If you’re new here or want to catch up, please read the first two installments to find out more:

1: At the edge of finding Mammie: The day I finally go to Stokes County
2: ‘There’s no smoking gun.’ But there is a face in an old photograph

Fifteen minutes after I walked into the Stokes County Register of Deeds Office, Brandon Hooker left me at the computer station at the back corner of the records office. The county’s Register of Deeds, he was a young father himself, and he needed to leave unexpectedly to pick up his little boy from preschool.

Before he left, though, we talked briefly about what he’d found after I’d first emailed him to tell him I was trying to figure out this mystery — the three women named Mamie who might be my dad’s mom, where they were buried and where more information might be.

But I wasn’t sure. I wanted to see the information and double-check my assumptions. I wanted to see the proof with my own eyes.

So there I stood, in Danbury, alone at the terminal. I typed this or that, pretending to know what I was doing and that I understood what popped up. I wanted to leave this quiet room, but I’d driven more than three hours to get there. Spending 15 minutes here only to leave without knowing much more about who my dad’s parents could have been seemed like a waste.

I kept plunking on the keyboards, anticipating and dreading what I would or wouldn’t find in equal measure. I typed in the only information I knew, which was from my dad’s birth certificate. On it, the name Mammie Lee Newsom is listed as my dad’s mother. Someone had written her name out and skidded a long line through the section left open for the father’s name. The record said Mammie was unmarried, 27 years old and worked in housekeeping. It said Dr. G.E. Stone was there at the birth of the baby, named Eddie Cantell Newsom.

If this is right, that would mean that my dad’s mom, Mammie, was born in 1897.

But the only thing I know for certain is that my dad was born on May 15, 1924, in King, N.C. It’s the only thing I’m 100 percent sure of as I stand at the computer. His name is spelled wrong on his birth certificate. Eddie is right but everything else is wrong. And there’s no Mammie (two m’s), much less a Mammie Lee, listed anywhere. Maybe a lot more is wrong.

It was so quiet in the room. Not even the fluorescent lights above me hummed. Now and then, I realized I was holding my breath. I’d sigh and inhale, feeling the still air moving around me.

Once or twice, one of the women working in the front room passed through the doorway to go into a closet-like room that held supplies and miscellaneous items. They never looked my way or asked me any questions or said anything.

So I just typed. I entered variations of the woman’s name listed as my dad’s mom, just in case another spelling cracked open everything: Mammie. Mamie. Mamy. Newsome. Nusome. Newsom.

Nothing much happened. I settled on the most common spelling of Mammie, which is Mamie. I found the three women named Mamie who were born around 1897 and after, the same three women Mr. Hooker had told me about when we emailed back and forth about my visit.

Their birth certificates appeared on the screen, and I clicked the print dialogue to send copies to the printer sitting on the floor at my feet. The records didn’t reveal anything I didn’t already know in broad terms, but I still wanted to have copies. I wanted them because I still wasn’t 100 percent sure that any of these women could be my dad’s mom, my grandmother.

Mr. Hooker and I agreed that it was most likely that the Mamie with the middle name of Magdeline, the one who looked like my dad in the old photograph I’d found, was my dad’s mother.

But maybe he’s wrong and I’m wrong and the photo is wishful thinking? Maybe it was another woman, one of the other ones born around the same time? Other clues didn’t add up. There wasn’t any concrete sign that any of these women was who left my dad at The Children’s Home in Winston-Salem, N.C., to let him grow up alone, from a toddler to a young child, from a teenager to a young adult, from a married man to a father and, eventually, into a widower, without ever contacting him again.

It could be one of them. It could be someone else. It could be someone I don’t know anything about at all.

When I pulled up their birth certificates, I clicked and the printer zipped into action. Somehow, I hit the print function a dozen times (by accident and brain-fog induced button pushing) and copy after copy of their birth certificates spat out of the machine. I looked around, panicking, to see if anyone was nearby to help. They weren’t, and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. So I just let it keep sending out birth certificates. One copy, two copies, three copies, four, five… The first Mamie, the second Mamie, the third… A pile of Mamie birth certificates shot out, still hot on the printer tray.

I couldn’t bring myself to put the extras in the recycling bins by the door. So I picked them up, went over to the table and separated them out, organizing them into three stacks of Mamie birth certificates, one for each woman. I clipped them together and numbered them at the top so I’d know who was who.

Here’s what they said:

Mammie number 1: Mamie Irene Newsom

Her delayed certificate of birth (this is a birth certificate issued well after the moment of the baby’s birth – for her it wasn’t issued until 1954) said she was born April 21, 1915, in Tobaccoville, N.C., another small town in Stokes County. A doctor was there when she was born to her parents, listed as Lelia Moore and Wesley Ernest Newsom. The “abstract of evidence” of her birth was included on the birth certificate, and it included the fact that she was married on Feb. 10, 1939. The other piece of evidence was from her mother, who certified that a Bible record said she was born that April, too.

Since my dad was born in 1924, I don’t think this is the Mamie I’m searching for. She would have been only nine years old when he was born, after all. So I ruled her out, sliding the pile over to the side of the big conference table.

I pull over the second stack of birth certificates.

Mammie number 2: Mamie Maud Newsome

This is Mamie Maud – I want to know more about her. She had a delayed certificate of birth, too. Hers was issued in 1944, but it said that she was born on June 7, 1898, in King, N.C., the same place where my dad was born. A midwife was there when she was born, and her parents were listed as Laura Ann Newsome and Jacob Henry Newsome. A Bible record and personal knowledge of Mamie’s birth were used to prove her birth date.

I click around and find the birth certificate of one of her children, Dorothy May McGee. It shows some new details. It said that Mamie had married a man named Oscar McGee and, on Sept. 17, 1929, she had Dorothy when she was 31 years old. Dorothy’s birth certificate said Mamie was a housewife and Oscar was a farmer.

A farmer. This was a clue – one that I wondered about and made me pause. Could this be her?

My dad had such few stories about who his parents were that the ones I do know are drilled into my memory. Here’s one I remember. Dad told me that he and the other boys at The Children’s Home would frequently go out as a group and work on the farms around Forsyth County and other places. They’d do farm chores and work in the fields. There was a large working farm at The Children’s Home, too, and they had experience working with cows and in the fields, planting or harvesting corn and hay.

One day, dad and a group of other boys were at a nearby farm. He was with Oscar “Pop” Woosley, who was the superintendent of the Children’s Home for most of my dad’s childhood. Everyone called him Pop, and my dad talked about him like a father. Even though my dad didn’t talk much about who his family could have been, he always talked about how grateful he’d been to have The Children’s Home and to have Pop.

So while they were working that day, Pop pulled my dad aside.

“That man is your father,” Pop told my dad, pointing to a man nearby where they were working.

Dad never said what that man was doing there, whether it was his farm or whether he was a farmhand, or whether he was just stopping by for a visit. Was he tall and thin as the wind just like my dad? Dad never described him or tried to guess. Maybe he didn’t want to remember.

But he did have one heartbreaking detail: the man never spoke to my dad or even acknowledged he was there at all.

He never seemed sad when he told me this, a long time ago, but how could he not have been? I am shattered by it. And, to my immense regret, I never asked him about it while he was alive, so maybe I’ll never know anything more. I never wanted to hurt him or bring up bad memories. I wanted to protect him from the people who left him behind.

But I wonder about that man at that farm, the man Pop pointed to.

Was he this farmer – this Oscar McGee, who married Mamie Maud?

Or was he someone else and Oscar isn’t anywhere related to this. Could Pop have been wrong? How did he know about this man at all?

My heart pounded.

