82-year-old locates, reunites with 96-year-old birth mother
Betty Morrell had been told her birth mother had died during childbirth and was shocked when she eventually learned she was still alive.
ALBANY, N.Y. — Eighty-two years after she was born to a teenage girl and put up for adoption, Betty Morrell finally has met her 96-year-old birth mother, thanks to the dogged persistence of her granddaughter during 20 years of searching.
And as a bonus, she has forged a close friendship with a sister she never knew she had.
“After my adoptive parents died, that’s when I started looking,” Ms. Morrell said by phone from her home in Spring Hill, Fla. “Being that it was a closed adoption, it’s like hitting a brick wall because you can’t get any information.”
Ms. Morrell was born in 1933 in Utica, N.Y., to Lena Pierce, who named her Eva May. Social welfare officials took the baby away because Ms. Pierce, then 13, was herself a ward of the state. Eva May was adopted by a family on Long Island and grew up as Betty Morrell, an only child.
“I grew up a very happy child,” Ms. Morrell said. “I was so content in the family I was adopted by.”
She was in her early 30s when she started looking for information about her birth family. She had been told her birth mother had died during childbirth and was shocked when she eventually learned she was still alive.
Ms. Morrell’s granddaughter, Kimberly Miccio, started helping with the search when she was 12.
“My grandmother had been looking for a long time,” said Ms. Miccio, now 32, who lives with her husband and three children a few minutes from Ms. Morrell. “She had never tried through the Internet, so we started going through different sites.”
It took 20 years, but the breakthrough finally came in September. Ms. Miccio got in touch with a distant relative of Ms. Morrell’s through Ancestry.com, and that person put her in touch with Millie Hawk of Windsor, N.Y., one of Ms. Pierce’s daughters.
“Kim and I got on the phone and called her,” Ms. Morrell said. “I had found my baby sister, who’s 65. We just clicked. It was like we had known each other all our lives.”
Ms. Morrell learned she had four sisters and two brothers, and that her mother was alive and well, living in an assisted living apartment complex in Hallstead in northwestern Pennsylvania. That’s about 20 miles from where Ms. Hawk lives.
“I rushed to my mother’s house to tell her,” Ms. Hawk said. “She just sat down in a chair and cried. She said, ‘My Eva May, they found her?’ It was just so emotional.”
A reunion was held in Binghamton, N.Y.
“The minute I saw her come through the security door, I just got goosebumps,” Ms. Hawk said. “Mother reached for her; Betty said, ‘Mom.’ They hugged and cried.”
“There were a few tears, and shaking,” Ms. Pierce said. “It sure was a joy to finally meet up with her. It’s kind of hard when you have a child that you get separated from. I never wanted to give her up.”
Since then, Ms. Morrell has been talking regularly with Ms. Hawk. She talks less often to Ms. Pierce. “Sometimes I have to remind my mother of who I am,” Ms. Morrell said. “I say, ‘I’m your long-lost daughter Eva May.’ ”