American abandoned as a child found relatives after 83 years of searching - ForumDaily
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An American abandoned as a child found relatives after 83 years of searching

In 2018, Angela Raven read the story of Ronald Perrault, who was left as an infant in a parked car in Portland, Oregon, 83 years ago, and decided to reach out to him to help find relatives. An unusual story was told by the publication Press herald.

Photo: Shutterstock

“I was doing some genealogy research on my family and just thought I could help him,” Raven said.

Then she did not call him, but the story of Perrault continued to spin in her head. Who left the baby in the car? And why?

Almost a year later, shortly after the state shut down due to the pandemic, Raven found herself with some free time. She was browsing Ancestry.com and saw Perrault's post. He had recently received the results of his DNA test and was looking for someone to help with the next step - identifying his parents and any other blood relatives.

“I decided it was fate,” Raven recalls.

This time she turned to Perrault, who was then living in Virginia.

“She said she would be honored if I gave her my information,” Perrault said. “I’m also honored to have her help.” I didn’t get very far on my own.”

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The popularity of websites and television shows about family tracing has sparked tremendous American interest in genealogy. As more and more people take DNA tests and upload their results, finding family ties has never been easier.

First data

It wasn't until 2019 that Perrault first learned anything about his origins.

As an infant, he was left in the back seat of a car outside a house on Deering Street owned by a local doctor. According to the newspaper clipping, he was dressed and holding a bottle of milk, still warm, but he was not carrying a note or anything that would help identify his parents. The boy was taken to a local hospital, where the nurses nicknamed him "Billy Sunshine."

The child was adopted by Arthur and Hazel Perrault from Sanford, they named him Ronald.

Perrault knew from an early age that he was adopted, but Arthur and Hazel could not provide any details about his biological parents. However, they provided him with everything he needed, he graduated from Sanford High School in 1955 and joined the Air Force. While working in Biloxi, Mississippi, he met Willie May Hilburn. They married in 1958, and the couple soon had two sons.

After spending 20 years in the Air Force, Perrault retired from the service and he moved his family to Woodbridge, Virginia. Before retiring, he built a second career as a civilian contractor in the army.

He said that he always wondered how his life began, but never spent much time looking for answers.

In 2018, Willie May died just a few months before the 60th anniversary of their marriage.

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A few months later, Perrault was looking for something to do and decided to see if he could learn more about his roots. This is how he ended up in Maine with a Press Herald clipping of his photographs under the headline "Abandoned Child in a Car." One of the photographs matched an undated photograph that his adoptive parents had given him years ago.

It was a wonderful find, but it wasn't enough.

So he took a DNA test and created a profile on Ancestry.com, but he didn't have the skills to move on. He posted a message on the service's message board in January 2020, hoping that someone would help him move forward.

Raven's help

Raven first saw his post in March, but did not contact Perrault until April and did not have access to his DNA on Ancestry.com until May 1. It was then that her investigation began.

The principle of the process is that each DNA match is assigned a number of centimorgan, a unit of measurement for a genetic relationship. The higher the number, the closer the relationship. For parent and child, this number is in the 3400 range. For siblings, it is closer to 2600. At the next level, around 1900 centimeters, things get more complicated. This number can mean a connection between grandparents and grandsons. It can be a sign of a connection between an aunt / uncle, niece or nephew, or between stepbrothers or sisters.

Raven started by checking the closest matches, including a woman named Lisa Spears from Georgia. The woman had no idea how she could be associated with Perrault or any of the other people on the list. But her mother was also adopted, so that could be one of the reasons.

Raven continued to search.

Perrault's case is complex, she said, because no biological parent has been identified. But Raven learned some tricks. One of them was the clustering method, which helps sort the DNA matches along four lines of human ancestors. The other involved triangulating DNA or looking through publicly available genealogical trees for closest matches to find common ancestors.

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One of the clues to Perrault's mystery was his closest DNA match. He shared with a woman, whose name is not indicated, since she did not consent to this, about 1900 centimorgan. This meant that they could be half-brother and sister, grandfather and granddaughter, or uncle and niece.

Based on the woman's age, 22 years younger than Perrault, Raven ruled out her granddaughter. Then she excluded her half-brother and sister, because the woman's parents were close in age to Perrault, that is, none of them could be his parent.

Only his niece remained, and judging by the level of the santimorgans, this meant that she was his full niece. Perrault was the brother of one of the woman's parents.

Raven then found documents that linked Perrault to the woman's mother. She also used the online DNA Painter tool, which allowed her to build a family tree and connect hypothetical lineages. In the end, Perrault's list of possible parents narrowed down to two.

“I had to do a few different family trees before I was sure,” she said.

Biological parents

By June, Raven was confident she had identified Perrault's biological parents, but she needed more documentation. The latest confirmation came on July 17 - the original birth record from the Maine Historical Society. She called it her Holy Grail. Here it is, Perrault's real name: Louis Joseph, born James Maddon and Clara Sargent. The father's last name is misspelled. He's actually Maddix, but that was common in those days. All other details matched what Raven had discovered earlier. Perrault celebrated his birthday in January all his life, but he was actually born on February 28th.

“It was like a puzzle that she put together,” Perrault said. “It was beyond my imagination.”

Perrault's biological parents died long ago, but Raven found obituaries for both in Bridgton News that helped clarify some details.

