Woman, Family Link Up After 61-Year Separation

When Nancy Durkee tries to remember her family, she can recall the names of her six brothers and sisters and the Indiana orphanage they stayed at together.

She vaguely remembers playing with her brother and sister, twins Rose and Bob.

For 61 years, that is all she had - until she received a telephone call last month in the middle of a spaghetti dinner.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think you’re my aunt,” Roxzy Malone, Rose Miles’s daughter, told Durkee over the phone.

“Needless to say, I didn’t eat any more,” says Durkee.

Now, Durkee is in a hurry to make up for lost time. She is planning a trip to Mesa, Ariz., later this month to visit her sister and niece and is trying to find money to fly to Indiana to see her other brothers and sisters.

“It is just a dream come true,” says Durkee, who has lived on Spokane’s North Side for four years.

Miles says the other five brothers and sisters always wondered about Durkee.

When Miles was young, she says, “I’d go outside and yell, ‘Nancy where are you? Answer me!’ I always wondered where she was, what she was doing, how many children she had. There was always that missing link.”

In 1935, during the worst of the Depression, Durkee’s parents, Josephine and Sylvester Snedaker, sent their seven children to an orphanage in Knightstown, Ind.

Two months after arriving, Durkee, then 2 years old and the youngest of the seven, was adopted. Miles, two years older, remembers going to a nearby lake and teasing Durkee about “going away.”

Durkee says her now-dead adoptive parents were good people but that they lied to her about her parents and did not encourage her to look for her siblings. As a child, Durkee was told her mother died in a car accident, but Josephine Snedaker actually died eight years ago of old age.

“There is no use being upset over things that happened years and years and years ago,” says Durkee.

She grew up, married twice and worked many odd jobs before retiring in 1991 to be near her son, who is stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base.

She searched for her siblings several times, but the orphanage, the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Children’s Home, would not release her records, first saying they had been burned in a fire, later that they had been lost.

On a whim, Durkee once checked a Los Angeles phone book for any Snedakers but hit a dead end. She had largely given up hope of finding her brothers and sisters when her niece called.

Malone found Durkee through her adoptive family. Malone once tracked one of her aunt’s adoptive relatives to Coeur d’Alene, but the man’s obituary did not mention Durkee.

After several months of tracing family trees, checking obituaries in public libraries and calls to directory assistance in a half-dozen cities, Malone found a Durkee relative who didn’t know Nancy’s phone number but did know how to reach her ex-husband. He gave her Durkee’s phone number.

“I have always said since I was really young that I would find Nancy,” says Malone, who runs a tree-trimming business with her husband. “I wanted to find her for my mom.

“I knew if I stayed with it, kept pushing, I’d find her.”

Durkee is grateful. Rather than having a family tree left incomplete, she has more branches than she can count.

“When you get a call and they say, ‘You are my sister. I love you. I miss you,’ it is overwhelming,” says Durkee.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo