Woman says she feels a sense of closure after years of searching
By Chuck Carlson
Battle Creek Enquirer
BATTLE CREEK, Mich. (AP) — It was 1946 and a pregnant 17-year-old named Joyce Wood found herself in a bad situation.
She had met a U.S. Marine on leave; he left her in a circumstance that was taboo for 17-year-old girls in the 1940s.
Furious and embarrassed, the girl’s father exiled her from her home in Albion to Jackson, where she gave birth to a girl at the Florence Crittenton youth home.
The baby was quickly taken away and put up for immediate adoption, though Joyce was able to ask if it was a boy or a girl.
A boy, she was told, who would be offered for adoption out of state.
Mary Kibbe knew the story since she was the baby. She wasn’t a boy, and after a stay in a Battle Creek orphanage, she was adopted at 10 months old by Wallace and Lois Falconer from Scottville.
The adoption became official in 1949, the year the brother she wouldn’t know for six decades was born, the Battle Creek Enquirer reported.
“I had no idea I had a sister,” said Robin Avery, who learned only a few weeks ago that Mary even existed. Since then he has spent hours finding out as much as he could about her.
The two siblings, Avery, 66, and Kibbe, 68, met for the first time in mid-June at a Kalamazoo restaurant, joined by Mary’s daughter and Robin’s new niece, Lisa Bredahl.
“It was wonderful,” Kibbe said. “We had actually spoken on the phone before this but I couldn’t wait to see him. I was curious to see if he looked like his mom but he probably more resembled his dad. I just wanted to hear any stories he had of my mother and he had more questions than I did. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
There is a lifetime the two have to catch up on but the story starts with Kibbe deciding almost 40 years ago to find out what she could about the mother who had to give her up at birth — the child who was originally called Penelope.
“I just wanted to get some answers,” she said. “I wanted to know what my parents looked like and who I looked like. I was just one of those curious people.”
Over the years, Kibbe went to Ferris State University, where she met her future husband, William. They settled in Manton, near Cadillac, where she spent 25 years in the banking business and had two kids, Lisa and Kevin. These days, she’s office manager at her church and she teaches dance and piano to local kids.
Meanwhile, in Battle Creek, after Robin Avery left the Navy, he worked at the Federal Center as a management analyst and, he admits freely, raised his share of hell.
His marriage to Sherry ended in divorce and he had four daughters, two of whom he hasn’t spoken to in ages.
“I flat-out told Mary that she was so proper and I was a sailor and I drank and I smoked,” he said with a laugh.
But it was Mary’s perseverance and the help of Robin’s cousin, Sue Kopulos, that helped reunite a brother and sister.
Kopulos, who lives in Homer, was the only person who knew that Joyce Wood had a baby at 17 and had given it up for adoption.
Wood had told Kopulos her secret years earlier, and Kopulos had kept it.
“My dad didn’t even know,” Avery said.
After several attempts over the years to find out her family history came up empty, Kibbe recently took a DNA test supplied by the lineage website ancestry.com and several names popped up, she said.
Upon learning of a cousin in Arizona, she said the pieces began falling into place.
“After that things went very fast,” Mary said. “I found I had a brother, deceased, and a brother in Battle Creek.”
Mary’s daughter then found information on Avery and contacted his ex-wife, who contacted their daughter, Larin.
“My daughter calls me and says, ‘This woman is trying to get hold of you,’” he said.
“I wouldn’t call because I thought he’d think it was a scam,” Mary said. “I never thought he’d believe me.”
But Avery was intrigued.
“I hadn’t had a good laugh that day and I wanted to find out,” he said.
They talked on the phone and Avery soon learned that she knew family history she wouldn’t have known otherwise.
So he called Kopulos for information and she revealed the decades-old secret about his mother.
“I was grateful she shared that with me,” he said.
Kibbe now hopes to get to know the family she never knew a little better. A family reunion is planned for later this summer.
She said she’s found a sense of closure after years of searching, though she still wishes she knew more about her birth father.
For Avery and his wife of 14 years, Diana, it’s been an unexpected journey of discovery.
“I was happy for him,” Diana said. “I was thinking, ‘This always happens to everyone else, not us.’”
Avery showed an email from Mary thanking him for last weekend’s meeting that ended with a simple, “Love, Sis.”
“That’s nice,” he said.
