Fading hopes of finding family turn in instant,
Darlyne Lounsbury had spent years searching for the mother who had given her up in an unconventional private adoption. She had all but abandoned hope of finding her birth family. Then one day, an email arrived
In December 2014, an unusual personal ad appeared on a popular Ontario genealogy website.
“Baby girl born Aug. 24, 1951, searching for birth mother,” it read. “Birthplace Toronto East General Hospital. Birth mother (28 years, born in England) had five other children, most likely told family baby deceased. Baby girl given to another family, named Lounsbury. Please contact Angela.”
That baby girl was Darlyne Lounsbury. She was raised as the first-born of Georgina and Jack Lounsbury’s three children, in a family riven by violence and divorce. Eventually she became convinced her mother hadn’t given birth to her, and conflicting hospital records seemed to corroborate that.
The hospital records from Darlyne’s birth note the birthplace of her mother, Georgina, as England, her religion as Presbyterian and her age as 28. The doctor put the Roman numeral VI beside the word “multi-para,” meaning this was the mother’s sixth labour.
Georgina gave birth to a second daughter less than two years later. In those records, staff at the same hospital listed her birthplace as Canada, her religion as Anglican and her age as 31.
In his notes, the doctor noted Georgina’s obstetric history as “nil” and wrote that this was her first pregnancy and first labour. The baby was delivered by caesarean section, in part because the patient was “obese.”
“That was the Georgina Lounsbury I knew growing up,” says Darlyne’s daughter Angela Gill, 45, who had placed the ad on the genealogy website. A former labour and delivery nurse, she now works in the operating room of Arnprior & District Memorial Hospital, west of Ottawa.
“She was difficult and grossly overweight,” Angela says of her grandmother, Georgina. “We knew a different lady had my mother, but nobody knew who.”
Her mother, Darlyne, had searched exhaustively for14 years by then, with nothing to show for it. Family folklore had emerged suggesting that another woman, presenting herself as Georgina Lounsbury, had given birth to her and handed her over to her parents in the hospital. But no one could offer her a name, a photo or even a description of her birth mother. Darlyne was fishing blindly for her true identity. Recently, she had given up and her daughter was also about to do so.
Posting the ad on the Ontario query board of waynecook.com was Angela’s “last-ditch attempt” to find her grandmother — a final tiny hook cast into the vast ocean.
Last August, an email arrived in Angela’s inbox titled “Adoption information.” It had been 10 months since her posting went up. The email read: “I believe the British woman you are looking for is my grandmother. We had heard rumours of a child that was not my grandfather’s that was given to a family named ‘Lounsbury.’ We also knew that she had given birth at Toronto East General. The dates match as well as the number of children she had. Please contact us. I have uncles and aunts that would love to talk to you as well my grandmother is still alive.”
Skeptical, Angela asked the sender for a photo of her grandmother.
“When she sent me the picture, I just about stopped breathing,” she says. There were the same eyes, the same nose, the same hair . . .
“It looked like my mom.” Adead end, then a ray of light It was at her father’s funeral that Darlyne began to wonder if she was truly a Lounsbury.
She’d never felt quite at home, she now says, but it wasn’t an easy home to feel comfortable in — by her and her brother Rob’s accounts, her parents fought violently until one day, the children came home from school to discover their father, Jack, had taken off to Mexico with the neighbour.
More than that, though, Darlyne felt different from her siblings and she certainly looked different. While they were broad, short and blond, she was tall, thin and dark-haired.
Her parents had always maintained she looked like her paternal grandmother in British Columbia, where Jack ended up moving with his new wife.
He died in 1999 of an aneurysm. At the funeral, Darlyne, then 47, was let in on a family secret — Jack had been adopted.
“If I look like Grandma, who is Grandma?” Darlyne remembers wondering.
She started to dig, phoning up distant relatives and family friends to ask for more information about her father and her mother, who had died in 1983. What she discovered was shocking: Darlyne wasn’t a Lounsbury, but she hadn’t been formally adopted either. She’d been given to her parents by a woman who’d gone to the hospital posing as her mother.
