Making the Family Connection, an amazing story

Making the Family Connection
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Albuquerque Journal
Feb 17, 2012

In December, J. Michael Blair, 67, told his story – what he knew of it – about how as a toddler he was abandoned in a random car in Gallup in 1945 and adopted by parents who thought better of sharing this significant detail with him.

A family friend disclosed the secret to Blair when he was in his 40s, shaking everything he thought he had known about himself. As promised, he waited until his adoptive parents’ deaths before searching for his birth parents, who had left him with little more than blank spaces and a silver bracelet with the name “Elija” engraved on it.

Virginia Buckmelter, a 61-year-old Albuquerque woman, read that story at the urging of her sister, who had seen the photo of Blair as a toddler in the Journal and thought it was Buckmelter.

“I didn’t see the resemblance, but she insisted Mike’s picture was me,” she said.

It was not the photo that prompted her to write me, but Blair’s story. She knew that story. Because it was also her story.

Buckmelter had always known she was adopted, scooped up and saved by her adopted parents from a vehicle on a Gallup roadside.

Or so she had been told.

I put her in touch with Blair, who lives near Astoria, Ore., with his wife, Brenda.

Buckmelter and Blair say they felt an instant connection, as if they had known each other for years.

They began speaking by phone almost daily. Their conversations inspired Buckmelter to have her own adoption files opened. She and Blair also decided to submit to a DNA siblingship test.

And this, folks, is where the story takes a curious turn.

“I’ve never had a case like this,” said Ann House of New Mexico Adoption Search, who had suggested Blair contact me after her records investigation turned up nearly nothing. “I’ve done some 1,500 cases over the last 25 years, and nothing compares to this one.”

According to the DNA analysis performed last month by Genetic Testing Laboratories in Las Cruces, there’s a more than 70 percent chance that Blair and Buckmelter are half-siblings.

“It was like wow, holy cow,” Buckmelter said. “I use the word ‘overwhelmed’ a lot. And ‘happy.’ ”

Blair prefers the word “great.”

The surprises were not over.

Through her adoption records, Buckmelter learned that the story she had shared with Blair of being a baby abandoned in a Gallup car, the story she had believed for years, the story that had ultimately brought her together with the brother she had never known, was simply untrue.

Records show she was not abandoned in a car but turned over to her adoptive parents in July 1950 when she was 2 weeks old with the consent of her birth parents and the assistance of a Gallup minister.

Her birth father was Paul Meador, a tall, fidgety man with unspecified “psychological problems” from Pomona, Calif., who played drums at a local nightclub.

Her mother, who is never named in the records, was about 19, a singer in the band intent on giving up her baby quickly. She had been adopted herself.

Buckmelter’s records held another surprise: There were more siblings.

The records list an 11-month-old girl, Meador’s child from a previous marriage, who was residing with the Meadors in a Gallup motel named Constants Court. An additional child from that previous marriage was given up for adoption, likely in California.

Mrs. Meador had also previously given birth to a girl who was being raised by Mrs. Meador’s adopted parents in Long Beach, Calif.

With House’s guidance, Buckmelter and Blair started digging for more information about their unexpected ancestry (it is not yet known which parent is common to both Buckmelter and Blair).

Through their efforts, they have learned that Mrs. Meador, the singer in Gallup, was Serelda Jeannette King, a young woman with an apparent fondness for sailors, getting pregnant then getting rid of her babies. Had she given birth to Mike, she would have been about 15.

She was married at least three times – to a young Navy seaman named William D. Bryan in 1947; then to Paul, also a Navy seaman; then to Benny B. Benjamin in 1965. According to records, she moved often.

Serelda’s first child on record was Natalie, the child believed to have been raised by Serelda’s adoptive mother, Pearl King, and her husband in California.

Then came Rebecca, born in the fall of 1947.

Sometime in 1948 or 1949, another child was born.

Buckmelter came next in 1950.

Serelda kept none of them.

The one she did keep, it appears, was her last child, Paula Dee Meador, born in September 1951. Paula at different times used the last names of Lowder or Jabbora. She bore at least two sons, but as her mother and mother’s mother before her, gave up both. She died last September.

Blair and Buckmelter do not know what happened to Serelda, or whether she is still alive.

Paul Meador had several marriages as well: Dorothy Mae Nero in 1947; then Serelda; then Billie Darlene Beaudoin in 1957; and a woman named Jessie Miles in 1967.

Meador died in 2000 and was buried in Walterville, Ore., not far from where Blair grew up with his adoptive parents.

“There’s a lot of coincidences like that,” Blair said. “Our paths have crossed several times.”

The most serendipitous and fortuitous, of course, is when Blair met Buckmelter. They are brother and sister now, family, friends, connected in a way they had only imagined.

“When you are adopted, you fantasize about the kind of people you came from,” Buckmelter said. “I think personally we got kind of lucky.”

To which Blair added: “Very, very lucky.”