An Adoptee’s 30-Year Search for the Pieces of Her Past

For most of her life, Shirley Frankel has wondered over and over: “Who am I?”

Sometime before being placed as a 6-month-old with her adoptive family, Frankel was given a false identity--a fabrication of details that would leave her with little chance of answering the question that haunts her.

“I have no history,” says Frankel, 65, of Huntington Beach. “I don’t know if I was stolen. I don’t know my genetic background or why I’m allergic to wheat. . . . This is my whole life,” she says, waving her bogus adoption records, the core of a 30-year search for the truth.

The adoption was one of many handled by Georgia Tann, who became infamous for the black-marketing of babies while head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. Her modus operandi included creating records based on stolen identities; the birth certificate, birth date and parents belonged to someone unrelated.

When she first learned what had happened, Frankel cried for days. “I was so discouraged,” she says. “All the times before, I would hit dead-ends. But this time it was a brick wall.”

Frankel, a document processor for an insurance agency, and her husband, a retired teacher, have been married 46 years. They have five children and nine grandchildren. Still, Frankel’s life feels incomplete.

In March 1932 she was adopted by George and Libbie Marsh, Russian Jewish immigrants who lived in Iowa. Eager to adopt, the Marshes contacted their rabbi, who knew of another Des Moines couple who had found a Jewish child through the Children’s Home Society.

At the time of Frankel’s adoption, the Memphis branch was run by Tann, who in 1950 was accused of selling babies. From the early 1920s to 1950, an estimated 5,000 children were adopted through the branch, though not all were illegally surrendered or placed. As the case broke, Tann died of cancer, taking with her the truth behind Frankel’s adoption and many others.

Frankel now doubts that she is of Jewish ancestry, as Tann purported in arranging the adoption. “I probably was a Southern Baptist, if anything.” And she doubts her birthday is Sept. 9.

As a child, Frankel recalls, neighborhood children taunted her, claiming the Marshes were not her parents.

“I confronted my mother, and she told me, ‘It doesn’t make any difference. You’re like my own flesh and blood.’ She said she loved me as if I was her own child.”

The subject never came up again.

When she was about 11 her curiosity flared again. In her mother’s dresser, Frankel discovered an accordion file containing adoption papers that named Hazel Beal as an unwed Memphis woman who had given birth to a girl named Sarah.

“I knew it was me, but I was too young to realize what adoption actually meant,” Frankel says.

But she snuck in to peek at the papers again and again. Libbie Marsh died in 1971 of cancer without ever discussing the adoption. Her husband had died many years earlier.

As Frankel began to have children of her own, her questions about her past persisted: Why was she was put up for adoption? Why was she so sickly as a newborn? Did she have any siblings?

In 1967, Frankel and her husband embarked on a search for her birth mother. They had only the name Hazel Beal to go on.

Shirley Frankel had written to Tennessee’s Office of Vital Statistics and the Department of Human Services for her birth certificate, but was told her records were sealed. All the files relating to the Tann case had been sent to Nashville.

Over the years, Frankel contacted various organizations that she hoped could help locate her family. Among them was Tennessee’s the Right to Know, a nonprofit group co-founded by Denny Glad that has helped more than 1,000 adoptees search for their birth families.

Glad has assisted many adoptees, birth parents and birth siblings affected by the adoptions arranged through the Memphis Children’s Home Society.

“When [Tann] charged fees, people paid in good faith, not thinking they were buying a child, and she put the money in her own pocket,” Glad says. “The power went to [Tann’s] head. It was the idea that she could play God and give people children who couldn’t get them any other way.”

Even with the experience she acquired working on other Tann cases, Glad was unable to help Frankel.

Despite many dead-ends, the Frankels continued to pursue every angle they could.

When Art Frankel read a newspaper article in 1992 about the federal government releasing the 1920 census, he started combing through records at the federal building in Laguna Niguel.

“I went through thousands of names hoping to find a Hazel Beal,” Art Frankel says. “I went through all the records from Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi.”

He found a Hazel Beal from Jackson, Tenn., who would have been old enough to give birth to a child in 1931. The Frankels contacted everyone named Beal in Jackson and neighboring cities, but no one had heard of Hazel Beal. One of their contacts suggested they call Peggy D. Mathes, a Nashville attorney who has assisted adoptees in gaining access to their records.

In May 1992, the Frankels hired Mathes to obtain a court order to open her records, and by late August, she secured the order. Within a month, Frankel had her birth certificate and many pages of documents--including her adoption file and background on the Memphis Children’s Home Society.

That was when Frankel learned that her supposed birth mother, Hazel Beal, was not. Beal was married to William Cohen, and they had raised a daughter with the same birth date as Frankel. The birth information had been “borrowed” to help build the false identity. The records listed aunts, uncles, siblings--all of whom turned out to be fictitious.

Mathes says, “It’s a real strange case. It’s the only one I’ve ever had like this. . . . I didn’t know what to tell Mrs. Frankel. . . .”

Frankel’s case is also the first Glad has seen involving “totally fabricated” records.

Frankel knows there is almost no hope she will ever find her birth relatives--a realization she says is heartbreaking.

Still, she hangs on to one piece of the puzzle that has felt real to her. She drives a car with a personalized license plate bearing the name that appears on her adoption papers: “Sara.”