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Sargent was born in 1898 in York County, a provincial Cornish town. Her obituary says she married Maddix in 1936 - she was 38 at the time - and they lived in West Freiburg. She sometimes worked as a maid and housekeeper. She died in 1963 in a Portland hospital after a short illness. According to her obituary, she was survived by three daughters: Sadie (often called Shirley), Doris and Mary.

Maddix was born in 1900 and raised on Prince Edward Island in Canada. He came to Maine as a young man and was naturalized in 1936, his obituary said. He worked in the logging operations of a Western Maine tree nursery. He died in 1973, 10 years after Sargent, in a nursing home in Dixfield. His obituary said he was also survived by three daughters, but two - Sadie and Doris - were listed as stepdaughters.

None of the obituaries mention the child they abandoned. Raven found more.

It turns out Sargent was once married to George Devine, a farmer turned lumberjack. He was the father of Sadie and Doris, who were 10 years apart. The couple also had a boy named Donald, who was two years older than Sadie, records show. Donald was not mentioned in Sargent's obituary. Sargent and Devine moved between Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, according to census records, but divorced in 1938, after 20 years of marriage. Donald stayed with his father.

The divorce came two years after Sargent allegedly began living with Maddix. Raven did not find any marriage certificates for this couple.

Maddix was also previously married. According to documents Raven discovered, the marriage lasted nine years and the divorce was due to "abuse." This was in 1936, the same year he allegedly married Sargent.

But that's not all

Raven had some hunch about one of Perrault's close DNA matches, Lisa Spears, a woman from Georgia. The level of the santimorgans gave reason to assume that she could be his half-niece or that one of Perrault's parents was her grandmother or grandfather.

Spears only knew that her mother, Isabelle, had been adopted by a couple in Vermont.

“We knew it was left on the doorstep, but that was it,” Spears said.

Raven found newspaper clippings from the Rutland Herald from 1931, when Isabelle was born, which revealed that the girl had been abandoned on her doorstep in Pittsford, Vermont. The circumstances were eerily similar to those in which Perrault.

Raven's research showed that Isabelle (who was named Mary Ann at birth) was born to an Italian immigrant named John. The birth took place just over two weeks before the child was abandoned. Another newspaper clipping talked about an abandoned child who was adopted by a couple with their 10-year-old daughter. Isabelle's adoptive parents at that time had a 10-year-old daughter.

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When Raven sent Spears the newspaper clippings, she was amazed. The surname of the family where the child was left is Gaudette. Her mother called this surname her maiden name. Spears later found her mother's birth record, confirming what Raven had already discovered.

“I’m so glad Angela reached out to us,” Spears said. “It was sad, of course, but I wanted to know the truth.”

Isabelle died in 1981 from breast cancer. She was 49 years old.

In 1931, Sargent was still married to Devine, which could explain her decision to leave Isabelle, born to another man.

In addition, Doris Devine, Clara and George's third child, later learned that her biological father was the same Italian immigrant. She was born a year earlier than Isabelle.

Doris died in 1999. Her obituary lists Devine and Sargent as her parents, but also says that “due to family hardship” she was raised by her aunt and uncle.

Doris's daughter Donna Woodward, who lives in Freiburg, said she knew about her mother's real father, but did not know about Isabelle and Perrault until recently, when Raven helped connect all the dots of the story.

Woodward was 11 or 12 years old when her grandmother (Perrault's mother) died, but she remembers her well.

“She always seemed a little distant,” Woodward said of Sargent. “She treated us well, but she didn’t care.” She didn't show much emotion. I think maybe she was just trying to deal with all her demons and sadness."

Seven children

Clara Sargent gave birth to a total of seven children from three different men. One son, her last pregnancy, was born dead.

She had two children with Devine, then two with an Italian immigrant, the second of whom she abandoned. Six years later, she had another child, this time with Maddix, and abandoned him too. It was Perrault. Less than a year after being left in a car in Portland, Sargent gave birth to Mary, whom she and Maddix raised.

Perrault said he did not know why his parents left him, but left Mary. But he doesn't regret it.

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“Clara seems to have had a hard life,” he said. “Those were bad times and who knows her circumstances.”

At the time of his birth, his parents lived in Rumford, an hour and 45 minutes from Portland, where they left Perrault. Sargent didn't have a driver's license, so someone had brought her. Maybe it was Maddix. The fact that Perrault was swaddled tightly and left with a bottle of milk was a signal to him that whoever left him was trying to do the right thing.

“Maybe it was the best choice for them, I don’t know,” he said.

He has spoken to Mary several times since he found out she was his sister. Perrault said she developed age-related memory problems, so he is not sure how much she understands the situation.

Woodward, who also spoke to Perrault, said she would not agree to share details about her grandmother and "the men in her life."

“They made a choice that they chose not to share even with their family. Now it’s all being unearthed,” she said. “Part of me says that by telling her story I’m insulting her.” But is it fair for Ron to keep this a secret? I don't think so. It's a double-edged sword. It brings joy in many ways, but in other ways it brings pain, sadness and confusion.”

As for Perrault, he regrets not starting the search earlier. Yes, he now knows his birth name and his parents, but he may never know why they decided to leave him.

“It appears that all the people who knew the details have passed away,” he said. “But I’m grateful for what I found.”

Raven said she takes great pride in learning about Perrault's past.

“In some weird way it’s very personal,” she said.

Perrault calls her his angel and believes that the name suits her very well. They hope to meet in person when the world is back to normal.

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