Mammie number 3: Mamie Magdalene Newsome

I put them aside and turn to the woman in the old photograph I found on Ancestry.com, the one of Mamie Magdalene, the woman who looked just like my dad? What about her?

I pulled over her stack of birth certificates. Hers is a delayed certificate of birth, too, and it says she was born on Aug. 19, 1897, in King, N.C. Her mother was listed as Frances Elizabeth Newsome, who was 25 at the time of Mamie’s birth.

Just like my dad, Mamie Magdalene’s birth certificate doesn’t list a father. Someone had just left typewriter dashes where her dad would have been.

I read on and learned that part of the proof of her birth date was a marriage record from June 6, 1925, and an insurance record from 1944. Someone named Martha Newsome Shore signed an affidavit of her personal knowledge of Mamie’s birth.

This Mamie married a Robert Lee, but I don’t find any of their marriage records listed on the computer.

I just know what Mr. Hooker found out for me, which is that they were married in Forsyth County, the county next to Stokes County that is home to Winston-Salem, where my dad had been left at The Children’s Home.

But the Mamie listed as my dad’s mom says her middle name is Lee. But there is no Mamie Lee. And this Mamie named a Robert Lee. Lee. Could she have said her middle name is Lee because she was going to marry Robert?

I don’t know. There are three piles of papers on the conference table in front of me. I’m left thinking that of the three Mamies, there are two plausible options:

The Mamie Maud who married Oscar, the farmer.

And the Mamie Magdalene whose mom was a single mother herself, the one who married Robert Lee.

I don’t know what else to do now. Looking back with a clearer head, I know I could have dug deeper, looking into who these women two were. I could have looked at their parents and siblings, looked for wills and property records.

But everything I knew about searching through public records had flown out of my head the second I had walked through the dinging doorway of the office.

So I turned away from the piles and the conference table started wandering around aimlessly. I scanned the books organized neatly on shelves lining the walls and the center of the room. I hoped something would just jump out at me. Might I find a book on a dusty shelf with “Angie Read This” on its spine, my own version of “Drink Me” from Alice in Wonderland? No, of course. But I still hoped so. Every book could hold a clue. Should I read the Index to State Highway Commission Plans with its faded red binding, sitting there on its side? How about an Indexed Record of Notaries Public No. 1 or a leather-bound group of Records of Official Bonds?

I eventually spotted the Vital Statistics Index of Stokes County sitting on top of a bookcase, propped up like a museum display. People on TV wear white gloves when handling precious historic documents. But there weren’t any here. There was just me and my clammy hands. I opened the book tenderly, like it was the Gutenberg Bible. Maybe there would be more of nothing in here. Maybe I would find a listing that revealed everything.

The paper looked remarkably fresh, though the handwriting along the edges said the birth listings were from 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924. More than 100 years ago, the handwritten record of all the kids born in Stokes County.

I flipped the pages, looking for my dad. I find him, but it just showed the same information as his birth certificate, only adding that he was from Yadkin Township. Still no mention of who his father was.

In another index, I found Mamie Magdalene and Mamie Irene. Their names were typed in a column filled with other Newsoms and Newsomes. There were so many Newsomes in Stokes County! My eyes read over the names, my fingertips slid gently over the letters. I wondered if I should stand there and memorize every single one. Could this be the first time I read the names of my aunts and uncles? Could these people be my cousins? What about Windsor Theodore, Charlie Ross, Auburn, Landis Roscoe? Am I related to Madia, Malecta, Pearl Ester, Eldon Barnett?

The mothers weren’t listed in this index, just the fathers, I realized. They’re ghosts here, and I ached to know more about them. I scanned the column of Newsom/Newsome baby fathers. Name after name is there. The only blank line is the one next to Mamie Magdalene.

Catch up: Why I started researching who my dad’s parents might have been and why they left him at The Children’s Home. Beginning to publish some of his photographs of his life there, and all the photos yet to come.

What I’ve found out so far:
1: At the edge of finding Mammie: The day I finally go to Stokes County
2: ‘There’s no smoking gun’: But there is a face in an old photograph

I reluctantly slid the index aside, even as I tried to burn the image into my memory. I pulled out a book of death certificates. Propped up on the same shelf, I flipped through the pages. I found the one for Mary Jane Newsom. She was the mother of Francis who was the mother of Mamie Magdalene. Mamie’s grandmother – is she my dad’s great grandmother? Is she my great-great grandmother?

The handwriting on the death certificate looped across the page. I couldn’t decipher it all, but I learned that Mary was widowed when she died in King sometime in the 1910s. At nearly 67 years old, she was employed as a “domestic” and died of pneumonia.

My dad’s birth certificate said Mamie was a housekeeper. Could this Mary be that Mamie’s grandmother, who was also a domestic?

I closed the book and slid it back onto the shelf. I wondered where to go next, what to do now. I was tired of looking at these books. About two hours had passed since I entered the office, saw the Andy Griffith artwork, talked with Mr. Hooker and started typing in names on the computer. Should I keep looking, searching through every single volume in this room? Was there something, somewhere, in this office that could tell me what I came here to find out?

I didn’t care. I wanted to leave. I walked over to the conference table, slid the three piles of printouts carefully into my tote bag, slung it over my shoulder and walked out. I passed the desks where the three women were working, not making eye contact or saying anything. They didn’t say anything to me, either. Mr. Hooker’s office sat empty.

I quickly pulled open the door – another loud door ding breaking up the quiet – turned down the hallway, pushed open the front doors and walked into the brilliantly clear, stifling hot July day. I kept myself to a fast walk instead of what I really wanted to do – run.

That’s the thing, the thing that still keeps me up at night. I want to run away from this and run to it, both in equal measure. I don’t know where I will find the answers, so I want to look everywhere but also don’t want to look anywhere. Will the answers to why my dad was abandoned – and why our family was then abandoned, too – be in these records, in these offices? Will they be online? Will they only come when I decide to take a DNA test?

I suppose I could look for years and find nothing. Or I could answer a random phone call or read an unsolicited email and everything could instantly change. What will I do when I find out? What will I do if I don’t?

I walked through the parking lot and climbed into my hot car. I flung my bag and papers onto the passenger seat next to me. It was too early to head home, wasn’t it, I asked myself? When I imagined what would happen today, I had thought I’d spend the whole day at this office, with at least an hour or so with Mr. Hooker, asking him questions and looking through the records. When I left home that morning, I had told my husband, Pat, that I’d probably stay the night in King or somewhere in Winston-Salem and go for a hike up to Hanging Rock the next day. I had thought I’d stop by my parents’ grave, just down the road from where I grew up in Davie County, on my way back home after my hike.

But it was just around 1 p.m. and nothing had gone as I’d expected. I had about 15 minutes with the Register of Deeds, three piles of copies and just a few more pieces of information. I sat there, sweating. The heat was stifling. My insides churned like a hive of bees.

So I turned the car on and search on my phone for what to do next. Finding an answer, I pulled out of the parking lot. I drive to find the cemetery in King where some of the Mamies might be.

That’s where I’ll leave it this week. Next, I’ll share more about what I find at the cemetery. If you think someone else would like to read and follow along, feel free to share it. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

~Angie

It was Thanksgiving 10 years ago when I first saw her.

At the time, I was consumed with grief and missing both my parents. Grief is a long, shimmering shadow. It can block out every speck of light and, when the light does manage to break through, still dims every color. It disappears and reappears without warning. It makes me feel both connected to every single person in the world and, at the same time, like a blistering island in a calm sea, raw and alone.

I am better at predicting when it will land now. But that day, the grief-made hole pulsed in my stomach. Much of the time, I could live with it and get on with things. Not that Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was ours. Unlike every other day of my childhood, that day brought calm. For that single Thursday in November, I knew we were OK, that we were happy.

