Korean War babies still searching for G.I. dads
62 years after armistice, their time is running out
WASHINGTON In 1959, six years after the Korean War armistice, Estelle Cooke-Sampson came to the USA as a 6-year-old mixedrace adoptee.
She was one of tens of thousands of mixed-race babies who came to the USA after the war, given up by Korean mothers and the soldiers who fathered them.
As the 62nd Korean War Armistice Day is celebrated Monday, Cooke-Sampson is one of many Korean War babies still searching for answers about their parentage.
Cooke-Sampson, 63, a radiologist at Howard University Hospital, works with a California-based organization called Me & Korea that has launched an effort to help reunite Korean War babies with their American GI fathers.
The group has not reunited any Korean War adoptees with their birth fathers, and board member Mary Hiatt said it is still trying to build resources to help with DNA testing and other services.
Cooke-Sampson, who wants to find her birth father, took a trip to Korea in January to discover more about her past.
Like most Korean adoptees, Cooke-Sampson had limited information.
She said her adoptive father, Joseph Henry Cooke, passed away more than 30 years ago. Her mother, Mary E. Cooke, does not have an interest in Korean culture.
Cooke-Sampson’s memories at one orphanage came back strongly.
“I actually found a picture of myself, so I knew I had been there,” Cooke-Sampson said. “And the landscape was just what I had envisioned, the wall I knew, how many feet the gate was from the front door.”
Cooke-Sampson said her next step is to do a DNA test to help find her biological father, who she assumes is either Ethiopian or American based on her skin color. She is concerned about the age of Korean War veterans.
“I would love to (meet him), but considering that person probably would be perhaps in their late 80s or even 90s, they might not even remember me,” CookeSampson said.
In the effort to help adoptees find their birth fathers, Hiatt said the Me & Korea organization asks Korean War veterans who fathered a child in Korea to submit their DNA to a biological tracking ancestry service called 23andMe.
Tia McConnell, a Vietnamese adoptee who lives in Denver, used DNA testing to discover her American GI father was John O’Neal Rucker, the last soldier to be killed in action in Vietnam before the cease-fire.
His family has embraced her, but she warned that some fathers may not want to reunite with their children.
“You can’t just walk into somebody’s life and say ‘Oh, I’m here,’ ” McConnell said.
Despite the obstacles, Hiatt maintains the importance of the reunification process. “I think everybody wants to know where they came from,” she said.