“It was a known story to everyone but Darlyne,” her mother’s cousin, Bob Brooks, told the Star for a feature on Darlyne’s search in 2002.
The hospital records confirmed this theory: the woman who raised her wasn’t British, and Darlyne did not have five older siblings.
She began by contacting adoptee organizations across the country and posting ads on their Internet forums. Most experts told her finding a biological parent with birth records was challenging enough, but finding one with no record seemed impossible.
“Truthfully, at first I thought Darlyne was crazy,” says Gail Hadley, president of non-profit Canadian Adoptees Registry Inc. “I had never heard of anything like it.”
Undeterred, Darlyne contacted bureaucrats at various children’s aid societies and the provincial Ministry of Social Services, searching for any paper trail. She found none.
She called politicians. She wrote many letters to newspapers, beseeching readers with any information to call her. Most ended with “I am desperate for medical and family information.” No helpful calls came. Brooks, Georgina Lounsbury’s cousin, provided the only tenuous lead. Back in 1949, he spent the summer helping Darlyne’s father, Jack — a milkman — on his
“Truthfully, at first I thought Darlyne was crazy. I had never heard of anything like it.” GAIL HADLEY PRESIDENT OF CANADIAN ADOPTEES REGISTRY INC., ON DARLYNE’S UNUSUAL ADOPTION STORY “I just want to know the truth. I’m looking to find something that belongs to me. Something that’s attached to me.”
DARLYNE IN A 2002 INTERVIEW WITH THE STAR
delivery route. Each day, Jack would stop outside a rundown house on Birchmount Rd. in Scarborough and tell Brooks to scram for 30 minutes. The woman was “pregnant at the time and had other kids running around,” Brooks said.
Darlyne combed old street directories and voters lists for Birchmount Rd. near Eglinton Ave. E., where Brooks recalled the house being. She looked up local pharmacies that were open in 1951 and tracked down their owners to ask if they remembered a woman with lots of kids. She searched the baptism accounts at local Presbyterian churches. Finally, she walked up Birchmount Rd. between St. Clair and Eglinton to knock on doors and post flyers.
One door after another opened and closed, offering nothing but sympathy.
“I just want to know the truth,” Darlyne told the Star in 2002, after another day of unsuccessful cold calling. “I’m looking to find something that belongs to me. Something that’s attached to me. I don’t know why I am the way I am, why my hands are the way they are, why I walk the way I do. It’s very important. There’s got to be somebody somewhere.”
One major street over, on Warden Ave., a top-secret munitions factory was constructed during the Second World War, with 172 buildings and four kilometres of underground tunnels. Most of the 21,000 workers were women, who built bombs while their husbands or fathers were off at war. If she had lived on Birchmount, was it possible her birth mother worked at the factory? Darlyne attended a workers reunion, hoping someone would remember her. It was another dead end. “It was a quest — it consumed me,” says Darlyne, who today is a 64-year-old divorced grandmother in Milton and works in the audit office of a bank. As years passed, she figured her birth mother would have died, making her search not just exhausting, but futile.
Two years ago, she finally called it quits. “I talked to so many people and went so many places . . . It just wasn’t going anywhere,” she says.
Then, last August, when she was visiting her daughter, Angela told her to sit down and passed her the photo she’d just received in an email.
“It was like looking at me,” says Darlyne.
That very afternoon, she was on the phone with Judy Thompsett — the fourth of six siblings in the Madder household, who had been quietly searching for Darlyne, too.
Judy remembered both a family visit to the Lounsbury home as a young girl and regular appearances by Jack Lounsbury with his delivery truck. The Madders had indeed lived on Birchmount Rd., she said, but farther north, near Finch.
She told Darlyne what she had hoped to hear, over so many fruitless years: they were sisters. What’s more, Darlyne had four other siblings who were still alive, as well as a mother, Doris.
The next day, Judy went to visit Doris. When Darlyne called, she handed over the phone. Astruggling family, an unconventional arrangement Doris Madder lives alone in a neat onebedroom apartment in a Pickering seniors residence, decorated with photos of her nine grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, as well as her late husband, Albert, who died of a heart attack in 1986.
