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Family ties retied

Klint Lowry/SUNCOAST

Nan Bishop of New Port Richey and her brother, Doug Maurer are making up for lost time. Doug was given up for adoption as a baby.

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BY KLINT LOWRY

THE SUNCOAST NEWS

Published: August 21, 2009

Updated:

Brothers and sisters build a collection of common childhood memories growing up together.

Nan Bishop, 54, and her brother, Doug Maurer, 51, missed out on all that. They spent their childhoods not even knowing the other existed. Thanks to persistence, luck and modern technology, the two can now make up for lost time. On Aug. 13, Bishop and Maurer laid eyes on each other for the first time at Tampa International Airport, a little over two months after finding each other.

"It was an emotional moment," Doug said two days after the fact.

"I didn't lose it, I was really proud of myself," Nan said. "I brought a sign that said 'baby brother,' but when I saw him in the crowd, I forgot to hold it up. A few minutes later I was like, 'oh, yeah, I've got a sign.'"

Doug had flown down from Connecticut with his family for a one-week trip. They had already noticed some similarities - they're both tall, they both like spicy food. They were surprised to discover they had both lived in California and North Carolina. Now that they were together in person, they were noticing other things, they said. Sitting together on a sofa, both barefoot, they simultaneously pointed down and laughed about a discovery made in the last 48 hours.

"My wife tells me I have these funky, long toes," Doug said as he and Nan each held up a foot. Until now, neither of them knew it was a family trait.

They also both have an affinity for music, something they figure they got from their mother.

An uncertain past

While holding down day jobs, Audrey Wees had been a singer. She died in 1966, on her 35th birthday. She never told Nan, who was 11 at the time, about her younger brother who been given up at birth and adopted when he was 2 weeks old in Terre Haute, Ind.

"I knew I was adopted real early," Doug said. "When I was 20, I started doing a little research." He petitioned the court to have his adoption records opened. He found out his mother's name and the company she worked for. He had no idea if she'd want to hear from him, "but I wanted to let her know that I'd had a good life, in case she'd worried about it all these years."

When the Internet developed, he used it in his occasional searches, eventually posting a query on Ancestry.com. He heard from a genealogist who said he thought he'd found Doug's mother, but that if he was right, she'd been killed in an automobile accident.

Doug quit searching for a while. A few years later, his posting got a response from a woman named Bonnie. She wrote about her aunt, but the details of her story didn't seem to quite match. From the records Doug had seen, Audrey had some kind of hearing loss. In her response, Bonnie had told him that her aunt did not have hearing loss.

In the meantime, Nan had learned that she might have a brother out there and she was doing some searching of her own from time to time, but based on faulty details. In 1959, Audrey had made a mysterious trip to Texas, and was being careful to keep her stomach concealed, Nan had learned from her aunt. So she concentrated her search on birth records from 1959 in Texas when she should have been looking to Indiana, 1958.

No time like the present

While buying bobby pins one day in May, Nan starting thinking about her mother. She went home and tried a simple engine search entering nothing but her mother's name. The very first result led her to Doug's entry on Ancestry.com.

"I just started shaking," Nan said. The information he had about Audrey was a perfect match. But then Nan saw a response from her cousin Bonnie, who had steered him away - five years ago. What Bonnie didn't know was that Audrey had injured her eardrum with a bobby pin. She had kept the injury a secret from most people so they wouldn't know about the resulting hearing loss.

Nan also saw that Doug had only responded to Bonnie's 2004 entry this past January. Concerned that it might be years, if ever, that he'd come back to the Web site, Nan wrote a letter to him at his stepmother's address, which she was able to find based on information on the site. She included her phone number in the letter.

"I paced around for about 45 minutes with the number punched into my phone before I hit 'send,'" Doug recalled.

"I was making dinner, and the phone rang," Nan said. When she saw the caller ID read "Maurer, Douglas" she and time stood still. After several rings, she managed to pick up.

"I was prepared for him to say, 'yeah, I'm your brother, now back off,'" she said. Instead, "We talked and talked and talked, and we said absolutely nothing, but we said everything."

Right away, Nan e-mailed Doug a bunch of photos. If there was any doubt he'd found the right family, it was erased when he opened the first one and saw Nan's son, Zac.

"My youngest son said, 'he looks more like you than we do,'" Doug said. "My wife thought I lost my mind; I was sitting there with a mirror, looking at the pictures."

Future memories

This week together in Florida is just the beginning. There was so much to talk about, and so much to still talk about. There are questions about the past that may never be answered. Nan and Doug realize it's quite possible they have different fathers.

"My parents divorced when I was six months old, but I remember him being around when I was young," Bishop said. Doug's stepfather had been part of the musical scene in Terre Haute back in the early '60s. Might he and Audrey have traveled in the same circles?

Not that it much matters. Whether they are siblings or half siblings, Nan and Doug have each other now. They don't have albums full of photos or stories of things that happened years ago that live on as family lore. The memories they will share are mostly yet to be made.

It's a process they are looking forward to, and of living with the knowledge that family is always there.

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