Mom—Willa Mae, or Willie to her friends—would pull out all her best dishes: the green pressed-glass goblets for the sweet tea, the purple-flowered China and silver-plated silverware that had been wedding presents and collected at yard sales. We’d slide the wooden leaf into the dining table, making room enough for ten to squeeze in next to the broken fireplace.

About mid-morning, we’d dig through a drawer full of Mom’s tablecloths, find the prettiest one, iron it out and spread it over the table. She showed how to arrange the silverware, the bread plates, the goblets and the folded napkins. She and I would pile homemade sweet and dill pickles and store-bought olives in the middle of a deviled egg serving tray. Her deviled eggs were one of my favorite bites – perfectly oval whites stuffed with yolks made silky and tangy by yellow mustard and Duke’s mayonnaise. If I was lucky, she’d let me sprinkle dark-orange paprika over the tops. Then, she would tell me to put it on the table, the first of at least a dozen serving bowls and platters to find their places there.

I couldn’t wait for those deviled eggs, but I couldn’t wait for a lot of Mom’s cooking. Her Thanksgiving meal was a tour de force. She made nearly everything from scratch, with the exception of the canned cranberry “sauce” and the Hickory Farms cheese ball served with Saltines. The rest were Mom-made: potato salad and homemade yeast rolls, hammy green beans and trays of dressing, overflowing bowls of mashed potatoes and turkey giblet gravy, cool ambrosia and macaroni salad. Dad would carve the turkey.

Family and friends would come through the carport to the back door, calling out their heys as they walked in. My mom’s parents and siblings, their spouses and kids, would fill our house sometimes. No matter who was there, Mom always sat closest to the kitchen so she could jump up and refill bowls and glasses at a moment’s notice. We’d play-fight over who had the most mashed potatoes and deviled eggs.

I’d pour gravy over everything on my plate and eat quickly, impatiently waiting for everyone to finish up and stop talking so we could get to dessert. Once, she made so many cakes, pies and cookies that there wasn’t room for them all in the dining room. She placed a fold-out table in the hallway just outside and spread out the chess and pecan pies, the peanut butter cookies – and the coconut cake towering over all the rest like the queen of the holiday.

Rightfully so. A day or so before Thanksgiving, she’d cover the kitchen table with the Winston-Salem Journal and line up fresh coconuts she’d find who-knows-where. Using a nail and hammer, she’d drill holes in them, drain the water into bowls and smash them into huge chunks. We’d pry the brown prickly skin off and she’d grate the flesh into coconut snow.

This is The Best Cake In The World, everyone declared as they filled dessert plates with seconds, this scene repeating itself over and over in my mind. She’d beam over her lit cigarette, elbows finally allowed to rest on the table as the meal was nearly over. She was always on a diet and never ate a bite of the cake.

Elementary school slipped into junior high, sunk into high school and sped into college. Year after year, things grew worse as my parents became sicker. Both of them would go in and out of hospitals like a revolving door, sometimes being admitted three or four times a year each with this malady or that–heart issues, a stroke, diabetes, etc. In between hospital stays, I’d try to “be normal” and do well in school and hold down jobs. But, inevitably, a middle-of-the-night call would send me driving to the hospital from wherever I happened to be. I knew the best parking spots and where to find the best wheelchairs at the entrances of the hospitals across three counties.

But on Thanksgiving, any Thanksgiving until they died, absolutely none of this mattered to me. Only the deviled eggs and the turkey and the coconut cake and the people around the table – right then, right there – mattered. It was Thanksgiving when I first brought home the boyfriend I would eventually marry. On Thanksgiving, I was happy.

So it had to be Thanksgiving when, consumed by grief and nostalgia, I felt propelled by ghosts to climb the stairs and look for my dad’s mom.

That was the first time I saw Mamie Magdalene.

She is one of the two Mamies who could be my grandmother, the woman who gave up my dad to The Children’s Home and never talked to him again. The woman my dad knew nothing about, not even her name.

My daughters were 4 and 5 years old at the time, warm bundles of rainbow drawings and sleepless nights and bubble baths and tantrums and books and episodes of Little Bear. My parents never met them. While I worked hard to keep that fact out of my mind most of the time, on this particular Thanksgiving, grief spilled out of my pores.

I didn’t want to ruin the day, so I left Pat and the kids downstairs and went up to the little office I had set up in the landing at the top of the stairs. Neck-deep in the first grueling years of starting a nonprofit online news organization, I was sleep-deprived from early motherhood and endless worries about money and parenting.

Ignoring the piles of papers and Post-It notes, I turned on my computer and went to Ancestry.com for one of the first times. I searched for Mammie Lee Newsom, the woman listed on my dad’s birth certificate. Nothing. No person by that name appeared, so I searched more broadly – Mamie, not Mammie; Newsome not Newsom. I found one family tree after the other, the same records appearing here and there without any explanation. I searched down rabbit holes, following men and women who might be sisters or brothers or mom or dad of a Mamie. Nothing. I kept going, kept clicking. I found a photo album that someone related to a Newsome uploaded. I clicked through, seeing blurry photo after blurry photo of unrecognizable faces looking back at me.

But, then, a black and white photo of a woman appeared. She had dark, curly hair, her face distinctive with big eyebrows and a strong nose. Looking up towards the camera, she held a little girl who sat in a crisp white dress on her lap. It looks like it might be Easter; another little girl stands nearby, holding a wrapped basket.

Tears erupted from my eyes. She looks like my dad, I wondered, dazed. Is this her? I look. Her name is Mamie Magdaline. Not Mammie Lee.

I sat staring at her for one second. I shut down my computer and walked away.

I went back downstairs to my kids who were playing, and to Pat who was cleaning up the Thanksgiving dishes. I didn’t say a word. And I didn’t look for Mamie again for nearly a decade.

Last July, I went to Stokes County on a blisteringly hot day. I’d just walked through the door to the Register of Deeds Office with an email from Brandon Hooker in my bag. It was the email where he, too, suspected that Mamie Magdalene could be her.

I wasn’t convinced. Or maybe I didn’t want to be. There were so many questions, ones I thought overshadowed a hunch and a single photo found during a grief-infused Thanksgiving 10 years ago.

Who was Mammie Lee Newsom? Why didn’t she show up anywhere? Why were there so many Mamies born around King around the same time, when there were just about 18,000 people in the entire county in the 1920s? Why did someone write Lee as her middle name, when no one has that name? Why was his father’s name missing?

What happened?

I walked in the office. Three women sat at desks stacked like dominoes at the back of the office. I could see Mr. Hooker – young, maybe in his 30s, in a button-up shirt and khakis – in his office through the little window from the waiting area. A young woman came over, and I said I was there to see him, the Register of Deeds, and that he was expecting me. He came out, a questioning look on his face.

“Hey, I’m Angie Newsome,” I said. “We’ve been emailing about my dad’s family, the Newsomes.”

An expression crossed his face that I couldn’t quite read. Did he forget I was coming or did he expect me to be 70 years old? My dad was about 50 years old when he had me. I’ve learned to roll with it and so I followed him into his office, babbling thank yous for seeing me. He told me to take a seat, so I sat on the other side of his desk as he swiped empty lunch containers away. He typed quickly on his computer. “Sorry, I have to wrap up this email,” he said.

“No worries,” I said, trying to be patient. It gave me a chance to look around his office and pretend to give him some privacy. A framed print of Opie and Andy Griffith hung on one wall. Photos of Mr. Hooker and a woman I assumed was his wife were propped on a bookshelf, both of them young and smiling.