She is 93 but her mind is still keen, her will rigid and her schedule jammed. Eight years ago, she successfully lobbied city hall to expand a bus loop to reach her building. She sets out by bus for two hours every day to do her banking or shopping.
She was named Pickering’s Senior of the Year in 2005.
Doris, who grew up in England, met a dashing Canadian soldier named Albert Madder at the theatre in Sutton, south of London, where she worked during the Second World War. They were married four months later, in 1941. A war bride with $5 in her pocket and two young children, she arrived in Canada in 1947. She made her way to Sudbury, where Albert was working in the police force. They soon had two more babies.
Albert had health issues — both physical and mental. He couldn’t hold down a job and the family soon sank into poverty.
“We had to move every year because we didn’t have money for rent,” says Judy, 66. “I remember the bailiff coming to take our furniture.
“They were good to us but we didn’t have much. It was very tough . . . I remember being hungry.”
The six Madder children shared two double beds, while their parents slept on a pullout couch.
“We were gypsies,” says the youngest child, 63-year-old Paul, born after Darlyne. “I went to six different public schools. It wasn’t until high school that I stayed in the same school.”
He was the only one to graduate from high school. The rest dropped out to find jobs and help prop up the family.
“I didn’t go to school much because I had to stay home and look after the kids when Mother was working,” says Shirley Deda, the eldest Madder child, now 73. At 15, she got a full-time job at a candy shop, making 25 cents an hour.
Her mother sewed most of the children’s clothing herself, and put on a single birthday party for all six children every year. For a present, they each got one chocolate Smartie, Deda says, “but we were happy because we all got to have cake.”
Doris calls it living on “dollars and dimes.”
She was anxious upon learning she was pregnant with Darlyne, already exhausted with five children at home, including two toddlers and a newborn. “I’m not going to be able to look after another one,” she remembers thinking. “Oh my goodness.”
Her father-in-law worked with Georgina’s father at Brown’s Bread. They introduced the Madders to Georgina and Jack.
“We were told they couldn’t have children,” says Doris.
The families arranged a very unorthodox adoption plan.
When Doris arrived at what was then called Toronto East General and Orthopaedic Hospital in the throes of labour on Aug. 24, 1951, she said she was Mrs. Georgina Lounsbury.
Then, a few days later, the real Georgina Lounsbury walked out of the hospital with the baby, Darlyne.
Asked why they didn’t go through the official channels of the Children’s Aid Society, Doris responds, “That’s the way people wanted it — very private.” She says no money was exchanged.
Adoption experts who help people track down their biological parents say the case is unusual, but not unheard of — particularly in the socially rigid 1950s, before the birth control pill and Canada’s welfare system came into being.
“This was pre-OHIP,” says Monica Byrne, national director of Parent Finders of Canada.
“You didn’t have to prove who you were — someone just had to pay the bill. We used to see that in Quebec, but it was so secret and so shameful. Think about it: you are that poor, you have to give up your child.”
When Doris returned home from the hospital without a baby, no one said a word, she says. The children don’t remember noticing it and even if they had, they would never have asked any questions — theirs was a strict household where children were seen but not heard, they say.
Doris didn’t speak of the birth again until two decades later, when she casually told her daughter Judy one day in the kitchen that she had another sister out there, somewhere.
Her name was Darlyne Longsburry, Judy thought — although she is not sure where she learned that. She looked up that incorrectly spelled name in various city directories and phoned a handful of numbers in Oakville and London.
“It was no, no, no, no, no; I got discouraged,” Judy says.
She never pressed her mother for more information.
“My mother was a loving person, but you didn’t dig at her,” says Judy, now a grandmother herself. “Even to this day, we don’t ask her too much.”
Speaking 64 years later, Doris is matterof-fact about what for many would seem a heart-wrenching decision. “We did it for a good reason,” she says. From time to time, Doris allowed her mind to wander to the little girl she gave away. But she never tried to find her.
“Being as I knew she was with a good family, we just let it rest,” she says.
Sixteen months after Darlyne’s birth, Doris delivered her seventh child, Paul, who became the sixth in the Madder household. When asked if she considered giving him up for adoption, her response is swift.
