Texas/Southwest

08/26/2006

By ELIZABETH WHITE  / Associated Press

It was clear Saturday that the nervousness Felecia Dorsey said she felt a day earlier had given way to the raw, beautiful emotion that often accompanies a life-changing experience.

Dorsey had waited all 34 years of her life to meet her biological father. At the San Antonio International Airport her shaking turned to crying as Larry Maston, 63, hugged his daughter for the first time.

"That's your big brother," Maston said after a long embrace and many tears, directing Dorsey, 34, to Ugene Wilson, the sibling she never knew she had.

Maston had thought until earlier this year that his daughter was stillborn in 1971, even though in reality Dorsey's mother, who was never married to Maston, put the baby up for adoption immediately.

But thanks to a bit of pestering from a military colleague of Dorsey's during a tour in Iraq, the U.S. Army sergeant began the process earlier this year of tracking down the birth parents she knew nothing about.

"I felt that if my mom wanted to see me she would have looked for me," Dorsey said. "So I was more nervous that they didn't want to know who I was than not finding them."

In early July, the private investigator who was working for free gave Dorsey the good, and bad, news. Her father was alive and running a hair salon in Los Angeles. Her mother, Mary Santos, had died in 2005 of heart disease.

Dorsey became the adoptive daughter to Ruby and Louis Dorsey, both now dead, at a young age after being shuttled through two other foster homes where her birth name of Juli had been changed first to Barbie and then to Mimi.

Dorsey had very little information to offer Susan Friel-Williams, of Internationallocator.com, besides that her name was once Mimi and that she was born in Los Angeles.

"We can only do so much as far as doing an investigation but we have to have something to start with," Friel-Williams said from Florida. She said the firm wanted to help Dorsey, despite the challenges her location in Iraq posed, as "our way to support the troops."

Friel-Williams, herself adopted, used Dorsey's birth date and mother's ethnicity, Hispanic, to figure out who she was in public records. Ultimately Friel-Williams was able to connect Maston to Dorsey, who shared an emotional phone introduction between Los Angeles and Iraq.

"He just started screaming, 'This is my daughter!'," Dorsey said.

"It was just absolutely wonderful, just to hear from her," Maston said. "She called every day for three weeks."

Maston said he would not have been mad at Santos, who was also Ugene Wilson's mother, for not telling him about Dorsey.

"If Mary had been alive, we'd have gone around arguing for about an hour but then it would have been over because this is more joyful than the anger would have been," he said.

At the airport where Dorsey also met her maternal aunt, Priscella Santos, and sister-in-law, Vanessa Wilson, her newfound brother, Ugene, said "it's like seeing mom all over again."

"She looks like my sister. It's kind of scary, but it's good, it's definitely good," Priscella Santos said.

Dorsey arrived back from Iraq this month and is now based at Fort Hood. She's due to be discharged from the Army at the end of the year, and she and her fiancee plan to marry in October.

Two half brothers and a half sister have yet to meet Dorsey and her daughter, Ta'Tiana Miles, 14. But there's time for that. Family and friends are planning a big party in California in December.

"I've been waiting for this day for a while," Ta'Tiana Miles said Saturday.

But not as long as her mother, who symbolically entered the family as her father placed a lei around her neck in what Priscella Santos said was a symbol of their love. Then the lot of them made plans to grab a bite to eat as they left the airport together.

"We have a lot of catching up to do," Priscella Santos said.