Glen Campbell played hits on the radio

A mystery baby book, family trees and the search for a long-lost aunt

I found the baby book tucked away in a box as we cleaned out my mother’s house, just a few weeks after her death. The cover was shell pink with gold lettering: Baby’s Milestones. 

I’d never seen it before, but it had been packed away with another baby book. This one I remembered: A white keepsake my mother had filled with birth announcements, photographs and hair clippings, the latter dark, glossy curls fastened together with strands of yellow ribbon.

Flipping through the mystery book, I spotted my name and birthdate, as well as a list of gifts that friends and relatives had given my parents. 

It was just like the baby book my mother had once kept for me. Except that it wasn’t. 

There weren’t any pictures in this one—just blank spaces where they’d been pulled away.  

Throughout, someone had jotted details in a wide, looped pink script.

I’d entered the world at 5:27 on a Tuesday, weighing seven pounds and three-quarter ounces. I measured 13 inches long, had a mole beneath the left side of my ear and, as the doctor had observed, the shape of my head seemed “funny”. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War continued to rage, Richard Nixon occupied the Oval Office, women wore mod dresses and maxi coats, and Glen Campbell played hits on the radio.

My finger skimmed through the pages. There was my dad’s name, and beneath his, my grandparents’ names, too. 

And then there was Pamala’s name. My birth mother. 

The book weighed heavy in my hands, the pressure of it consequential, even as the rest of my body seemed as if it might float away, untethered to the moment.

“This is my original baby book,” I told my husband. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Cory abandoned the box of papers he’d been sorting and came over to inspect it. Slowly, we turned the pages, comparing details with ones that my adoptive mother had once documented. Almost everything was the same, right down to the set of small, folded birth announcements. In one set, it listed Pamala as my mother, in the other, Barbara.

“My mom never showed this to me,” I said. 

It wasn’t like her. My mother, who had adopted me when she’d married my father,  had always been open about the details that brought her into my life.  

She’d never shied away from telling me about Pamala and our complicated history. She supported me years later when I felt ready to meet my birth mother. She’d called me every night when I flew out to Wichita Falls to sit at Pamala’s hospice bedside just a few years before.

But now this book reminded me that we all keep secrets, some deeper than the others.

I placed both books in a box I’d set aside for myself and brought them home. Eventually, they made their way to the garage and I didn’t think about them again for nearly two years.

Texas calling

It was late December when I received a phone call from a distant cousin who’d tracked me down through public records, word-of-mouth and other relatives. He was constructing an extended family tree and hoped I could answer a few questions.

He lived outside of Dallas, and we quickly took up an easy conversation. We’d never met before, in fact I hadn’t known he existed until that exact moment, but the distinct central Texas twang of his voice put me at ease. I learned he was a cousin on Pamala’s side—the son of a granduncle I’d also never known.

“I never met anyone other than Pamala,” I told him.

“You never met your grandfather either?” 

My grandfather, the brother to the granduncle, died in the early ’80s—long before Pamala and I reconnected.

No, I said. Pamala was the only person I’d ever known on the side of that family. She rarely talked about relatives, near or far.

“There are a lot of us,” he said.  

Our grandfather had five brothers and a sister, he said.  There were cousins upon cousins upon cousins. A flock of cousins, none of whom I’d ever known.

He had another question.

“Did she have any other children—besides you? After you?”

“No, her sister is the only person she ever mentioned,” I said.

“A sister?” I heard the note of surprise in his voice. “None of my searches have ever brought up a sister. No one has ever even mentioned a sister.”

My aunt lived somewhere back East, I told him. Tennessee, maybe? She and Pamala didn’t get on very well. One of my birth mother’s last wishes, in fact, was for my stepfather to not contact her after she died.

“If you can find anything else about her, I’d really appreciate it,” my cousin said. He wanted to ask her some questions about their grandfather.

I promised to try, though I wasn’t confident I’d have an easy time of it. 

I’d been thinking about my aunt long before this phone call. Other than my stepfather, she was my final link to Pamala. The last person who might be able to answer some questions, who might be able to tell me what she was like as a child, a young woman, a mother, an unhappy wife.  

