Looking for Laura

How do you find someone you’ve never met, and know nothing about except a name and date of birth? I don’t even know if her birth name is the name she uses.

Here is what I do know: her original birth certificate gives her name as Laura Carbis, born May 29, 1945 in New York City to Marilyn Carbis. Her father’s name is unlisted. Her original birth certificate was not sealed, which may mean she was never adopted. Then again, maybe she was privately adopted soon afterwards, and a new birth certificate issued. I suspect that in 1945, it would not have been particularly hard to disguise an adoption as a home birth. So maybe Laura has never known she was adopted, never known her name was Laura, has never imagined that she has at least one sister who is looking for her.

My half sister, Linda, is also the daughter of Marilyn Carbis. She has been looking for Laura since she first found out that Marilyn had a child who she gave up. In fact, it was through Linda’s search for Laura that we found out we were related. Here is where the story gets complimented.

Marilyn and her sister grew up with their parents, Frank and Theresa, in an apartment in Astoria, New York. The building had six apartments; they lived in the first floor, front. My father, Billy, his two brothers, and his sister, Betty, lived in an apartment across the street, and by 1940, had moved in that same building, in the second floor, front apartment. Marilyn and Betty were best friends.

We don’t know what Marilyn did in the immediate aftermath of Laura’s birth, but we do know that in October, 1945, she married a man named Donald Simons. She could not have known him long; he had been a Prisoner of War and had not been back in the US for very long. The wedding announcement, in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania newspaper (the area Donald was from) lists her only attendant as Blanche Alexander.

Had Donald known about Laura? Had Marilyn broken up with Laura’s father and married Donald on the rebound? We can only speculate, since we have only rumor, innuendo, and inference to take us further.

In late 1944 and early 1945, my father (who is also Linda’s father) was in the US Navy, and wrote letters to at least one, and likely multiple, girls back home. One of those girls was my mother, who saved his letters. Billy was 21 in 1944, as was Marilyn. My mother, Kitty, was 16 and was employed as a live-in au pair for Betty’s two children. Dad’s letters vacillate between addressing Kitty as the teenager and family friend/employee she was, and more romantically as a girl back home. (The romantic parts of the letters are uncomfortable to read, not because they are my parents, but because I find them inappropriate to be written by a 21 year old to a 16 year old.) In one sentence, he is calling her Kitten, and saying he wants to come home to her. In the next paragraph, he is saying he can’t break up with Marilyn until she has the baby. In another letter, he denies being the baby’s father. Of course, that leads me to ask why could he not break up with Marilyn if she was carrying someone else’s baby?

Everyone we know who may have known the real facts are long gone. Don died in 1959. Marilyn died in 1966. Marilyn’s mother died in 1970; her father in 1977. Billy died in 1985. It was after that that Linda first heard rumors of another child; it was after that that she was first told by someone that “her father was not her father.” The bits and pieces of information we ever learned from either of them were either deliberately vague and unhelpful or outright fabrications. For instance, was Laura’s father a guy named Joe from around the corner who did not make it back from the war? Did my mother really know nothing or was her comment “it wasn’t my secret to tell” window dressing? When Betty claimed that Laura was adopted by some people “named Alexander”, who worked at the same place as Betty, did she know the Alexanders were part of Marilyn and Don’s wedding party? Betty died in 2002; Kitty in 2003, taking the secret with them.

And what about the second secret? You can’t really tell from the picture above, but all three of us look alike. There are pictures of Linda as a child that my mother insisted were of me; there is a picture of Linda on a tricycle that I could easily mistake for a picture of our middle sister, Mary. But that secret, that Linda was our half sister, was hidden in plain sight. Linda’s grandparents lived downstairs from us; Mary and I used to play a game where we went downstairs and pretended to be Linda and her brother coming to visit Grandma and Grandpa. In retrospect, that was cruel, especially since the adults around us knew or should have known the truth. Not only did we always call them Grandma and Grandpa, but our brother Ted had already started school before he found out they weren’t our true grandparents.

I am very lucky that I knew Linda my entire life. I used to call her “my cousin who isn’t really my cousin” – which itself was odd, because I had plenty to cousins I was not really related to, but Linda was always described with a certain specification. But we did not remain close. After all, how do you include your pretend cousins in your larger family gatherings? It wasn’t until December, 2016 that I got the best Christmas present ever, another big sister.

Linda, Mary, Ted and I are all anxious to find Laura. Laura, we are sorry we have never gotten to know you, and we hope that changes soon. We wish we had known sooner; we wish your parents and all the others who knew the story had told us sooner; we wish you had been kept in the family; and we hope you had a great childhood and are having a great life. We’ve done Ancesty DNA and we hope we find you. We hear a lot of stories of people finding their birth families and not being welcomed. Be assured, we are waiting with open arms for you.