Puzzles fascinate me, so when I discovered that my father was adopted I longed to know more of the story. The quest began in 1989 before the Web, and has involved determination, heartache, slammed doors and brick walls. It ended, however, with a beautiful discovery.
My dad Dayton Louis Horner was born on 20 April 1948. He grew up in Walnut Creek, California, with his parents Howard and Virginia (Gini) Horner. Dad served in the United States Marines Corps during the Vietnam War, and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 1972, Dad married my mother Jeanne in California, and I was born a year later. Mom and Dad divorced when I was three, but Dad and I remained close.
The revelation that he was adopted came totally out of the blue, and he didn’t want to discuss it. I was a young teenager at the time, and found the news very hard to process.
A while later, I visited Grandma Gini and broached the subject. She told me that Dad’s birth mother was an unmarried teenager from San Jose in California, who was also called Virginia. Who was she? Was she still alive, and did we have a large extended family?
By the early 1990s, I desperately wanted to find Dad’s birth mother and he gave me his blessing. Grandma Gini presented me with a bundle of papers including Dad’s birth certificate, which falsely declared Howard and Gini to be his birth parents.
There was also a series of warm letters between Grandma Gini and Virginia Whitley, Dad’s birth mother. Virginia lived in San Francisco, and had placed Dad with the Horners temporarily in the hope she could later reclaim him. Clearly that never happened.
Adoptions in California were ‘closed’ in 1948, which meant that the records were sealed. I wrote to the Department of Social Services in the 1990s, but they denied our petition to open the file and it is still closed today.
I spent many years searching for Virginia Whitley, and got a breakthrough when the 1930 US census record was released in 2002. Eureka! There she was, aged two, living with her parents Frank and Bessie, and sisters Marjorie and Imogene in Tulare, California. I did a lot of work tracing the family forward and was able to communicate with Marjorie’s daughter Ernestine, who didn’t know that her aunt Virginia had had a baby adopted.
I also discovered that Virginia’s mother died in 1931, so she was placed with a foster family called Corsaw who had an older son. When I had my DNA tested there was a connection to the Corsaws.
After almost 20 years of sleuthing, I still couldn’t find Virginia, so in 2008 I hired a private investigator. Her discovery would change our lives.
The investigator Monda revealed that Virginia Whitley married Wilford Frazier in 1951, and they moved to Washington State. However, my heart plummeted when Monda told me that Virginia had died in 1991.
She then said, “There’s something else: Virginia had a son in 1953. His name is Max Frazier, and he lives in Texas.” I felt stunned at the news that Dad had a half-brother, and I had an uncle.
Max lived in Azle, Texas, and Monda found the address of a PO box for a business that he ran there. I went through a lot of soul-searching before contacting him.
I wrote a long letter to Max explaining our connection, and enclosed photographs of Dad. After three weeks I began to lose hope, but one day at work an email popped up in my inbox. It was from Max.
He had been surprised to receive my letter, of course, but he could see the likeness between him and Dad, and wanted to discover more. We began a long and friendly correspondence.
A few days later I told Dad that he had a half-brother. He sounded only mildly surprised, although he was intrigued to hear that he and Max looked alike. Dad began corresponding with Max as well, and in 2009 the two of us arranged to meet Max and his wife Valerie in Texas. Dad and I flew in to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, and hugged them in the Arrivals lounge.
We started noticing similarities between Dad and Max straight away – even how they sat, right leg crossed over left, leaning back. The two men shared so many passions too, including music, hunting and fishing.
Finding Max was an extraordinary blessing. He gave Dad a bond of brotherhood that he’d never known possible, and they spent many happy times together over the years.
Both Dad and Max have since passed away, but I still feel a profound sense of accomplishment for having put the two of them together.
I’ve written a book about my search called Finding Max. I hope it inspires other people to seek out their long-lost relatives.