He finished and we walked quickly out of the office and into the windowless records room. Several computers sat on a shelf at the back, and he went over and started tapping away as I put down my bag at the conference table. He pulled up a database and started searching, all the time talking and sharing fact after fact.

Standing there, my mind went blank. I barely remember anything specific about what he said, just flashes of an outline of what could have been the start of my dad’s life.

He talked about the three Mamies, who they married, when they died, where they were born, who they were related to, where they were buried. He guessed whether one was more likely to be my grandmother than the other, the interesting things he found out about them, including how one was buried in King in the same cemetery as his own family. He told me that one Mamie had two marriages, that her mother wasn’t buried with the man she went on to marry. He told me about missing Census records and when marriage licenses started being used.

Fifteen minutes in, his cell phone rang. It was his wife. He had to answer it, of course, so off he went, leaving me in the room alone.

My head ached. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. Having someone casually reveal all these unknown facts about yourself is so strange. Maybe I imagined he would talk to me like a doctor delivering a hard diagnosis – careful, delicate, whispered. In reality, he was just describing a stranger’s life to a stranger. He wasn’t brash or careless, but he was matter-of-fact, blissfully immune from all the questions and uncertainty.

When he came back, he looked crestfallen.

He had planned on spending an hour or so with me, he said, but his wife called to tell him that their baby’s preschool suddenly didn’t have any water. He had to go pick up his little boy.

“It’s always something,” he said, like every parent in the world. Yes, it’s always something.

You have to go pick up your son, I nodded.

Mamie, whoever you are, you had to go pick up your son, too.

My heart sank. I asked him to repeat some of what he’d said. Could I record him, I asked? My notes were a frantic mess, not like the tight, precise notetaking I had done for decades as a journalist. Shaky scribbles and phrases scattered over the paper like a rat’s nest. Circles here, arrows there. Words started but not finished. Confused and unsure.

“I really have to go,” he said, after patiently repeating himself.

Just a few sentences stuck.

“There’s no smoking gun,” he said. “There’s nothing that definitely points to this one person being her.”

There was no Mammie Lee Newsom. But there was a likelihood that one of the two Mamies was his mom, he said, “though we can’t be sure.”

Mamie Magdalene. The woman in the photograph.

Mamie was born in 1897 to an unwed mother, herself. Her birth certificate said her mother’s name was Frances Elizabeth Newsome, born in the 1870s. The space for Mamie’s father was blank, just like my dad’s had been.

Mamie Magdalene married a man with the last name of Kropff but we don’t know what happened to him at this point, Mr. Hooker said. Then she remarried in 1925, a year after your dad was born, he continued. To a man named Robert Lee.

Lee.

Lee.

Lee.

My dad’s mother listed her name as Mammie Lee Newsom. Is it the Lee that gives us the most definitive clue, the biggest breadcrumb left behind?

He tells me that Robert and Mamie (now Mamie, not Mammie) married in Forsyth County. They eventually moved to Raleigh, where they lived until she died in the 1980s.

Another clue, another breadcrumb of a memory. I’ve played this one over time and time again; it’s the one that’s shaped this the most.

I was maybe a senior in high school when the phone rang. My dad and I were in the woodworking shop he had built in the backyard. I loved hanging out there with him. He’d sit on a stool that had a piece of foam tied to it, perched next to fire he’d light in the little wood stove in the corner. He’d sit there with his baseball cap on, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, listening to Focus on the Family on a little radio sitting on the windowsill. Work benches lined the walls and the center of the room, piled with tools and nails and sandpaper and little tins of varnish he used to refinish furniture. Sometimes he’d prop up a canvas and paint, spreading open his box of oil paints, the one with multiples of burnt sienna, his favorite color. A glass jar of turpentine filled with dirty paint brushes as he painted sunsets and little cabins, rivers and trees.

I can’t remember who first answered the phone when it rang. Sometimes my mom or sister would pick up the phone in the house and, when it was for my dad, yell across the yard to tell him to pick up. The phone in the shop sat on a shelf in the front room, where he stored the antiques and furniture he planned to sell at his booth at the flea market in Yadkinville.

That day, he stood tall as a statue, the phone pressed to his ear. He was silent, listening.

I think I remember him saying “I’m not interested” before gently putting the receiver down and walking away.

Are the details a memory or a dream? I can’t be sure, but I am certain I was with him when that call happened. I think about this moment a lot, trying to place myself there. I’m a high school kid, full of anxiety and fear, in the shop with my dad. I was scared that my parents were going to die at any moment, that we teetered on an edge, one where my parents lived as if everything was going to be taken away or disappear at any second.

In my memory, I watched him listening, immobile. One, two, then three seconds passed before he said those few clipped words and hung up. In my memory, I knew something had happened. Something that defined us.

The clue: The call came in the late 1980s, just a few years after Mamie Magdalene had died and been buried in Raleigh, far away from Stokes County and The Children’s Home. Maybe, after she had died, her family had found out about my dad.

“That woman said she was my step—or half—sister,” Dad said to me in this memory/dream of mine. “They didn’t want to know me. I don’t want to know them.”

We never heard from her again.

That’s where I’ll leave it this week. Next, I’ll share what happened when I was able to search the records for myself. If you think someone else would like to read and follow along, feel free to share it. Thank you for joining me on this journey.

~Angie

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It was a brilliant mid-July day, crystal-clear but heavy with hot, soupy humidity. The air stuck to my bare arms as I threw my backpack into the backseat of the car. I hadn’t been sure I was going to do this until 30 minutes ago, when I suddenly stuffed a change of underwear and a clean shirt, my toothbrush, toothpaste and meds into a bag.

Now, here I was, standing in the driveway looking back at Pat. He stood on the front porch at the top of the steps. I think he was nervous for me. I was nervous, too, but also strangely excited to finally be on the way to Stokes County, to King, N.C. I yelled goodbye, quickly got in the car and started driving before I could second-guess myself. I saw him watching me in the rear-view mirror, standing there, until I crested the hill and went out of eyesight. I was alone. And everything could change today.

As of then, all I knew for sure about my dad’s beginnings was from a birth certificate sent to me about 10 years earlier. Toying with the idea of learning about where my dad came from, I had looked on Ancestry.com and saw that he was born in King. I called the Stokes County Register of Deeds then and asked them to send me a copy of his birth certificate. All I had was his name and his birthday.

When the letter arrived, I found his birth certificate. This slip of paper, light but heavy as lead with discovery, told me that a baby named Eddie Cantell Newsom was born to a woman named Mammie Lee Newsom in King, N.C. on May 15, 1924. The place where his father would have been listed was blank. Nothing.

There were so many things I don’t truly understand about this. My dad’s name was Eddie Cantrell Newsome, not spelled the way it was on his birth certificate. Who was Mammie Lee Newsom? All the paperwork told me was that Mammie gave birth to him in King in 1924. That was all, and that was everything.

I put the birth certificate away almost as soon as I read it, and I tried not to think about it very much. But I did, of course.

And on Eddie’s 100th birthday, on May 15, 2024, I decided to start again.

So here I was – a year after deciding to dig into this mystery and what it meant to me, my family, and to those orphaned and poor in Appalachia in the early 20th century – driving to Stokes County. Like everything with this, I’d been thinking about it for months, weeks, days. Should I drive three hours away to Danbury, the county seat of Stokes County and where the Register of Deeds office is, and look at the records myself? Should I go down the mountains, winding backroads, onto the interstate, back to more backroads, past farms, to this unknown local government office?

There was the physical effort of it all, but that was nothing, really. What was the Mount Everest of it all was the emotional journey it would take me to find out who had abandoned my dad as a baby, leaving him at The Children’s Home in Winston-Salem, N.C.

