Father and Child Reunion : Daughter’s Decades-Long Search Finally Has Happy Ending

For 28 years, the only evidence Judy Laberto had that her father ever existed was some faded memories and an equally faded photograph showing a smiling, black-haired man. And a golden wedding ring.

When Laberto moved to California from Germany eight years ago, she put her father’s wedding ring on a gold chain around her neck and silently vowed never to take it off until she found her dad.

It was a vow that the 33-year-old Mission Viejo woman would break just once--on her wedding day when she temporarily put the ring into a small white clutch bag that she carried with her up the aisle.

On Wednesday, almost three decades of separation ended at the San Diego Airport. And tonight, the wedding band will find a new home in Laberto’s jewelry box.

“I had given up hope of ever finding him,” Laberto said Thursday as she smiled at James Small in the living room of her Mission Viejo condominium. “Now, we’re a family again.”

Laberto’s mother, Marianne Small, had taken her along when she moved back to her German homeland in 1963 after a painful divorce. Laberto was 4 then. Laberto said that as the years passed, her mother’s words were laced with anger on the rare occasions when she spoke of her ex-husband.

James Small, now 55, says he wrote his daughter many letters and never received a reply. Laberto said his messages were not passed along to her.

Marianne Small never remarried, and as Laberto grew to be a teen-ager, she found herself missing the father she had hardly known.

“I missed sitting in his lap,” she said, “and I missed hugging him and talking to him and then I realized that I had to find my dad.”

At the age of 15, she began what would turn into an 18-year search for her father, sending a trail of letters from Waco, Tex., where he was stationed with the Air Force, to Pennsylvania, where her father’s deceased mother had once lived.

Years of futility passed. During her search, Laberto moved to California, near Encino, eight years ago at the prompting of the federal government, which told her that she had to visit the United States or risk losing her U.S. citizenship.

“My U.S. citizenship was the only thing I had from my dad,” Laberto said. “That’s why I wanted to keep it.”

She married Benjamin Laberto in 1987 and now has two children: 3-year-old Sabrina and 7-month-old Benjamin. Her mother remains in Germany, but she never forgot her father.

“The worst was not having him around when I got married,” she said. “I tried so hard to find him so he could give me away. I just cried and cried over that.”

After years of searching, ironically, it took just one phone call and 60 cents in stamps to locate her long-lost father.

Laberto’s mother-in-law told her about a letter-forwarding service run by the Social Security Administration. For no charge in most cases, the federal agency will help contact missing relatives if they are reporting wages or receiving social security benefits.

“If there is a lost relative or a family that has been estranged,” said Linda Molina of the agency’s Santa Ana office, “we provide that service for humanitarian reasons.”

Contacting the agency’s Laguna Niguel office, she gave them what little information she had about her father, handed officials an open letter to him, and then said a prayer.

“My two biggest fears were that--No. 1, he would be dead, and No. 2, that he wouldn’t want to talk to me.”

On July 20, two days before his birthday, James Small went to the mail box of his Fredonia, Pa., home and leafed through a stack of letters. Among them was an envelope from the Social Security Administration.

Inside was a letter that began, “Dear Dad. . . .”

“I was shocked,” said Small, a retired insurance salesman who remarried and started a second family after his divorce. “I began to cry so much that my son had to help me finish it.”

Small telephoned his daughter’s home in Mission Viejo. Judy Laberto picked up the phone and heard a strange voice say, “Judy, it’s your dad.”

It was now Laberto’s turn to shed tears.

“I cried all day,” she said. “We went to a barbecue at my husband’s work and I told everyone there and just cried with happiness all day.”

The ensuing days were filled with nervous apprehension over Small’s visit.

When Laberto saw her father at the airport, she wasn’t sure if she should approach him.

“I was a little frightened,” she said. “I walked past him. I was just too scared to ask, ‘Are you my dad?’ ”

Benjamin Laberto called out Small’s name and the long-lost father turned around.

He looked at his daughter and thought how much she resembled his ex-wife. Then he picked up his granddaughter for the first time.

“Hi, grandpa. Are you lost?” Sabrina Laberto asked.

“Not anymore,” Small replied.