Mystery Solved After 100 Years
How an online service and its members can solve an intractable mystery from 100 years ago. I had succeeded in finding the identities of some people who had been shielded from the public. For example, Eliot Ness had kept the name of the shocking serial killer who called himself “The American Sweeney Todd” a secret for almost forty years. It took me a few years, but I learned who it was.
After my mother listened to me congratulating myself, she asked why I hadn’t found her biological parents yet even though we had her original birth certificate and her adoption papers. The birth certificate claimed that Olga Steward from Croche, Miss. was the 19-year-old mother of Dorothy Geraldine Bryan and the father was 23-year-old John Bryan, a sailor in the U.S. Navy from Akron, Ohio. Olga Steward said she was married.
The county welfare department had taken my mother from Olga several times after evidence emerged that she suffered from rickets, a disease that can cause softening and malformation of a child’s bones because of extreme and prolonged vitamin D deficiency, malnutrition, and scalding. Thankfully, the couple who adopted my mother were wonderful parents. It was only by accident when she was a young adult that she learned that she had been adopted.
I wondered why she wanted to meet her biological parents since she had been treated so poorly, but I threw myself into the search anyway. My mother’s adoptive parents had been given a story about Olga Steward that might yield some clues. They had been told that Olga came from a Mississippi family with many children and didn’t have the means to send Olga to college. However, Olga’s family had a wealthy cousin living in Shaker Heights, Ohio who agreed to pay her tuition to Flora Stone Mather College, Case Western Reserve’s women’s college. So the story went that Olga moved in with the cousin and became a student at Mather, but when it was obvious she was pregnant, the cousin threw her out and she left school.
My first call was to my alma mater, Flora Stone Mather College, to see what they could provide me about Olga. The school had no Olga in 1917 or 1918 nor any woman from Mississippi. After not finding Croche, Miss. on any Mississippi map, I enlisted the help of four University of Mississippi reference librarians, all of whom assured me there was no Croche in Mississippi. Next I scoured the Mississippi Census records looking for Olga Steward and could not find her. I wrote to the Navy about the John Bryan from Akron and provided a copy of the birth certificate, but the Navy never heard of him. Olga told authorities she was married, but there was no documentation of that in Ohio. I made a trip to Akron to see if I could find John Bryan’s birth certificate or his family. Again, no luck. The Ohio veterans association publishes a book listing veterans from each war, but my John Bryan wasn’t in that WWI book.
I began to think that the entire birth certificate was false except for the date of birth, the hospital, and the name of the doctor. I continued the research as I learned of new reference sources, but I was not optimistic. After my mother passed away, I just stopped looking until earlier this year when there was so much advertising about DNA samples that helped a person find relatives. I gave samples to Ancestry.com, 23andme, and Family Tree DNA.
Suddenly, I had two second and one third cousin on Ancestry.com. All three were from the same family. One of the second cousins, who had collected a treasure house of information about her family, was kind enough to provide me with everything I needed to determine the identity of Olga and a lot of fascinating information about her family. I was stunned and thrilled at the same time.
Finding Grandpa looked like a more difficult project because my so-called John Bryan grandfather wasn’t married to my Olga. Then, a few weeks ago, another second cousin received her DNA test, but her family tree and the family tree of my Olga were completely different. As we communicated, I think we’re very close to ascertaining who Grandpa was.
I am astonished that I have found a whole new part of my family in such a short time and overjoyed that my second cousins are such lovely ladies who have so helpful. I am now learning about the real woman who called herself Olga Steward and the U.S. Navy guy that she called John Bryan. Just wish my mother could have known when she was alive.