They never spoke to him again. No Christmas cards or birthday cakes. No new shoes or pencils. No hugs or books. Nothing.

He never knew his mother’s name or who his father was. He told me he never wanted to know. They never looked back. And throughout his life, for his 79 years, he didn’t want to, either.

At around 10 a.m. or so, I had made it down the mountain and onto Interstate 40, which goes the long length of North Carolina. I passed by the Farmington Road exit in Davie County. The air shimmered over the scalding asphalt even though it wasn’t even noon.

The exit looked the same as always, with the gas station and the blue jean factory. I grew up just a couple of miles away from here, down Farmington Road close to the blinking four-way red light in a community called Farmington. So much the same, yet so much has changed. Mom and Dad are gone. They’re resting together at the Methodist cemetery, under an oak tree next to a cow pasture, just a few minutes away from where they spent a life together.

My parents loved their house, the house where I grew up and where they lived until they died. It was where he and my mom moved to when he stopped working at The Children’s Home years after he “aged out.” Once the parsonage for the tall white Methodist Church nearby, it was run down and abandoned by the time they bought it for a couple thousand dollars in the 1960s. Someone had been using it as a de facto barn and piles of hay filled the top floor. My mom and dad poured nearly every dime they had into fixing it up. It was the only home he’d ever had that was his own.

It took me years after their deaths – and the excruciating aftermath – before I could face the house, let alone walk through its door. When I finally did see it, the grief and loss punched me in the gut.

My sister owns it now and it’s seemingly abandoned and disintegrating. The tall pin oaks lining the road have disappeared, as have the huge oak and crabapples that shaded the house. The browning yard looked like it would burst into flames. Bags of trash were stacked in the carport, an old car and lawn mower left in the yard.

I debated whether to visit again right then. By the time I’d reached the Farmington Road exit, my excitement had spread. Not now, I thought. I’ll go by and see the house and see Mom and Dad on the way back. I’ll want to be with them and tell them what I know. I’ll want to see them.

On I drove.

Eventually, the interstate took me to Winston-Salem, and I turned north onto the two-lane country roads going through Rural Hall and Germanton. Pastures and corn fields ran, fenceless, up to the ditches beside the road. Low brick ranch houses with huge grassy yards and big gardens popped up every now and then. Cows, heads down, grazed in sunny, hot pastures.

Summers around here were oppressive. I’d spend hours upon hours on the trampoline in our backyard, either jumping as hard as I could to touch the pin oak branches and catch a breeze, or laying as still as possible, barely breathing, so I’d feel like I was floating above the ground. We weirdly had air conditioning, or so they said. It was too expensive to run, and anyway, my parents said it didn’t work. So I’d stay outside in the shade as long as I could before coming inside to sweat all night long or sleep on the floor in the hallway under the only fan we owned.

I spotted a big farm pasture with flags advertising blueberries hanging next to a gravel driveway. I braked hard to turn in and I parked beside a low white house. I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, just sipping cooling coffee as I drove. But I was stalling, too.

A tall teenager with a sheepish smile came out a door, walked across the porch and led me into the farm store his family ran. We chatted about the farm as I pulled a pint of cold blueberries from the refrigerator and picked out bars of soaps made from his family’s goats’ milk.

Artificial Christmas trees decorated with ornaments sat on low tables in the middle of the store. He said he’d made some of them, the blobs of string and goat hair tied with ribbons. They’re to help birds line their nests, he said. I couldn’t resist the idea of this cute teenager spending his time twisting clumps of hair and ribbons, so I pulled two off the tree, one to give to a friend and one to keep, even though our birds have exactly no need for goat hair-lined nests.

As I paid, he told me his grandmother started the NC Cheese Trail and his mom ran its Facebook page. “You’re like farming royalty then,” I said, wishing for some strange reason to win this kid over. Maybe he reminded me of my dad, a farm boy doing farm things. He gave me a generous smile even though I cringed, ridiculous. I hustled to my car, giving him a quick embarrassed wave goodbye.

About 20 minutes later, I drove into Danbury. It is a tiny but old town of about 140 people, with a two-lane Main Street lined with buildings for just a block or two. A two-story brick house with a wide porch and tall, white-paned windows was the home of the Stokes County Historical Society Museum. It and the old Stokes County courthouse or town hall were the biggest and among the oldest buildings around. Founded around 1850, Danbury was named after the nearby Dan River and the plantation owned by former senator and N.C. Governor Alexander Martin, who named his plantation “Danbury Bluff.”1 The Historical Society museum is in the Wilson Fulton House, which was built around 1859. The old town hall was built in 1888, and a couple of churches – what were originally the Old Danbury Presbyterian Church (1894) and Clark Memorial Presbyterian Church (1893)2 – are still around.

I drove slowly by them. Across the street from the old town hall was a small cafe and some empty-looking storefronts. It was on the early side and the sidewalks and parking spots were mostly empty. It took less than 5 seconds to get to the other side of town.

There, I drove up a small hill and pulled into a large parking lot. I parked in a shaded spot, got out and looked around. The air was even hotter, easily over 100 degrees. I squinted. A three-story white and gray brick government building blazed in the sun, sitting by itself at one corner of the lot next to a grassy hill and field. Ronald W. Reagan Memorial Building it said, and the Register of Deeds office was inside.

I was about to meet Brandon Hooker, the new register of deeds in Stokes County. I was excited, nervous, unsure.

After learning that Mammie was my grandmother, I had spent more confusing hours on Ancestry.com, like any other person doing any other genealogy research. I had only questions, though. There was no Mammie Lee Newsom to be found. Other than my dad’s birth certificate she didn’t exist. No birth record or death record for anyone with that name. Ancestry was just a confusing mess of names, unreliable spellings and inaccurate family trees.

Who was she?

So I emailed Mr. Hooker and told him I wanted to see the records myself. I explained the situation, shared a bit of what I knew and what I was looking for, and asked whether I could come by and look around.

He emailed me a day or so later. It was generous, long with details I never knew and information I’d never heard. He wrote that he’d spent a day researching my dad’s family. He had actually found three women named Mammie (or Mamie) Newsom (or Newsome). Three! My eyes and heart popped when I read that. He wrote:

“I’m finding it truly difficult to pinpoint which Mamie is correct, using my own Ancestry account. There seems to have been three in the vicinity of your father’s birth – two in Stokes County and one in Forsyth County. One died in 1916, so we can rule her out. One married an Oscar McGee in 1918 and they were married til death, so it would be natural to rule her out.

The third was born August 1, 1897, to an unwed mother – Frances Elizabeth Newsom. In 1900, Mamie and her mother were living with her grandparents in King, N.C. – a John W. and Mary J. Newsom. This Mamie married a Eugene Morrison Kropff on December 7, 1917, in Winston-Salem. I cannot find them in the 1920 census, anywhere – I’ve used all kinds of spelling for Kropff. They were not living with his parents or her mother and step-father. On June 6, 1925, this Mamie married a Robert Isaac Lee, Sr. Your father would have been about a year old. Mamie and Robert moved to Raleigh, N.C. at some point and they are buried there. She died July 22, 1985.

This is all I can find on Mamie – even if she’s the right person. I never saw her listed as “Mamie Lee”, except on your father’s birth certificate, and neither were the other Mamie’s listed with the middle name “Lee”. She was always listed as “Mamie Magdaline”.

If you want to come by our office, I’d be happy to help you further, although we won’t have a lot on Mamie, but we may have some on her mother and grandparents – If this is even the right person…it’s difficult to say for sure.”

With the email tucked into my bag, I walked into the building, the air conditioning hitting me as I opened the door. I walked down the hall and found the Register of Deeds office. Red, white and blue ribbons hung on the door for Fourth of July, which had been just a few days earlier. I pushed open the heavy door and a bell chimed to let everyone know I was there.

