W4LNY

Just in time for Christmas
Island man is reunited with birth mother after 24 years

By Joanne Sherman

 

The e-mail sent to newspapers and dated December 13, 2001, began: "My name is David. I am searching for my birth mother." That letter was just one step -- as it turned out, one of the final steps -- in the decade-long quest of 28-year old Islander David Beatson.

 

David, who grew up in Happaugue, had moved to Shelter Island last summer. "I always wanted to live on a real island," he told the Reporter in November when he was interviewed about the electric car he drives. In that article he mentioned Joe and Cynthia Santillo who had become his friends when he moved here and helped him join the fire department. They were also instrumental in helping David find his birth mother.

 

Until a few weeks before Christmas all David had to go on was his mother's first name, Judy, and that circumstances had forced her to put him up for adoption when he was four.

 

When he was 18, and with the support of his adoptive parents, David decided to find his birth mother. He contacted registries available to people searching for birth parents or children who were given up for adoption. He also got in touch with Suffolk County Social Services, which had handled his adoption, but could never come up with enough information to bring him any closer to the woman he knew only as Judy.

 

David told his story of looking for his birth mother to the Santillos who knew of another Islander who had been through the same thing. "It was Dawn LoBue," David said. "Joe was asking her questions about how she had gone about finding her birth parents. She told him that I should come and talk to her myself." David did that and credits Dawn for "getting the fire going underneath me."

 

"I didn't do anything," Dawn said, insisting that all she provided was "moral support." She said David was a dynamo and that he already was doing what he needed to do to try to find his birth mother.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help much when all you have to go on is a birth date and a first name. And David didn't even know if his mother was alive or if she wanted to be contacted by the child she had given up so many years before. But with the encouragement of his parents, his friends and his employers at Cross Country Computer in Happaugue, and with the determination of a detective, David persisted. If he ran into a dead end, he backed up and tried a different road. If he came up against a locked door, he tried another. When it seemed like there was nowhere else to look, he went back to places he'd already been, always hopeful. He was driven.

 

Late in the fall he went to speak with a woman at Social Services in an effort to uncover just a shred of information that might help him. He described the woman as "nice," but she couldn't provide him with any more than what he already knew. He went to see her again, and again came away with nothing. It was during his third visit, on December 12, that everything changed.

 

"There's something I need to tell you," she said, explaining that it had been "very hard for her since the first time I went there to meet her, because she knew my mom" and also knew that his mother wanted to find him. Then, slowly and carefully -- because legally she could not reveal any "identifying" information -- she was able to fill in some of the gaping holes from his earliest years. As it turned out, this woman he had been dealing with in an effort to locate his birth mother had been "Judy's" caseworker. She was the person who had driven David to his first foster home.

 

"She told me my mother was a good woman who cared and loved me very much," he said. And that she didn't want to give him up, but wanted what was best for him. The woman told him that his mother had tried to find information about David approximately five years after she had given him up. "I was about nine at the time," David said. The social worker couldn't reveal anything because he had been adopted by the Beatson family long before. David said the social worker told him how difficult it had been since he had first gone to see her, because "she knew my mom so well," and knew his mother would want him to find her. The social worker could not reveal any other information to David, but she said she would ask the state to make an exception so that she could reunite him with his birth mother. Her request was turned down.

 

That refusal didn't matter in the end, because just a few days after his meeting with the social worker, on December 15, David went to the library in West Islip to scan old newspapers for information about births that took place on April 17, 1973. "Adoptive parents are given amended birth certificates," David explained. His indicated his town of birth, though not the name of the hospital. He'd already looked through old newspapers, but he went to the library to try again. It was in an old issue of the Islip Bulletin that he came across an announcement of a David John Lawson, born on April 17, 1973, to Mr. and Mrs. David Lawson at Good Samaritan Hospital in Bay Shore. That was it, he was sure of it. He went to the hospital to see if he could get more information and was told his request would take "about a week" to process. But while he was waiting, other doors started to swing open.

 

David took advantage of his computer background to make sure that his name and information about his search was listed on the Internet. Each time he'd make another discovery, he would update his file. During the week he was waiting to hear from the hospital, he discovered that his birth mother had registered with an adoption-information agency in the early 1990s. The name she had given then was Judith Splendorio and she lived in the Bay Shore area. But so much time had passed, her address was no longer valid. So David started making phone calls. There were five Splendorios in the phone book, he said, "and I called all of them." When someone would answer, he'd begin with, "My name is David," and then explained that he was trying to find his birth mother.

