LilMtnCbn
07-08-2004, 06:16 AM
http://www.auroranewsregister.com/77news1.html
Sister search ends happily
Phillips woman finally finds sister she’s never met
Sisters Sonya Harris, left, and Cindi Boersen reunited last week after
searching for each other for a quarter of a century and now are reluctant to
let each other out of sight or out of hugging distance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Laurie Pfeifer
They grew up 1,400 miles apart.
Cindi Boersen was born Jan. 1, 1952 in Grand Island.
Sonya Harris was born Nov. 30, 1953 in Los Angeles
For more than a quarter of a century, neither knew the other existed.
Even after relatives finally started dropping hints that they had a
sibling, it took them another 25 years before they found each other.
Secrecy.
Unknown paternity.
Phone calls that dead-ended.
A trip to an address in California that missed its mark by just days.
The roadblocks were everywhere, but somehow Cindi and Sonya, sisters born
23 months apart, found their way back to each other last week and it’s been
nothing but smiles and tears of happiness ever since.
“I’ve smiled so much the past few days my cheek bones hurt,” Boersen
said as she leaned over to plant a kiss on her sister’s cheek.
It’s a happy ending to a frustrating turn of events, the sisters note.
Cindi found out she had a sibling in 1979 and has been looking for her ever
since, only to have one door after another slam shut.
Sonya found out she had a sister in 1985, but was at a loss as to where to
begin looking. She also was afraid she’d disrupt lives in her quest, so she
went on with life, feeling incomplete.
Their story begins in 1951 when Cindi’s mother, Dixie LaVone Packard, met
Indiana truck driver Jack Lee. Packard became pregnant and gave birth to Cindi
on New Year’s Day, 1952.
Lee didn’t stick around. “He had a roving eye,” Cindi said of her
father. “He was a rover.”
Dixie became pregnant again early in 1953, briefly moved to Los Angeles,
Calif. to give birth to Sonya and returned home without her. Her newborn
daughter was adopted by a childless aunt and uncle, Helen and Robert Vance, and
raised as an only child.
Call it a sixth sense, intuition, invisible family ties, but Sonya said she
always felt there was something her parents weren’t telling her. “I always
had a feeling I was adopted,” Sonya said. “But my parents always said
no.”
Eighteen-year-old Sonya was cleaning out some drawers in her mother’s
closet when she found her birth certificate and realized the truth.
“I never knew I was a Packard until I was 18 and found my birth
certificate,” she said. “That was a heck of a way to find out I was
adopted, being nice and cleaning my mother’s drawers for her.”
She began asking questions: The birth certificate gave her the name of her
mother, but who was her father? Did she have siblings somewhere?
Nobody was willing to give up the information she wanted so she finally
quit asking.
She married a military man and they lived in Guam, Florida and California.
She returned home in 1978 to take care of her ailing mother, who died the
following year.
Finally, before her father died in 1985, he told her the truth -- he told
her he wanted her to know she had family.
“I always had a sense that there was someone out there, especially after
my husband died,” Sonya said. “I felt I had family out there, but with no
one to help me, I didn’t know what to do or how to find them.”
While Cindi found out she had a sibling at an earlier age and had the
support of her husband in trying to locate her family, she was having little
success. She was initially told she had a brother out there in 1979. Then an
aunt told her the truth in 1985 -- she had a sister.
“I went through relation I never knew, I went to adoption centers, I
looked through marriage records and death records and didn’t get anywhere,”
Cindi said.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, Sonya had remarried and was finding support
from her husband. They made a trip to Nebraska in 1995 and spent hours and
hours in the Grand Island library looking for links to her family on the
Packard side. She returned to California empty handed.
It was Cindi who finally turned to the Internet and met with success. “I
found 20 Sonya Lynn Packards,” she said with a laugh.
She began making phone calls, eliminating the Sonyas from her list as she
went.
Finally, striking out with every Sonya on the list, Cindi went to the
Internet once last time. She logged on to Pieces of Dreams, part of the Angel
Network, and made contact with a lady named Amy.
“She really helped me out. She sent me the birthdays of Heidi and John
Robert, then she sent me Sonya’s birth date and marriage certificate and a
another page of Sonya Lynns,” Cindi said. At the bottom of the list was the
name Parsons, opening up a whole other avenue for her search.
She finally got through to an H.E. Parsons, Sonya’s first mother-in-law,
and then to her sister’s ex-brother-in-law. He called his brother and his
brother called his daughter, Heidi -- Cindi’s niece.
“Dad called me and asked for mom’s phone number because her sister
found her,” said Heidi, who flew to Nebraska with her mother for the reunion.
