uncle Mike mentioned the letter from Fong.
They thought the letter was a scam. Since their mother had given money to charities in Montana, they thought someone in Montana had gotten their names and was trying to shake down the family.
Then Dawn Marie showed the brothers the photos of Fong. Mike saw the pictures and burst into tears, and Pat kept saying, “Oh, my God.”
The men met their sister Cathy at a restaurant to tell her of their baby sister. Mike and his wife Barb thought Fong should come to Denver. As it happened, Fong and her husband had planned a trip to Denver in June.
Three weeks before they were to go to Denver, Fong got a phone call. Her husband said, “Marie, it’s your sister.”
“I waited all of 20 seconds to call her,” Fong said, smiling.
They had a wonderful conversation, Fong explained, paving the way for the visit to Denver.
“I grew up in a home that was not touchy-feely, and I have always been touchy-feely. Here I was in the midst of this incredible touchy-feely family,” Fong noted.
Another surprise recently surfaced. Although it was a delicate subject, the siblings had pieced together the story that Betty Ann had hidden her pregnancy. She was a 5’10” lady and had never told anyone about the baby. It was a different time, and Betty Ann struggled to take care of her first three children.
Cathy had been going through her mother’s house and found a box within a box within a box containing a hospital bracelet with Fong’s birth date on it. The tiny bracelet read 10-20-54 3:21 a.m. Coffman girl. Betty Ann had saved the bracelet all those years.
Now, Fong said, her sister is sending her an airline ticket in October for “my very first birthday with my family.”