“No.” Long-lost child tightens family bonds When Shirley Deda first laid eyes on Darlyne, she burst from her car, screaming, “That’s my sister!”
Judy Thompsett felt the same way, looking at this familiar stranger.
“Just getting out of the car, it was like she belonged to us,” says Judy. “She looked like my mother, and, ‘Oh my God, she has fingers like my brother and father.’ I was overwhelmed. I wanted to tell her everything from the past 60 years in one split second.”
They were standing in an Oshawa cemetery, by the grave of Jean Meval, another sister.
From there, the reunion progressed to the Scarborough home of Judy’s daughter, where they were welcomed with a sign and cake.
The Madder siblings celebrated Darlyne’s most recent birthday. Judy gave her $64 — $1 for every birthday she’d missed.
The next day, the siblings took Darlyne to meet their mother — and hers.
“When I got towards her, her arms went up,” Darlyne recalls. “You could see the tears in her eyes. She said, ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘I love you too. Did you miss me?’ ”
After years of searching, Darlyne says, the feeling she had wasn’t nervousness or giddiness. It was a calm sense of finally belonging. “It’s as if we’d been together since time began. I could say whatever I wanted to. Everyone understood. It was comfortable. They were waiting for me in a sense.”
Darlyne knows now who she gets her looks from. “I look so much like Dave, it’s creepy,” she says of her older brother David Madder, now 65. “You’d swear we are twins.”
Over the past four months, she’s been getting to know her long-lost family. Some of her siblings feel close already.
“I phone her twice a week, sometimes three,” says Shirley. “She has a lot of the interests I have — music, travel. I’m busy as a beaver, and so is she. We’re hoping to plan a trip to England. To me, it’s very interesting now. I want to look into Mom’s relatives.”
Derek Madder, 71, a retired truck driver in Brighton, Ont., says the news that he had another sister came as a “shocker.” He can’t recall ever hearing of her before last August. Shock quickly turned to happiness, and already he feels he loves Dar-
“I was overwhelmed. I wanted to tell her everything from the past 60 years in one split second.” JUDY THOMPSETT ON MEETING HER SISTER DARLYNE FOR THE FIRST TIME “Oh, my new-found family members, you were the people I was looking for. And just look — you found me.”
DARLYNE AT A FAMILY REUNION
lyne. “She’s a wonderful person,” he says.
Jean Meval died in 2002 from ovarian cancer, at age 54. (The disease runs in the family — Darlyne had a nine-pound cyst removed from her ovary in 2000, and two years ago, Judy was diagnosed.) It was Jean who set the stage for Darlyne’s reunion with the family, as she’d been digging into the Madders’ genealogy before she died. Her daughter Jennifer was the one who emailed Darlyne’s daughter Angela.
Paul Madder, the youngest, is a workaholic who admits he rarely calls his siblings or mother. Darlyne, the missing child, has strangely become the epoxy to glue the family back together, he says. Her entry into the clan has made him realize “we are not around here forever. Let’s make it the best we can.”
In December, some 30 members of the Madder clan — siblings and their children — came together for the first time since Jean’s funeral 13 years ago. They had Christmas brunch at the Mandarin restaurant in Pickering, followed by dessert and coffee in the activity room of Doris’s building.
Darlyne gave an emotional speech. “Oh, my new-found family members, you were the people I was looking for,” she said. “And just look — you found me.”
She still has many questions, some with no answers. Why was she given away, and not David or Paul? How would she be different had she been raised by the Madders and not the Lounsburys?
One nagging question has been answered: her secret adoption was the result of poverty, not infidelity with the milkman, Jack Lounsbury. When Darlyne asked who her father was, Doris showed her a photo of her deceased husband, Albert. To be sure, Darlyne and Judy sent saliva swabs to a DNA testing lab in Vancouver. The results showed they had a 227-to-1likelihood of being full siblings, compared to a 33-to-1 chance of being half-siblings.
“I was surprised,” Darlyne says. “But DNA tells the story.”
She is happy, not resentful or angry. After 15 years of waiting, she doesn’t intend to waste any precious time. “I don’t blame them. That was the era,” she says.
“While Doris is alive, I’m going to do the best that I can to have a relationship with her.”