Lost for 65 years, a brother who ‘disappeared’ is found

Mike Tussey has only one mental image of the little brother who disappeared 65 years ago.

“The last memory that I have of him was not very much. He was Stephen Patrick, born in 1948,” said Tussey, now 76 and living in Florence. “I remember in this big old house, I remember him: Just a little, black-haired kid running around the house.”

Tussey’s sister, Sharon Horton, has a single memory of a baby brother growing up in their family’s Ashland, Kentucky, home.

“I was walking with my mother down the street, and she’s pushing a baby stroller,” recalled Horton, now 72.

That was it.

Until they learned of Rik Kurtz, 67, of Tampa.

Sixty-five years and all kinds of unanswered questions later, and with the advent “of a wonderful little thing called the Internet,” Tussey says, the three will reunite in Cartersville, Georgia, next weekend.

Mike Tussey can hardly imagine it.

A piece of paper, looking without finding

Tussey said it was his wife, Jo Tussey, who initially sparked his memory of the toddler brother. One day in the mid-1960s she opened a drawer in the Tussey family’s dining room.

“I found this paper. It had ‘Stephen Patrick Tussey, March 5, 1948,’ and ‘may have gone to northern Ohio,’ written on it,” Jo Tussey recalled this week.

“In those days,” she said, “you didn’t ask anything.”

But Jo would ask. She brought the paper to her husband, who tried to explain what had happened in his family years before.

Their parents separated when Mike and his sister were just kids. Mike and Sharon stayed with their father’s family in Ashland. Their mother moved to her family home in Ironton, Ohio, the older kids assuming that she took the baby with her.

“Stephen, as he was called, disappeared,” Mike said.

But in 1950, as the family story goes, the boy was adopted to a family from Columbus.

Details were missing, but it didn’t seem to matter. “I was involved in my childhood,” Tussey explained. “He was gone.”

After Jo Tussey found the slip of paper, she couldn’t let it go. She decided to go to Ohio to try to retrieve records at then-Ironton General Hospital.

Her husband wasn’t optimistic.

But the hospital could offer nothing. “They never kept any records back then,” Jo was told.

“I just resigned myself to ‘I have a brother somewhere,’ ” said Mike, “but (knowing him) is not meant to be.”

His sister was not so easily deterred. She registered with a service in Ohio designed to link family members. It would only work, she was told, if the person adopted were to check there.

It didn’t work.

What Tussey and Horton had no way of knowing was that a man named Rik Kurtz, who had grown up in Columbus with his new family, was wondering about his birth family, too.

“I was always told I had another family. I tried to look for them,” said Kurtz, on a phone call from Tampa. “About 25 years ago I went to see my aunt in Ohio. I was about 43 years old and I asked her point blank: ‘Do you know anything about my adoption?’ ”

She thought she knew his parents’ jobs. As it turned out, she didn’t.

“I just kind of chalked it up to, ‘I’ll never know,’ ” Kurtz said. “Which didn’t hurt me because you can’t lose something you never had.”

Enter the Internet and a helpful Facebook

So Rik, Sharon and Mike went on with their lives, working, raising children, enjoying their years.

But Sharon Horton, more computer savvy than her brothers, continued her hunt – now online.

“In recent years I started thinking again, oh my gosh, I wonder where he is,” Horton said.

She got online repeatedly and searched websites and records. Then one day, a friend of hers encouraged her to try Facebook groups. She found one, then another. And another.

Eventually she came to Search Squad, a closed group with more than 20,000 members. Horton joined and asked for help finding her brother.

Brenda McLain of Tyler, Texas, a member and searcher, stepped in.

With no more to go on than Stephen Patrick’s birth name, birth date and, possibly, the city of his adoption, McLain worked with other searchers who had Ohio resources to confirm what was already known. Next, she searched each male baby born on that date using Ohio birth records.

“I began a process of elimination, tracking each one of them,” McLain said.

She found possible matches – men with the same birth date – through Facebook and search.com.

When McLain tracked one of the adoptee’s names to a man in Florida, she compared photos that Horton had provided of herself and Tussey.

Twenty four hours after she started looking, McLain had found the brother that had been lost for 65 years.

At last, hearing each other’s voices

McLain told Sharon Horton the news. And Sharon did what she has wanted to do for years.

“She calls me one day and she said, ‘Are you sitting down? Sit down,’ ” Tussey said. “She said, ‘I found our brother.’ ”

Horton reached out through a letter to Rik Kurtz, on May 6.

Three days later, she was in a shop when he called.

“I get this card in the mail from my biological sister. She found me through a group on Facebook. I called her,” Kurtz said.

After the two chatted, it was Mike Tussey’s turn to hear his brother’s voice.

“I called him. He answered the phone,” Tussey recalled. “I said, ‘This is your big brother, Mike.’ ”

Since then they’ve been emailing and calling each other. Tussey was thrilled to learn that his baby brother used to be in a rock band: “I had one, too,” he said. The families are noting similarities, such as “bushy eyebrows,” in each other’s photos.

They’re all Facebook friends now.

After next weekend, they’ll be more.