Because her parents don’t speak, Heidi said she was worried her mother
wouldn’t answer the phone when her dad called to give her the news. “I
called her and told her when dad calls she had to answer the phone because he
had news about her sister,” Heidi said. “She didn’t believe it, but I
kept telling her it was true. Then she started crying.”
The wheels were in motion
After years of searching, Sonya and Cindi heard each other’s voices for
the first time that day -- Fathers Day, 2004.
“We’ve been talking on the phone every day since then,” Cindi said.
But it was their reunion at the airport in Omaha that made it real. They
could see each other, feel each other. They hugged, kissed, cried, hugged some
more.
The information exchange has been non-stop since they found each other on
Father’s Day.
So have the photo ops.
“I swear, she has a camera in her hand when she comes downstairs and
wakes me up in the morning,” Sonya says of her sister.
They’ve found many similarities in the directions their lives took. They
married less than a year apart, their kids were born in alternating years.
“They also make the same clicking noise with their mouth, they hate to
wear shoes and they love the outdoors,” Heidi chimes in.
Just the beginning
The rural Phillips resident said last week’s reunion with her sister is
only the beginning.
She received phone calls from a woman in Grand Island Thursday morning,
telling her that her mother gave birth to a set of twins between August of 1954
and August of 1955. “I believe they’re our siblings,” Cindi said with a
smile. “We’re going to have relatives coming out of the woodwork.”
She’s found she has several half-brothers, children her dad fathered with
different mothers. She’s also found a new aunt in Phillips, another in Grand
Island and a third in Indiana. “It’s mind boggling what’s happening,”
she said. “I wasn’t even looking for my father and found all these
relatives.”
Cindi is planning several family reunions for Sonya -- small gatherings so
she can get adjusted to the the fact she has such a large family.
Despite their half-century separation and the disappointments they
experienced trying to find each other, the sisters are trying to focus on the
positive.
“We’ve lost so much time. We’ve lost 50 years together because some
knew about my adoption but refused to tell me,” Sonya said.
“What makes me so mad is my aunts knew all along that I had a sister and
wouldn’t give me the information I needed,” Cindi added.
But, they agree, it’s the end result that matters most. They found each
other.
“I feel like there’s been a void filled,” Cindi said. “I feel
whole. A piece of me that was missing is found.”
And finding her sister has given Sonya an entirely new outlook on the month
of June, a month that stirs sad memories of her son’s death on June 9, 1996
and her husband’s death on June 28, 2002. “This is the first time in eight
years that my tears in June have been tears of joy,” she said.
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
Sister search ends happily
Phillips woman finally finds sister she’s never met
Sisters Sonya Harris, left, and Cindi Boersen reunited last week after
searching for each other for a quarter of a century and now are reluctant to
let each other out of sight or out of hugging distance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Laurie Pfeifer
They grew up 1,400 miles apart.
Cindi Boersen was born Jan. 1, 1952 in Grand Island.
Sonya Harris was born Nov. 30, 1953 in Los Angeles
For more than a quarter of a century, neither knew the other existed.
Even after relatives finally started dropping hints that they had a
sibling, it took them another 25 years before they found each other.
Secrecy.
Unknown paternity.
Phone calls that dead-ended.
A trip to an address in California that missed its mark by just days.
The roadblocks were everywhere, but somehow Cindi and Sonya, sisters born
23 months apart, found their way back to each other last week and it’s been
nothing but smiles and tears of happiness ever since.
“I’ve smiled so much the past few days my cheek bones hurt,” Boersen
said as she leaned over to plant a kiss on her sister’s cheek.
It’s a happy ending to a frustrating turn of events, the sisters note.
Cindi found out she had a sibling in 1979 and has been looking for her ever
since, only to have one door after another slam shut.
Sonya found out she had a sister in 1985, but was at a loss as to where to
begin looking. She also was afraid she’d disrupt lives in her quest, so she
went on with life, feeling incomplete.
Their story begins in 1951 when Cindi’s mother, Dixie LaVone Packard, met
Indiana truck driver Jack Lee. Packard became pregnant and gave birth to Cindi
on New Year’s Day, 1952.
Lee didn’t stick around. “He had a roving eye,” Cindi said of her
father. “He was a rover.”
Dixie became pregnant again early in 1953, briefly moved to Los Angeles,
Calif. to give birth to Sonya and returned home without her. Her newborn
daughter was adopted by a childless aunt and uncle, Helen and Robert Vance, and
raised as an only child.
Call it a sixth sense, intuition, invisible family ties, but Sonya said she
always felt there was something her parents weren’t telling her. “I always
had a feeling I was adopted,” Sonya said. “But my parents always said
no.”
Eighteen-year-old Sonya was cleaning out some drawers in her mother’s
closet when she found her birth certificate and realized the truth.
