It isn’t easy to pick up a phone and call an Investigative Company. What do you say, how do you say it, will you be able to express your thoughts and feelings to someone you don’t know? Is that gut feeling just a passing thought that has taken on too much of itself or is there just enough truth in it to make that call?
Believe me; Investigators all across America have heard just about every conceivable story told by their Clients. A scenario involving a spouse, an ex-spouse, a friend, lover, family member, co-worker, boss, neighbor and even an unknown! We have worked every type of case before and have a strategy that can assist us in obtaining factual results. There isn’t a life event that we at one time have not investigated. So when you pick up the phone and make that call, your particular investigative need will be reviewed and you will be advised as to the best way to come to a solution.
Mary was a prominent business woman; she was married to a very eccentric man with whom she loved dearly. He worked from home and she ventured out to her office every day. Their time together was spent doing all the things in life that made them happy, but something was different with him, he was always a moment behind in their conversations, he appeared to be listening, he was looking straight at her and then Mary realized she was repeating more and more because his focus wasn’t on her. He was elsewhere.
One day, out of the context, he asked her if she had missed having children. They had everything, but they did not bring any children into the world. They had agreed they didn’t want to have children from the beginning, had he been having regrets on their decision?
Mary picked up the phone and called us, just to ask a few questions, just to place her thoughts and feelings upon another’s plate. Mary’s concerns were very personal and emotional and her words were chosen with much thought, but in the end, it was apparent Mary was worried that the man she loved was on the verge of regretting that long ago decision.
Mary had found telephone numbers she didn’t recognize written on a piece of paper that was neither in her handwriting or her husbands and there was a date on it, May 3, 1957. The prefix was an Oregon exchange, the paper appeared to have been folded and unfolded many times, the edges worn and there were small tears where the paper had become thin. Mary handed the paper to us and asked if we could determine who the number belonged to those many years ago. We determined the number at one time belonged to a private adoption agency that had been out of business for many years. The number had also been assigned to a paint store, a private individual who had passed away and was currently an unused number.
The next time we heard from Mary, she knew more, she knew her husband had fathered a child and that child was born on May 3, 1957 in Oregon. The mother of the child had died in childbirth and the baby, a girl, was adopted, her husband was a young man at the time, just enrolled in college and was not in a position to take care of a child, so he made the decision to place the child with parents who could provide for her and give her a home with both a mother and a father.
Through the years, her husband would take the note from his wallet as a reminder that his baby girl would grow up and never know her mother and her father made the hardest decision in his life so that she would have a good life. And now, her father was losing his battle with cancer and he wanted to find her, but in doing so he would be forced to tell his wife not only was he dying, but he had for a brief moment held a baby he had fathered and had given away. He wanted to know if his decision was the right one.
Finding missing heirs, or conducting missing children investigations or locating unknown heirs are probably the hardest cases to work. Not only are they emotional, but there are few leads to go by. To find a birth parent, or to find a birth mother, in this case, we knew the name, or conduct an adoption search, we had the name of the agency, and we felt that we could accomplish his request. Through our research, we had located a volunteer who had worked at the adoption agency who provided us with a lead. She had remembered our Client’s husband, as it was the first case she had assisted. She said she would never forget the case, the mother passed away and the father had cried when he signed the papers. She remembered the name of the woman who took the child from the hospital to the adoptive family. There are sites that assist to find biological parents, but in this case, the missing heir was our Client’s husband’s daughter. With additional research and many calls we did locate his daughter. She was herself a grandmother and was willing to meet the man whose decision provided her a happy and healthy life.
Brenda McGinley, CEO, All in Investigations
B. McGinley, Director of Operations,