My silence, my breath caught. Now, I thought, walking in. I’m about to find out for myself.

That’s where I leave it for this week. Next, I’ll share what happened when I stepped in the office and met Mr. Hooker. Thank you for joining me here.

~Angie

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My oldest daughter, Iver, and I were driving home on the interstate Monday after a long orchestra rehearsal. It was late, close to 10 p.m., and the September sky was darkening. I love this time of day, especially when I can grab some time with one of my kids in the car.

Iver is 15 and, among her many interests, she’s a dedicated and talented violist. That night, she was excited, talking a mile a minute about everything that happened during practice with the youth orchestra in Asheville. It was the beginning of a new season, and she told me all the details of seeing her friends, sitting on a bench with the conductor and music director — an awe-inspiring professor from Appalachian State University — and learning about the new chamber music program.

The conversation bounced around as we, likewise, bounced down the road through the September night. I just drove and listened, happy that the interstate wasn’t clogged with cars for once and soaking up that teenage excitement.

Suddenly, she stopped and turned to me.

“I read your last newsletter,” she said, of my post from last week. I published just a handful of the thousands of photos my dad took and collected of his life at The Children’s Home in Winston-Salem. I shared some as part this work to learn more about who my dad’s parents were and why they left him at the orphanage, never to speak to him again. The photos from last week were of a group of boys from The Children’s Home cutting corn and baling hay, likely taken in the 1950s.

“I loved seeing the photographs Grandaddy Eddie took,” she said. “It makes me feel close to him, even though I never knew him. I want to read what you’re writing, if you’ll let me.”

I choked up, but tried to hide it and focus on the road ahead. I had been caught off guard by how emotional I was after publishing that post last week. I was consumed with doubt about the writing and research I’ve been doing, just some of which has been published here. I was afraid of how he would react, if he were alive and knew of this. I don’t think he would like it, really. Last week, I was certain he would hate it.

But she startled me when her excitement about music suddenly turned toward these photographs and this project — especially that she felt that seeing his photos has brought her closer to knowing him. He died in 2004, more than a decade before she was born. But it was like he was there with us right then, in the quiet darkness of a car ride, like a ghost in the backseat.

Iver and my dad are similar in so many ways that it’s uncanny at times. They both have/had huge hearts and are sensitive with lots of high standards and expectations. Both were/are beloved “tallies” as I call them — my dad was an astounding 6’9,” the tallest person I’ve ever known. Iver is 6’ herself. Both were/are artistic, quietly funny and smart, with big, serious eyes and a generous smile.

I reached over and squeezed her hand.

“Of course you can read it,” I told her. “No matter what this all ends up being (if anything at all), you can absolutely read it.”

That was it. Sometimes I can’t find the words to talk about him, and it was one of those times. We kept driving, holding hands for a bit longer, the conversation slowly going back to music and the Telemann piece she’s learning.

But what she said has lingered. It’s reassured me. To know that she feels closer to him through this, even when I’m worried that he would feel betrayed, has brought relief.

So, this week, I thought I’d step back a little and show you some of his collection and his equipment, another way to make him more real for me, Iver and you, hopefully. Another way to get to know him.

Over the years, I’ve spent some time sorting through his slides and organizing them for digitizing. The photos are in photo albums that are slowly disintegrating. There are also rolls of film (perhaps movie film?) and boxes negatives. Recently I’ve been digitizing the slides I have organized into archival slide holders.

There are a ton to go through. While I was amassing it all this morning, I discovered EVEN MORE slides that he took, piled in a slide carousel box that I had thought was empty.

I think it’s pretty amazing that he spent his money (which he earned by working at The Children’s Home after he “aged out” and could have moved away) on cameras and equipment and film and developing.

Let me show you. All these photos are by me.

In addition to the slides, I have three photo albums and scrapbooks that he put together. In the 80s, a former resident and researcher of The Children’s Home, Dr. Perry Lefeavers, borrowed them. He went on to write and publish, The Children’s Home: The first seventy-five years, in 1983. To my dad’s utter dismay, Lefeavers wrote in the albums and, at times, actually on the photographs.

There is a lot to go through, and I think I’ve digitized about 400 slides so far. They are in varying degree of condition and quality. To digitize the slides, I’ve been using some DIY hacks. Professional slide processing equipment is pricey, so I’m experimenting with this. For now, I’ve use a light box app on a (very old) iPad. I place the slide on, raising it a bit off the surface of the iPad to prevent shadows and pixelation and scan it with the SlideScan app on my iPhone which is set up on a tripod to help reduce movement. The app does some minor adjustments for lighting, but I prevent it from doing anything dramatic. I then move the photos into the Photomyne app and transfer them into a filing system I’ve set up on Google Photos. They go in unedited.

I’m slowly starting to go back through them and pull out my favorites, like I did last week and published here.

I have noticed that the images’ sharpness is degrading during this process, so my DIYing isn’t foolproof. I also need to try scanning in the photographs because I don’t want to remove them from the albums themselves. I’ll see, in the future, if I need to come up with a better process.

Can I ask for your help? I’d love to know if you’ve preserved or organized any of your family’s photos. If so, how did you or do you do it? Do you display them or treat them like an archive? I’m curious because I’m still experimenting with what to do with all of these. Thanks in advance for your advice!

Next week, I hope to start sharing some about a research trip I took in July to King, N.C., where my dad was born. It was a doozy, and there’s lots to share. See you soon!

~Angie

Without making you suffer through the nitty gritty of the last few months, the short story is that I’ve made serious (to me) and amazing (again, to me) progress on this project, this idea of finding out the story of who my dad’s family was/is, why they abandoned him as a very young child at The Children’s Home in Winston-Salem and basically never talked to him or saw him ever again. An investigative history and memoir about him — and me.

I’m calling it Orphans, the working title is emblazoned at the top of my Google Doc and Notion Dashboard. Because he was an orphan, among the many things that identify him. With him and my mother gone, I am one, too. The irony of this is not lost. It’s a word I want to … I don’t know … get used to? I don’t want that word to be easy or familiar, but I also don’t want to be scared of it. I want to be able to say it because, for one thing, that word never once passed my dad’s lips within ear shot of me. We never, ever, ever said that.

So, I’ve been writing and researching a ton. Some days incredibly slowly. Other days with an unrecognizable force. Along with the writing, reading and researching, I’m going through the thousands of photographs and slides he shot at The Children’s Home. They date from the time he was about 25, in 1949, up until he moved away in the early 60s.

I have about 400 digitized now. Some days, seeing the photos and putting myself into his world and into what he was witnessing makes me emotional. Other times, he makes me laugh when I see a photo full of grinning people. I think I know (maybe, probably) what he was thinking when he clicked that shutter. He could be highly mischievous and an epic jokester. I see the faces grinning at him through the viewfinder and can almost hear his laugh, even though he passed away in 2004.

Because the weather is turning, it feels like fall and I actually found some wild ripe muscadines on a hike through the mountains recently (they remind me of the muscadine wine he made once in our bathtub — another story for another day), I was inspired to say hello and share some of his photos and give a quick progress update.

I wanted to start with some photos of Children’s Home boys in fields baling hay and cutting corn. Farming like this was a huge part of his life. As a kid and young adult, he worked on the farm at The Children’s Home and at others nearby. After he left the Home, he owned a dairy cow breeding business, traveling all over Western North Carolina to help dairy farmers grow their herds without having a dangerous bull around. In Davie County, where I grew up, we all spent a lot of time at “the farm,” 20+ acres of land down from our house where we had, at random points in time, an apple and pear orchard, beef cattle, chickens, pastures for hay and what felt like acres of vegetables – tomatoes, green beans, butter beans, corn, okra, etc.

