The following teaser is from an article posted in the April 6, 2014 edition of mysanantonio.com:
SAN ANTONIO — When Daisy Beagle’s daughters grew up, they remembered their mother’s stories about the baby girl she gave up for adoption. They remembered how she’d talk about the hard days, trying to raise five children in Kansas City in the 1940s. And they remembered how she’d wonder aloud if the child had a good life.
In February, one of the sisters, Sybil Panko, received a certified letter at her home in Merritt Island, Fla., from San Antonio. The writer, Verda Byrd, claimed to be the infant that Beagle had given up in 1944.
Panko was leery. She called her younger sister in Dallas, Debbie Romero.
“Guess what I got in the mail?” she said. “A letter from a woman saying she’s my sister. And there’s a phone number.”
Romero called the number. When Byrd, 71, answered, Romero said there wasn’t a doubt. The woman was her sister.
“There’s no denying,” Romero said. “I know she’s my sister, I don’t need a DNA test.”
After a 70-year separation, Byrd found sisters she never knew existed. After an exhaustive search on the Internet and library archives, she located three living siblings: Panko, 76; Romero, 56; and Kathryn Gutierrez, 59, of Omaha, Neb.
