Siblings found: Brothers and sisters united after decades-long search

Posted 7/7/15

“I’m just so excited,” she said.

Then the doorbell rang. Though they’d never met, Rosemary and the woman at the door exchanged a big hug while two men waited behind.

“Oh, my goodness!” Reno said as she smiled and hugged the woman, …

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Siblings found: Brothers and sisters united after decades-long search

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Nervously, Rosemary Reno looked around the room. Yes, everything was ready: Table set for company, memory books on the table, a bouquet of flowers on the counter.

“I’m just so excited,” she said.

Then the doorbell rang. Though they’d never met, Rosemary and the woman at the door exchanged a big hug while two men waited behind.

“Oh, my goodness!” Reno said as she smiled and hugged the woman, her sister, for the first time. Then she turned to give hugs to her two brothers. “This is just incredible!”

Reno had waited for this moment for 61 years — ever since she learned in 1954 that her father had three other children she had never met, two sons and a daughter, all children of his second wife.

The siblings’ recent reunion was a result of a birthday present to Rosemary, 81, from her daughter, Denyce Reno, both of Powell.

Rosemary knew little of her father, James “Cullen” Varney, who had deserted his wife and two daughters when Reno was 3 years old and her sister, Barbara, was 2.

Families deserted

This wasn’t the first time Varney had left his wife in the lurch.

According to a family history written by Denyce, Varney disappeared in 1933 when his wife, Mary Melba, was pregnant with Rosemary. Mary Melba later learned he had stolen the payroll and was a wanted man. He was captured, convicted and sent to federal prison in Chillicothe, Ohio.

“Confused and bewildered, Mary Melba decided that she would also move to Chillicothe to be near her husband,” Denyce Reno wrote.

Varney was at the apartment during Rosemary’s birth in January 1934, handcuffed to the prison warden. He returned home after he got out of prison, but left his little family for good in 1937.

After that, Mary Melba and her daughters lived a nomadic life for several years while Mary Melba traveled throughout the Northeast, acting and doing theatrical sketches for vaudeville.

In 1941, Mary Melba met and married Werner Tanner, who became the man they thought of as their father. He adopted the girls, and they took his name. The couple later divorced.

Though the girls had never heard from Varney since he left them, their mother had maintained a relationship with his family. She made sure they kept in touch with their paternal grandmother, Mary Elon May, in Kentucky.

After deserting his family, Varney didn’t contact his mother until he called her in 1951. At her request, he gave her permission to pass along his phone number to the Rosemary and Barbara.

When they called him, he invited his daughters to visit him in San Pedro, California, where he put them up at a hotel, then met with them during his lunch hour at work. He had been out of their lives so long that he couldn’t remember Barbara’s name to introduce her to co-workers.

During that visit, the girls discovered their father had changed his name to Ray Faulds, pronounced “Falls.”

Contact with their father was sporadic after that.

In 1954, Varney — aka Faulds — and his third wife went to Oklahoma to visit his mother. There, he told her he had three other children — two boys and a girl — by his second wife, Mildred. He gave his mother a photo of the three children, all dressed up for Easter. Their first names were written on the back: Bobby, Davella and Wiley.

“He told her that the children’s mother had left him, and that he didn’t know where they were,” Denyce wrote in the family history. “This, of course, was not true; he had deserted his second family in the same way that he had deserted Rosemary and Barbara.”

Varney died in 1972 at the age of 64.

The search begins

After learning she had three grandchildren she’d never met, Rosemary’s grandmother told Rosemary about them and showed her their picture. Until then, she had no idea that she had two brothers and another sister.

Based on her father’s actions, it seemed obvious that “he didn’t want us to meet,” Rosemary told the Tribune.

From the time she learned about them, Rosemary tried to find her siblings. But, before the advent of the Internet, searching for people was very difficult. Nothing she tried brought any results.

“I wrote Oprah Winfrey once and asked her to help,” Rosemary said, but she never got a response.

Then, in 2002, Rosemary’s husband died, followed by the death of her sister, Barbara, in August 2003. Her mother died in February 2004.

“It was a difficult, painful time,” Denyce wrote. “Everyone from her generation was gone, and she wished more than ever that there was some way to connect with her unknown brothers and sister.”

Rosemary moved to Powell in 2005 to be near Denyce and her family.

Last September, Denyce decided to try to find her mother’s missing family members.

“Her 81st birthday was coming up in January of 2015, and I hoped to find my mother’s long-lost siblings as a birthday gift. So I began an intensive search. It didn’t go well.”