These are just a few, of course; I can publish only so many here. I’m working on a standalone website, but we’ll see. These shots are undated, but I suspect that they’re from the 1950s? (If you are savvy about farm vehicles, clothing styles and photography and have a more precise guess, please let me know!)

I hope you enjoy seeing some of Eddie’s photos. I’ll write more here about what I’ve discovered soon. In the meantime, take your time with these photos. I love them, and I hope you like seeing them, too.

Thank you for reading and spending time with me and my dad’s photos.

I’m curious: When do you connect with the farms in your community the most during the year? Is it during the fall, like me? Do you have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership? I’d love to hear!

~Angie

(I guess I should say this? All images here, except where noted, are scans from 35mm color slides, date and location unknown. All are owned by me and shot by my father, Eddie Newsome. None of them may be reproduced, downloaded or altered in any way without my written permission.)

Here I am at the library, a littlish one with amazingly few windows in downtown Hendersonville, N.C. There are people scattered here and there, mostly on the computers and checking out books. There are gurgling babies, totting toddlers and cutie pie parents, with grandparents nearby to reach out to hug and snuggle. There is a group of (loud) women gathered around an oak library table covered with huge paper maps. They’re planning a trip to (somewhere? Norway? I can’t tell.) in September. “Should we get a car? Stay at the hotel at the airport?” they ask one another. “Can you drive all that way?”

The future is tip-toeing about.

I see it! But it’s strange, too, to witness people working on, thinking about, and planning the future. All summer and early fall I felt unmoored. Our kids started new schools, which was understandably rocky at first. That smoothed out but our move from Asheville to Saluda dragged on and on and on. I had just started to feel a bit settled in late September when Hurricane Helene upended the world in Western North Carolina, in an Appalachian region that hasn’t seen anything like what happened in recent recorded history. The “future” was shaken up like a snow globe, hazy outlines visible among all the swirling bits.

Nearly everything changed for us — our jobs and financial wellbeing, our house and landscape, and my ability to know what was going to happen the next day. That Friday, three trees collapsed on our house, bouncing off the porch and spearing our roof. A limb broke through our roof and exploded into our living room, sending roofing material and drywall everywhere. Three trees ripped and dented gutters and broke a porch beam. They fell just feet from Pat, who was out on our porch heating up water on the grill. Thank God he was OK.

We ran, scrambling to the basement and we stayed there pretty much for days. We watched downloaded episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine on my tiny iPad. I ventured to clean up and drape tarps over furniture, rolled up the rug and put buckets and towels out to keep rain from soaking everything. We left after a week of no water and no electricity to stay with Pat’s parents. When we got back, we took deep breaths and shouldered on, going to the FEMA emergency office to make claims for help (none arrived — and I’ve given up trying to scrounge some up for now), and starting the never-ending process of insurance claims (they were less than helpful; we only got 50 percent of what we need for repairs).

While we were the worst hit in our immediate neighborhood, we’re some of the very lucky ones. Pat and I lived in Asheville and in Swannanoa, combined, for more than 25 years. There are still overturned cars and piles of debris. There are homes totally gone, washed away. And there are so many people who died. It’s absolutely heartbreaking into a million different splinters that are lodged into our skin and spirit and outlook.

It’s a relief to sit here at this table next to the library copier and “act normal” and overhear people making plans and see them snuggling babies. Still, what’s going to happen? Will they rent the car or stay at another hotel? Will the gurgling baby be OK? She won’t remember the storm, I know, but will she feel it? Will her parents tell her the stories of That Friday in 2024? When I catch up with people now, we run through what happened to us and our families and our work during and after Helene. I wait to hear whether everyone is OK, whether everyone made it. I listen to the quiet, halting stories and about family members who didn’t, of those who nearly escaped, of the water people could see from their homes. We, all of us, just brush, just barely touch the outlines of these memories when we tell each other what happened. Not too much, not now. Maybe later. When we can breathe. When the overturned cars are gone and the debris is out of sight. When we can plan for the future.

Me, I’m still taking it a day at a time, really. There’s a thick layer of snow and ice around our house now. It’s been 25 degrees in the morning nearly every day this week, and the snow and ice crunch under my feet as I try to slip and slide my way out of the house. I’m focusing on walking a step at a time, not falling and breaking (another) leg. But I made it to the library, got a new library card and am here, writing again! That’s me, tip-toeing, too, I suppose. (And cheering, quietly, from my chair: “Y’all, rent the car! Get a great hotel! Snuggle the baby! Tell her everything will be OK!”)

What I know today, in the most simplest terms, about where my dad came from: Eddie Newsome was born in King, in Stokes County, N.C., on May 15, 1924, to a woman named Mammie Lee Newsom.

And with that, I know more than my dad ever did.

I actually learned this in 2013, when I screwed up the courage to call Stokes County and ask whether Eddie Newsome’s birth certificate was there. The kind person on the phone — it could have been the Register of Deeds Kathy Young herself — did some quick digging and found it. I didn’t find out anything else. I wrote out an official request for a copy of his birth certificate and mailed it to her (that’s how they did things then — maybe even still).

In August, I got a letter from the Stokes County Register of Deeds office in Danbury, N.C. In it was a photo copy of his birth certificate. And with that, I knew what my grandmother was: 27-year-old Mammie Lee Newsom, a housekeeper who lived in Stokes County at the time. My dad was born with a doctor in attendance (could this be important to know?).

But my heart sank when the other lines were blank. His parents weren’t married, and no father was listed. There was nothing about him at all. No residence, occupation or racial information. But that probably makes sense, really, when you consider why The Children’s Home existed in the first place.

The Children’s Home, where my dad lived until he married my mother, Willa, and moved to Davie County, opened in Winston-Salem on Sept. 13, 1909, on the site of what was previously Davis Military School. The military school opened in 1890, and “flourished until the Panic of 1893, when it was forced to fight a burden of debt.” It closed in 1897.1

A short time later, the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church purchased the 25 acres where the school had stood.2 Prominent business families of Winston-Salem (think: the Reynolds family of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Hanes family of the P.H. Hanes Knitting Company) soon served as donors and some members of the orphanage’s trustees. Individual Methodist churches from all over Western North Carolina took up contributions from their congregations to give to The Children’s Home throughout much of the orphanage’s early and middle history.

Back in 1923, the year before my dad was born, there were 152 children living at the orphanage. Children arrived many different ways, but many of them came to The Home after they were referred by Methodist ministers throughout the western state. Not everyone could go, and it wasn’t always free. In 1923, for example, The Children’s Home had 180 applications for admission but only admitted 15, according to The Children’s Home: The First Seventy-Five Years, by Perry Lefeavers.

It was the next year when Mammie had my dad. I had no idea until I saw his birth certificate that his name was spelled Eddie Cantell Newsom when he was born. When he died in 2004, and all the years I knew him, he spelled his name Eddie Cantrell Newsome. I, myself, spell Newsome with an “e,” though there are many variations on our last name. I’ve seen my last name also spelled Newsum and Newsom, for example. It will be a wrinkle in tracking down my family members, I predict.

In his book, Lefeavers wrote that my dad arrived, without any siblings, to The Children’s Home on Aug. 18, 1926. He was just over 2-years-old, if this is correct. Right now, I don’t know anything about how or why he arrived, whether a minister referred him or whether another circumstance led to him being there. Even though he grew up in an orphanage with hundreds of other children, my dad knew less than most of the other kids about how he got there and where he was from. Many of the children, perhaps most, lived there because one or both of their parents had died or because they were from very poor families who couldn’t afford to raise them. Most came knowing something.

