Kimberly Blair has written a touching story in the Pensacola News Journal (FL), about an 83 year old woman who was taken/illegally bought when she was a baby, and never knew her blood relatives until her daughter tracked them down 83 years later using a lot of patience and the internet.
Excerpt from the article:
Armed with a little information from family stories, Sharon Cummins ramped up those efforts just weeks ago while on a two-week Christmas break from her job at Pensacola Junior College….
*snip*
Whether it was luck, fate or super sleuthing, dots of information in her disjointed search began to connect.“Terry Altstatt, my cousin, was the key uniting us,” Sharon Cummins said. Altstatt, the granddaughter of one of Maggie’s siblings, Oleta Walls, had listed the names of her family members on genebase.com, a site where she was documenting the genealogy of the Walls family that has roots in Missouri.
“What put it together for me is that I had these uncommon names, Oleta and her mother, Prudie, and I searched for those names on census records of all the area’s surrounding the orphanage my mother had been taken to,” Sharon Cummins said.
It’s a good article about a genealogist with a lot of patience and knowing what to look for (or rather what to look for that appears missing).