Siblings unite for the first time
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on August 6, 2017 7:21 PM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
James Kasey looks to his wife Fran, who helped him find his long-lost sister, Wanda Darby, as he shares his story at his Goldsboro home Wednesday.
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
James' wife, Fran, holds a scrapbook with a photo of his biological mother, Lydia Wood.
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
James Kasey holds his cell phone showing the text messages between he and his sister, Wanda Darby. They have been texting each other daily since meeting.
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Submitted photo
Long-lost siblings Wanda Darby and James Kasey pose for a photo on their reunion visit.
James Kasey's parents never told him he was adopted.
An 8-year-old Kasey first heard it from a 'mean old lady' in his home town of Beckly, West Virginia. She called him "that adopted Kasey kid" when he went to fetch a wayward ball from her lawn.
When he returned home to his grandmother, who was caring for him at the time, he asked her if it were true.
"She said she didn't appreciate that lady saying it to me, but it was true," Kasey, 81, said. "She said 'they'll tell you about it later on,' but they both died before later on came."
It wasn't until more than 70 years "later on" that Kasey met part of his lost family -- a sister he'd never known, but who had also been looking for him.
The son of a registered nurse and a taxi cab driver, money was tight during Kasey's childhood. When his father, the driver, developed cataracts and his mother diabetes, things became even harder.
At 16, Kasey dropped out of school. He joined the U.S. Air Force just after his 17th birthday.
He had to take a test to enter the service. Kasey said he wasn't sure what he would have done had he failed.
"I had no intention of going back to school," he said. "They gave me a hard time, and I gave them a hard time."
Kasey passed the test, and with a small allotment from his parents he joined up. Marrying his wife, Fran, a few years later, Kasey spent 20 years in the Air Force as a weapons mechanic. He served two tours in Vietnam ---- from 1969 to 1970, and then again from May through November of 1972 ---- before eventually being assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base when he returned.
From his childhood through early adulthood, Kasey brought up the topic of his adoption to his parents only once, he said.
"They wouldn't discuss it," he said. "My mother, now adoptive mother, told me 'there's nothing to talk about' and that was that."
As he got older, however, he and Fran decided to take things into their own hands. Ordering a DNA testing kit from Ancestry.com, Kasey submitted a sample of his DNA to the website.
Earlier this year, the couple's work paid dividends. Kasey got in contact a Missouri woman who shared Kasey's DNA, and who would help him fill the gaps in his own story.
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Wanda Darby, 69, first learned of her potential long-lost brother in 1996.
After her mother, Lydia Wood, passed away, Darby's cousins told her that Wood may have had another child before Darby was born. At the time, there was no way to tell one way or another. The question lingered for years.
Darby said she and her husband enjoy genealogy, and both took the Ancestry.com DNA test around four years ago. She searched for her sibling, who at the time she thought was a girl, without much luck.
That changed in late 2016, when Darby learned of a potential DNA match. She tried to contact Kasey herself, but ran into technical issues with her email system and couldn't get her messages to go through. Instead, she spent the following days working with another distant relative she had met through the Ancestry.com database, a man who she had not met face-to-face but had some correspondence with. Through him, she was eventually able to track down and contact Kasey for the first time. She said a weight was lifted off of her shoulders.
"I was initially looking for a sister," she said. "Now the mystery is gone, and I'm happy about it."
Together, Kasey and Darby worked through the events which had led to each of their births, more than 1,000 miles and 10 years apart.
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According to Darby and Kasey, the story began in West Virginia, where their mother, Wood, worked as a babysitter for a couple. While there, she became pregnant by the man she babysat for, an event which both Darby and Kasey characterized as rape.
She was "sent away" for a while to have the child, a practice Kasey said was all too common where he grew up for women who became pregnant out of wedlock.
Wood left Kasey in an orphanage in Charleston, West Virginia, then left and eventually found herself in St. Louis, Missouri. There she would get married and eventually give birth to Darby.
For Kasey, the story filled in the gaps in his past. As a child, his grandmother told him that the orphanage his mother adopted him from had burned down in the years since, taking with it any records it may have held. That dead end had cut off Kasey's search for years, but his DNA testing had injected new life.
Kasey's birth certificate bears his adoptive mother's name, which he attributes to her employment as a nurse.
"What I think happened is that, since she had diabetes, she couldn't have children," he said. "I think the doctor she worked with had connections with people at the orphanage, and he told her 'there's this little boy there, if you want him go get him.' And she did."
Having learned the story of his birth, Kasey was able to put his early childhood experiences into some kind of context. He had always felt like his relatives looked down on him and his family for his adopted status.
"There were relatives who I knew, but they never really came over to our house," he said. "When my adoptive father came down with cataracts and couldn't drive a cab anymore, and my mother's diabetes got worse and worse, we really fell on hard times. And they never came over to help us."
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After talking back and forth for a while, Kasey and Darby decided to meet for the first time. Both Kasey's took to the road, making the 2-and-a-half-day, 1,025-mile journey to meet his half sister in her home state.
Before the meeting, both siblings were nervous, but excited. Having spent so long searching for answers, they were ready to find some closure.
When the two finally met in May, Kasey said, it felt right, immediately.
"I thought, 'I guess God, this is what you wanted me to do, so this is what I did'," he said. "She looks like me, her fingers are kind of short like mine and her face is round like mine."
Standing next to each other, it is easy to see the relation. A photo of their mother, now displayed in Kasey's home, further carries the resemblance.
The two spent all of their time together during the Kasey's stay, visiting the farm where the Budweiser horses are bred and raised. Fran said she, too, felt like she was among family.
"It was like, when we met her, we were right at home," she said. "We fit in and got along with everyone well."
Kasey and Darby now text each other every day -- sometimes a few words, sometimes more, but always something just to keep in touch. They check up on each other, a simple "how are you," or "what are you doing today," serving as a constant reminder of how what was once lost was found again.