But there are a few, tiny clues as to how his story started. My dad told me just a few stories — and he told them very infrequently; I think he didn’t liked to dwell on this at all — about what he did know.

He told me once that he had been taken to The Home as a tiny infant and had been left there, with a note attached to him, in a basket on a doorstep. (It reminds me of the Bible story of baby Moses being put in a basket and left in the Nile River.) My dad never showed it to me, but I think, at one point, we could have had the letter at our house somewhere. Possibly? I never read it, and I don’t know where it could be if it even still exists or if it existed at all.

He elaborated to say that he lived at The Home for a little while, but someone soon came and got him, presumably to “go back home.” But that didn’t last long, he said. Dad said that they — whoever they were — brought him back when he was about 2-years-old. He never left again. And he never saw his mother or any family member again, officially.

There may have been one time when he came close to meeting a family member. He did tell me that once, he and a bunch of other boys from The Home were out working on a nearby farm. (This wasn’t uncommon, I’ve come to learn. The Home was nearly self-sufficient when it came to food, and it owned and operated many farms at the time, though I don’t know if this farm was one of The Home’s farms or another one.)

The Home’s superintendent, Oscar “Pop” Woosley, was with the group at the time. Dad said he remembered Pop calling him over and pointing to a man who was also working nearby on the farm. My dad said that Pop said, “Eddie, that there is your father.” The man never acknowledged or spoke to my dad at all, he said. I’m not sure how old he was at the time. I remember this story as clear as day. It shook me up when my dad told me about it; it still does, now. It makes me want to hug my dad and never let go.

That’s it. Here’s where we start. And though my dad was an incredibly honest man, I have no idea if any of this is true, in parts, select details or completely.

A big revelation … of what I won’t get to find out

And the big news I’ve gotten recently is that I don’t know if I ever will, actually. A few weeks ago, I learned that the basement of one of the buildings at The Children’s Home flooded a while back. Unfortunately, it was the building that held and all the records from 1990 and earlier. They were all destroyed; there aren’t any records left there of my dad.

I almost cried when the staff at The Children’s Home told me. It was really, really disappointing.

So, I don’t have any primary source materials from The Children’s Home. I don’t have a copy of the letter (if there ever was one) left with him as an infant. I don’t have any of his other records about how or why he was admitted, what he did while he was there… Nothing…

One thing I am thankful to have, though, is “The Home Chronicle,” The Children’s Home’s monthly newsletter. There are decades of The Home Chronicle, and the archivist at The Children’s Home has shared snippets where either my dad or mom show up. It’s been amazing to read about them through other’s eyes and, in some cases, what they themselves have written or said. I’m very grateful to W.D. “Dave” Edwards for sharing those with me.

I also have the book Perry Lefeavers published, which includes many photos my dad took. And, of course, I have the beginnings of information from genealogy sites (which is very confusing; more on that later).

So this is where we start. The Children’s Home, a birth certificate and some family lore.

On the photos I’ll share throughout this project

My dad loved photography, and he was a prolific photographer of The Children’s Home, especially from the 1940s through the early 1960s. He kept several photo albums, which I am very lucky to have. The photos from this post are ones that he either took or were in his album (with some obvious exceptions).

I also have boxes and boxes of slides that he shot. Those will take me a lot longer to go through and organize. I’m slowly, slowly figuring out how to digitize them efficiently. And I’ll share ones that are the most interesting and relevant. If you have any technical suggestions, please let me know! It’s going to be a monumental task, but I’d really like to share these with folks who may be interested.

Until next week, thank you for reading — and especially to those of you who commented on my last post and/or reached out to me by email or through direct messaging. There are so many important stories you’ve shared about finding your family and your loved one’s families. It is an odd comfort to know that I am not alone in this (of course I wouldn’t be, but the confirmation is worthwhile). Thank you for sharing your story and for listening to mine.

~Angie

After my last post, where I laughably proclaimed that I was going do SO MANY THINGS in 2023, well… To be honest, the things I had planned on doing were promptly shoved aside as I struggled to recover from a severely broken leg and ankle and then, later in 2023, transitioned away from Carolina Public Press, the statewide nonprofit investigative news organization I founded and led for 12+ years.

It took me until about last February to deal with all of that to even get to the point where I could come back to this newsletter. Since then, I’ve revamped and renamed it Hey There because I find myself saying that all the time. An unintentional catchphrase that I’m embracing here.

But, the name is pretty inconsequential. I have more news about where Hey There is going.

The big news (for me) that I want to share

Some of you may know the story of my family, especially my dad, Eddie. On May 15, he would have turned 100. (He had me later in life; people were always mistaking him for my grandfather.) He passed away in 2004, and I have been thinking for a very long time about writing about him and his life.

My dad grew up in an orphanage, at The Children’s Home in Winston-Salem, N.C., never knowing his parents or how he ended up there. It was a place he really loved, and after he “aged out” of the orphanage, he stayed on and went on to work at the large dairy farm they ran at the time. Later, he met my mom, who miraculously graduated from college and went to work in the dining hall at The Home, and they married and settled down in Davie County, where I grew up.

But beyond that and a few anecdotes pointing to who his family might be, I know next to nothing about how he ended up at The Children’s Home. While he was alive, he had no interest in finding them or any other family member, and I have always respected that and didn’t pursue it because I wanted to honor his wishes.

But on his 100th birthday, I felt something shift.

After thinking about it for a long time (decades, really) and being very torn about whether I should pursue any answers, I suddenly felt that it was time and it was OK. He would have been 100 years old. It’s time, I thought. I’m not going to lie, though. A part of me is still scared to ask because I don’t know what I’ll find, honestly.

But, on May 16, I decided to start to find out.

I have started working on a writing and research project to piece together the answers to the lists of questions I have about my dad, of course, but also about The Children’s Home itself. I don’t have any real confirmation (yet) on who his birth parents were. His birth certificate has no information about his father and the woman listed as his mother? I can’t confirm who she is yet. Also, the more I do research, the more I am perplexed by how little I’ve been able to find (so far) that explains the history of the orphanages in the South that formed at the turn of the 20th century.

“The Home” is a big deal in Winston-Salem even now because so many children from Forsyth and surrounding counties ended up living there, whether it was temporarily or for a long time, like my dad. It isn’t “gone,” at all. The Children’s Home is, right now, a “group home” for kids in the foster care system, as I currently understand it. So it has remained, albeit in a different form. The cottages and buildings still stand in central Winston-Salem, and the campus looks very similar to how I remember it looking as a child.

Since May 16, I’ve been corresponding with staff at Crossnore Communities for Children (what The Children’s Home is now known as) and an archivist who has some information about The Home. I’m going to go there within a few days to meet with them and some former residents who actually knew my dad, and were there while he was there. I’m thrilled! It’s been years since I met anyone who lived at The Children’s Home while my dad was there.

I will be writing a lot about this project in this newsletter. If you’re interested, I’d love to hear what you think and any questions you may have. I’m a bit in the weeds with this because it’s so close to me, so having perspective is a challenge, really, even though I’m hopefully going to use my journalist eye and mind to navigate this project.

And you can of course share this with anyone you think might be interested. Though it’s a personal project, I’m hopeful that we can uncover this mystery together and that I can write something that would be interesting to others.

That’s it for today. I will send out another newsletter next week (and hopefully every Thursday following) and share how my trip goes to The Children’s Home. No matter what, it will be enlightening, and The Home is a very special place to our family.

To end, here’s the earliest photo we have of my dad. I believe he’s at The Children’s Home in this photo, which is undated and the photographer is unknown.

In honor of Eddie, I really thank you for joining me in this journey! Until next week…

~Angie