Then, after weeks of searching, Denyce found partial records of the births of the children. While privacy laws prohibit posting their full birth records, they did include one important bit of information: Mildred’s maiden name was Linkletter. But, the trail ended there.

In January, Denyce and her family celebrated Rosemary’s 81st birthday without the special gift she still hoped to provide: information about her brothers and sister. But she continued her search.

“One night, without a clue as to how to proceed, I tried linking Cullen’s (Varney’s) assumed last name, Faulds, with his second wife’s maiden name, Linkletter,” she said. “That’s when the magic happened. Their daughter’s marriage license came up!”

Rosemary said previous searches failed because Mildred had remarried after Faulds deserted her and the children. Mildred’s new husband adopted the kids and gave them his last name.

However, that name change hadn’t been done legally, so Davella used Faulds on her marriage license. Without that, “I never would have found her,” Denyce said.

Then the search began in earnest. 

“With an unusual name like Davella Urquides, it wasn’t hard at all to track her down” in San Pedro, California, Denyce said.

“I couldn’t keep the information to myself, so I called my mother and told her about her belated birthday gift.”

“Denyce came through,” Rosemary said. “I really didn’t think, at my late age, that I would ever be able to find them.”

First contact

Denyce called Davella the next morning, with Rosemary by her side.

“I told her my name and that I was from Wyoming and said, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think that my mother might be your sister.’ There was a short silence on the other end of the phone, and she said, ‘Was her father’s name Ray Faulds?’” Denyce wrote. “I said, ‘Yes, but his real name was James Cullen Varney.’ That led to a long conversation and many surprises on both sides.”

Davella, Robert and Wiley are still alive, all living in California. They knew nothing of their father’s previous identity or his daughters, Rosemary and Barbara.

Rosemary’s big surprise was to learn that none of them knew anything about her or Barbara.

“We had always assumed that they knew about us and that they had been searching for us for all of these years, but my father had never told them anything about the existence of his first family.”

Under the circumstances, Rosemary said, it was remarkable that Davella and her brothers took the news seriously.

“They could have hung up on us,” she said. “It would have been a shock. I just can’t imagine how surprised they were.”

Rosemary and her newly found siblings made arrangements for her to meet them in California. However, she suffered a small stroke in February, and that set their plans back.

Rosemary said, “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t you know, after we’ve found them, I’m going to die. I’ll never get to meet them. Wouldn’t that just be my luck?’ But it was a minor thing.”

Rosemary recovered well, but Davella, Robert and Wiley decided it would be better to come visit her in Powell instead her going to meet them. They set the date for their first meeting for May 6. 

Meeting at last

The day Rosemary had waited for finally came, and she was almost beside herself with excitement.

“I can’t wait for them to get here,” she said. “It doesn’t seem real. It’s something I’ve wanted for so many years. I had just given up hope.”

After greeting each other at the door, Davella Urquides, Robert Arthur Richey and James Wiley “Mouse” Richey followed Rosemary into her home. There, she and Denyce presented them with memory books containing photos and recollections of their unusual family history.

They gathered around the table and visited about the events that had, at long last, brought them together.

“We had no hint at all that they existed — none at all,” Davella said. “It was a bolt out of the blue. ... I got a phone call on a Sunday morning saying, ‘Mrs. Urquides, I think my mother is your sister.’”

After determining the call wasn’t a joke, “I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and call my brothers,” she added.

Their reactions?

“Other than being a total shock, it was just another day in the zoo,” joked Bob. “It’s like something you see on TV. Especially after the length of time that (Rosemary) searched.”

Davella added, “I can’t say it was a shock. It was just a nice surprise.”

The newfound siblings enjoyed conversations over the phone and were anticipating Rosemary’s visit when she had her stroke.

After that, Bob said his wife told him, “You need to go see sissy.”

Davella said she, Bob and Mouse have another older half-sister, Mary, in California.

“We never use the ‘half,’” she said. “She’s just our sister, just like Rosemary is our sister.”

Looking forward

Reno said later she and her newfound siblings enjoyed getting to know each other during their visit here. They also met Denyce’s family.

“It was  just lovely,” she said. “It was so nice getting acquainted with them, and they were such lovely people, and friendly.”

Now, they’re turning the tables, and Rosemary will go to California for three days this month to visit Davella, Bob and Mouse, as well as their spouses, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“It’s going to be fun to meet the rest of the family,” she said.

That’s a dramatic turnaround from a few months ago when Rosemary had no extended family to call her own. 

“What a nice, nice thing to have happen when I’m so old, before I kick the bucket,” she said.

 

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