Perhaps it was a betrayal to reach out now, but it was my stepfather who’d made that promise, not me. 

I signed up for a genealogy site, but nothing came up through its archives. Her name was common enough, too, that Google searches yielded nothing promising.

I emailed a cousin of my dad’s. He’d known Pamala when she and my father dated.  Maybe he remembered something.

“I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don’t,” he wrote back.  “But I have no idea about her sister.”

Maybe this aunt was just a figment of my imagination—someone I only dreamed Pamala had once mentioned. There’d been so many secrets and half-truths over the years, little could surprise me now. Not even a fictional aunt.

One needle, many haystacks

The family tree cousin put me in touch with another relative.  Bill, 93, was my great-grandfather’s nephew and my second cousin. Long retired, Bill spent his days researching family history and sent me a lengthy email, eager to gossip about our shared connections. He knew my name—he’d heard it over the years, he said— but little more.

Born and raised in Wichita Falls, Bill remembered my grandparents, Jed and Ruby, the latter whom everyone knew as “Bunny”.

He had a passing memory of my birth mother, too, he said. 

“It sounds like you have a story all your own if your mother put you out to pasture at such a young age,” he wrote—as if Pamala had just dropped me off on a street corner one day because, at 18 months, she thought I was finally old enough to get by on my own. Which, perhaps, in a way she had.

When it came to my aunt, Bill’s memory clouded.

“I had, in time past, thought there was a sister to your mother, but since we never heard anything about her, I thought it was just a malfunction of my memory,” he wrote. 

What he did remember raised more questions than answers.

“My mother and Bunny were on a friendly basis, and I remembered one time my mother said something about how Jed and Bunny treated those two girls so different,” he wrote in closing.  “It sure would be interesting to find your aunt to get her side of the story.”

My stepfather couldn’t help much either. He didn’t have my aunt’s number, although two years after Pamala’s death, he’d once picked up the phone, surprised to hear her voice on the other end. 

“She did not know Pamala had died,” my stepdad wrote, leaving the obvious statement left unsaid. How would she have known?  “I have not heard from her since.”

He closed with a small but critical piece of information: Her maiden name and the name of her ex-husband.

Excited, I passed this along to my cousin, eager for what he might sleuth out.

Meanwhile, I continued my own search. Even with her married name, however, the hunt remained a guessing game—a frustrating exercise of what about this needle in this haystack?   

I worried again that, perhaps, I really had dreamed her entire existence. 

And even if she did exist, did she know about me? Had she left home before I was born? Did she even know she had a niece?

But what about the baby book, the one now twinned away in a box with its counterpart keepsake?

I retrieved the book, unsure of what I was even looking for in the moment. 

And there I saw the inscription on the inside cover: 

“With all our love, a proud aunt & uncle.”

Beneath it, her name and my uncle’s, too.

I’d missed the looped handwriting the first time but now her name sparked off the page like a beacon.  My aunt didn’t just exist, she’d been a part of my life at one point, however briefly. 

She existed. She knew I existed. And, I hoped, she was still out there, somewhere.

From there, as if the book had opened a portal, small but consequential pieces started to fall into place on the genealogy site. There was a veteran’s benefit card my grandmother had filled out in 1950. On it, she’d listed her dependents, handwriting her daughters’ names in full, which revealed the unusual spelling of my aunt’s middle name. Another clue.

With that, her high school picture popped up on the site. Age 14, she stared back at me, looking very little like my mother, save the careful knowing of her gaze. A few clicks later, a record of her marriage in Wichita Falls on a cold winter day in 1965. She was just 16.

My cousin continued to send the occasional update.  Here was an address where she may have once lived, there was an alternate spelling of her name.

Weeks passed, however, and every tidbit that teased discovery ultimately brought us no closer.

Just as hope started to recede, my cousin emailed again, this time to update me on the brutal Texas ice storm he and his family had just endured.  

Almost as an afterthought, he said he had good news.

After months of searching, he was certain he’d finally uncovered the needle in the haystack. 

I stared at the words until they made sense, until I could breathe again.

“I think I found your aunt.”