“I never knew I was a Packard until I was 18 and found my birth
certificate,” she said. “That was a heck of a way to find out I was
adopted, being nice and cleaning my mother’s drawers for her.”
She began asking questions: The birth certificate gave her the name of her
mother, but who was her father? Did she have siblings somewhere?
Nobody was willing to give up the information she wanted so she finally
quit asking.
She married a military man and they lived in Guam, Florida and California.
She returned home in 1978 to take care of her ailing mother, who died the
following year.
Finally, before her father died in 1985, he told her the truth -- he told
her he wanted her to know she had family.
“I always had a sense that there was someone out there, especially after
my husband died,” Sonya said. “I felt I had family out there, but with no
one to help me, I didn’t know what to do or how to find them.”
While Cindi found out she had a sibling at an earlier age and had the
support of her husband in trying to locate her family, she was having little
success. She was initially told she had a brother out there in 1979. Then an
aunt told her the truth in 1985 -- she had a sister.
“I went through relation I never knew, I went to adoption centers, I
looked through marriage records and death records and didn’t get anywhere,”
Cindi said.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, Sonya had remarried and was finding support
from her husband. They made a trip to Nebraska in 1995 and spent hours and
hours in the Grand Island library looking for links to her family on the
Packard side. She returned to California empty handed.
It was Cindi who finally turned to the Internet and met with success. “I
found 20 Sonya Lynn Packards,” she said with a laugh.
She began making phone calls, eliminating the Sonyas from her list as she
went.
Finally, striking out with every Sonya on the list, Cindi went to the
Internet once last time. She logged on to Pieces of Dreams, part of the Angel
Network, and made contact with a lady named Amy.
“She really helped me out. She sent me the birthdays of Heidi and John
Robert, then she sent me Sonya’s birth date and marriage certificate and a
another page of Sonya Lynns,” Cindi said. At the bottom of the list was the
name Parsons, opening up a whole other avenue for her search.
She finally got through to an H.E. Parsons, Sonya’s first mother-in-law,
and then to her sister’s ex-brother-in-law. He called his brother and his
brother called his daughter, Heidi -- Cindi’s niece.
“Dad called me and asked for mom’s phone number because her sister
found her,” said Heidi, who flew to Nebraska with her mother for the reunion.
Because her parents don’t speak, Heidi said she was worried her mother
wouldn’t answer the phone when her dad called to give her the news. “I
called her and told her when dad calls she had to answer the phone because he
had news about her sister,” Heidi said. “She didn’t believe it, but I
kept telling her it was true. Then she started crying.”
The wheels were in motion
After years of searching, Sonya and Cindi heard each other’s voices for
the first time that day -- Fathers Day, 2004.
“We’ve been talking on the phone every day since then,” Cindi said.
But it was their reunion at the airport in Omaha that made it real. They
could see each other, feel each other. They hugged, kissed, cried, hugged some
more.
The information exchange has been non-stop since they found each other on
Father’s Day.
So have the photo ops.
“I swear, she has a camera in her hand when she comes downstairs and
wakes me up in the morning,” Sonya says of her sister.
They’ve found many similarities in the directions their lives took. They
married less than a year apart, their kids were born in alternating years.
“They also make the same clicking noise with their mouth, they hate to
wear shoes and they love the outdoors,” Heidi chimes in.
Just the beginning
The rural Phillips resident said last week’s reunion with her sister is
only the beginning.
She received phone calls from a woman in Grand Island Thursday morning,
telling her that her mother gave birth to a set of twins between August of 1954
and August of 1955. “I believe they’re our siblings,” Cindi said with a
smile. “We’re going to have relatives coming out of the woodwork.”
She’s found she has several half-brothers, children her dad fathered with
different mothers. She’s also found a new aunt in Phillips, another in Grand
Island and a third in Indiana. “It’s mind boggling what’s happening,”
she said. “I wasn’t even looking for my father and found all these
relatives.”
Cindi is planning several family reunions for Sonya -- small gatherings so
she can get adjusted to the the fact she has such a large family.
Despite their half-century separation and the disappointments they
experienced trying to find each other, the sisters are trying to focus on the
positive.
“We’ve lost so much time. We’ve lost 50 years together because some
knew about my adoption but refused to tell me,” Sonya said.
“What makes me so mad is my aunts knew all along that I had a sister and
wouldn’t give me the information I needed,” Cindi added.
But, they agree, it’s the end result that matters most. They found each
other.
“I feel like there’s been a void filled,” Cindi said. “I feel
whole. A piece of me that was missing is found.”
And finding her sister has given Sonya an entirely new outlook on the month
of June, a month that stirs sad memories of her son’s death on June 9, 1996
and her husband’s death on June 28, 2002. “This is the first time in eight
years that my tears in June have been tears of joy,” she said.
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
