Search for Own Kin Gives Man New Vocation: Adoption Sleuth

The young woman sits at a picnic table across from Bob Mulvehill for at least an hour before she approaches him.

“I’m looking for my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles--everybody and anybody,” she tells him.

She holds a piece of paper containing only scraps of information about the man and woman who gave her up before her first birthday.

She thinks she may resemble her mother: a 4-foot-10 woman with dark hair, blue-green eyes, pale skin and freckles, according to the paper. Her father was a part-time police officer who liked to hunt and fish.

The paper represents the woman’s only lifeline to the parents she never knew.

“I carried this around with me for a long time because I didn’t want to lose it,” she says.

At 20, with a daughter of her own, she wants to know more. She wants to know her parents’ names, what they really looked like, whether they had any hereditary illnesses, whether she has other relatives who may want to know her.

She doesn’t know who she is, and it’s tearing her apart, she says.

“I don’t know how to bond,” she confesses. “I don’t feel I can be the person I was meant to be.”

That’s why she contacted Bob Mulvehill and came to this meeting of his group, called Lost Loved Ones, outside a senior citizens’ center.

Bob Mulvehill looks for those who are lost, those who don’t know they’re lost and those who don’t want to be found. He scans dusty court records and badgers reluctant clerks for some whisper of a name that will answer the question: “Who am I?”

An estimated 6 million adoptees live in the United States, according to the American Adoption Congress. In the last six years, Mulvehill has helped at least 50 find their families and has provided clues to hundreds of others.

With a camouflage-green hunting cap, stained nylon jacket, black sneakers worn thin and a day-old growth of beard, the 51-year-old Mulvehill doesn’t resemble a spiffy sleuth-on-the-prowl.

He doesn’t have an office, let alone a computer. He uses the dining room table in his cramped wood-frame home for his paperwork and the local doughnut shop for interviews.

His “staff” are well-intentioned people who donate time whenever they can, and his salary comes from night work as a disc jockey playing at parties in the western Pennsylvania mountain town of Ebensburg.

He charges those who seek his help only for his expenses. If people want to give him something for his time, he funnels the money to his nonprofit group, Lost Loved Ones.

He and members of the group he founded in 1991 provide support for those struggling with their identity. And they provide guidance, advice and shoe leather when those people decide to launch a search.

His success, he said, comes through “perseverance and divine intervention.”

“Sometimes at the same time the birth mother starts looking for her daughter, the daughter may be looking for her birth mother,” he says.

“Whether you want to attribute that to God saying, ‘We’re going to put these people together,’ or genetics and makeup, I don’t know.”

His motivation comes partly from his quest for adventure, his love of mysteries and his compassion.

“It’s addicting. You get on a case and you don’t want to quit. If you run out of money, you’re still determined you’re going to close it. It’s a challenge, a puzzle, and you’re not going to let one kick your butt.”

After weeks of work, Mulvehill finds his reward in uniting a child and parent or a brother and sister.

Reunions can be painful, wonderful, nasty or satisfying. All are intense.

Mulvehill’s quest began with his own search.

For the better part of his life, he assumed he had two sisters and a brother--the product of the union of Robert Mulvehill Jr. and Mildred Mulvehill.

But over a period of several years in the early 1990s, he discovered he had eight other siblings: seven from his mother and one from his father, who was in the Air Force. He suspects but can’t confirm that somewhere in this world, he has another brother fathered by Robert Mulvehill Jr.

Born in 1946, Bob Mulvehill was sent to live with a relative in Ebensburg in 1957, after his father was killed in a military plane crash in California.

Depressed and alone, his mother began barhopping. Her remaining three children, who were five to 10 years younger than he, were put in foster homes or adopted.

But Mildred Mulvehill also had seven children by other men, including twins--a boy and a girl. Five were born after Mulvehill left home and two before he was old enough to remember. All those children were put up for adoption, scattered from California to Georgia.

As for Robert Mulvehill Jr., while on duty in the Azores, he fathered a son to a Peace Corps volunteer. The woman eventually returned to the United States and reared the boy alone, never revealing his father’s identity. When Mildred Mulvehill died in 1982, Bob Mulvehill discovered papers revealing the boy’s existence and the woman’s name.

Several of the Mulvehill children began looking for one another in 1991 after getting clues, some quite tenuous, that they might have siblings.

Mulvehill still wonders at the forces that conspired to lead his brothers and sisters to start searching and eventually find each other.

“Why did all the siblings look the same year?” he asks. “They were all different ages. What is this deep connection?”

During his own search, Mulvehill says, he learned a great deal about getting records that many people considered unobtainable. He figured such information would be helpful to others in his situation, and he formed Lost Loved Ones.

Sam Ruffing drove 200 miles from his home in Cleveland one night in June to extend a handshake to the man who helped him discover his past.

Ruffing was born in Cambria County, Ohio, and placed first in an orphanage and later in two foster homes. He was adopted when he was 3.

For most of his 52 years, he wondered about the identity of his birth mother and father. His adoptive parents refused to reveal his birth mother’s name and even had it stricken from his birth certificate.

A tall, lean man with smooth skin, clear eyes and blond hair mixed with a little gray, Ruffing would look in the mirror and try to visualize his parents.

“It really bothered me over the years,” he says. “Every time I went to the doctor and he asked about family history, I had to say, ‘I have no idea.’ ”

At the suggestion of friends in Cambria County, he contacted Mulvehill, assuming it would lead to another dead end. Within several months, though, Mulvehill found Ruffing’s mother in Pittsburgh.

Ruffing drove to Pittsburgh a week later, full of anxiety, curiosity, fear and excitement. As he walked down the hall to her apartment in a low-income high-rise, a “little itty-bitty wisp of a woman” opened the door.

“She was skinny, had hardly any teeth in her mouth and had straight gray hair combed flat back. And a big smile comes on her face,” Ruffing recalls. “I said, ‘How’re you doing, Ma?’ I didn’t know what else to say.”

Ruffing spent hours pumping his mother for information about her life and the man who was his father. He took her shopping for clothes, had her hair done and arranged for a dentist to fix her teeth.

In the last year he gradually has become part of her life. But he worries what his role should be to a woman who said goodbye to him so many years ago.

“You’d better be prepared for the consequences of finding someone,” he says. “They may shun you. They may not want to see you. They may expect things from you.

“For me, it’s been 50 years. If I had found her when I was 25, it would have been a whole different ballgame. I went there expecting the worst, and that’s about what I got.

“The parents that raised me--in my heart and mind, I know they were my parents. But this woman gave me life. So now what?”

Reunions are not about happy endings, Mulvehill says.

They’re about answers to questions.

“If you’re not an adoptee, it’s hard to understand because that curiosity drives a lot of them up a tree,” Mulvehill says. “Psychologists call it emotional stress syndrome--that wanting to know. It’s always on their mind, ‘they’re adopted, they’re adopted.’ They just want to know who they are.”

“It gives you closure,” says Jane Nast, president of the American Adoption Congress.

“Do you know what’s at the bottom of Pandora’s box? Hope. At the bottom is hope.”