 

A woman who answered the phone at a West Babylon home said her name was Nancy and that she was his aunt. She told him that his mother had been looking for him, too.

 

"I left work and went to West Babylon," he said. "When I pulled up" to the house, "I could hear screaming. I didn't know what was going on." A woman came running out of the house toward him. David didn't know if it was his mother, Judy, or his Aunt Nancy. It turned out to be his aunt who told him that she had already called his mother and she was on her way over.

 

As David -- who is a fast talker anyhow -- told this part of his story, the words poured out so quickly, it was difficult to keep pace with him. And it was easy to understand how he must have been overwhelmed with a variety of emotions when he realized that he was nearly at the end of a decade-long search. "My birth mother had four sisters and two brothers," David said, expressing a sort of awe at the size of the family that he is a part of. "It hit me, I have 24 cousins."

 

"I never assumed that everyone [in the family] would know about me," he said, but his birth and adoption had never been kept a secret. "They all told their kids."

 

After his birth mother arrived, one of the first things she said to him was, "Let me see your chin."

 

"I knew why," he said, lifting his head and pointing to a spot just under his chin. "I had a birthmark that was "removed when I was 16." That wasn't a birthmark, his birth mother told him, explaining that when he was about two months old, she was cooking eggs -- stirring them with a spoon. David started to cry and she picked him up, forgetting about the hot spoon. It burned him under his chin. David laughs over the fact that for so many years he, his parents and the doctors all worried about his birthmark, when actually, it was a burn mark.

 

David's reunion with his birth mother and her family was, as he described it, a "wonderful experience, very positive." But he still wondered about his father. Now that he had full access to information he got the number of his father's parents and called them. "My grandmother was thrilled to talk to me," he said. He spoke with his birth father, too. "He was in tears on the phone. He told me, 'I loved your mother and I loved you very much,'" and took full responsibility for deserting his wife and son nearly three decades earlier.

 

David was able to piece together the full story of the circumstances of his birth and then his adoption. His birth parents were in their late teens when Judy got pregnant. There was a wedding, but David's father had a drinking problem that got worse and he "just left," so David's mother was on her own. "I was with her for 20 months," David said, then he was placed in foster care. "I was in three different foster homes until I was five," he said, and was adopted by the Beatsons the next year.

 

David's birth father lives in North Carolina and no longer drinks, but because of health problems can't travel to New York, so David will be going to meet him for the first time this weekend. David spent Christmas morning with his parents, the Beatsons, at their home. "My adoptive mother is my mother," he said. "She's the one I have a mother-son relationship with. My birth mother --she's like a close friend, a relative."

 

All that's happened during the past couple of weeks has required a big adjustment on the part of everyone, including the Beatsons. But he was able to give his parents a special Christmas gift -- something they wouldn't have had if he hadn't started his search -- photographs of himself when he was a baby that his birth mother gave him. Later on Christmas day, David spent time with his birth mother's family, meeting all those aunts and uncles and those two dozen cousins.

 

It was a wonderful experience and "kind of spooky," David said. "They talk loud and fast, and so do I." He described them as fast eaters, too, another trait he shares. David has always loved and still loves model trains. It turned out that a lot of his birth mother's family worked for the Long Island Rail Road -- the railroad turnaround in Riverhead is named for one of his relatives -- and his birth mother's father, who's 75, is also a model train buff. "He's got them all set up in his basement," David said.

 

David is only just beginning to learn about the family he's recently discovered, but he's convinced that this might not have happened if it hadn't been for the fact that he ended up on Shelter Island and without the help of the Santillos and Dawn LoBue.

 

"All those years of looking but not finding," and then to have everything come together in less than two weeks. "I believe everything happens for a reason," he said. "The whole thing has been very positive all the way around." He realizes that it could have turned out differently but he was prepared for that possibility, too. "I hope that my story" encourages other people who might be searching for birth parents, "not to be scared. That it might get them going."

 

It did help him to have the support of family, friends on the Island and his employer. His company even helped financially by paying for half the cost of an ad he placed in Newsday. He had arranged for the ad to run for a specified number of days before he made that fateful call to his Aunt Nancy. It appeared in the paper on New Year's Day, the same day David told his story to the Reporter.