Swapped as a newborn for $1,000 behind a blond brick North Georgia clinic, Jane Blasio went to live with a couple in Ohio, where she found love but no one who looked like her.
Blasio spent the past eight years searching for the family she lost in that back-door exchange 32 years ago. In August, clues started emerging after a woman saw her picture on television.
Now she’s met a man who might be her half-brother. They share the same blue-green eyes that change colors with their moods and slope softly away from their noses.
They have the same cheekbones and that defiant cowlick crowning the more compliant strands of their thick, dark hair. They share the tendency to be blunt.
“He’s got the same sick sense of humor that I have, " Blasio said.
DNA tests are needed to confirm it, but Blasio believes she’s found her half-brother. And if he is her kin, then finally she’ll know who her birth mother was. Her biological mother would have been one of as many as 200 young women who couldn’t keep their babies and surrendered them to a McCaysville doctor who sold them for as little as $100 and as much $1,000. She would be a petite woman with thick, brown hair named Kitty Self from Turtle Town, Tenn.
Then Blasio would know for sure that her birth mother had wanted her and thought about her often. She’ll also know that they’ll never meet.
Self died six weeks before Blasio’s adoptive mother passed away and a year before Blasio started her search. She’d been curious for years, but Blasio decided to start her search after her ailing adoptive mother died. Blasio said she doesn’t regret the delay that might have cost her a chance to know her birth mother.
“I believe that God’s got it all handled, " Blasio said. “He took care of that. There was some reason why it was for my better . . . or Kitty’s or . . . somebody’s that she was to go when she did. . . . There’s no such thing as coincidence. There’s no such thing as should have been and could have been.”
Since 1989, Blasio made a half dozen trips to McCaysville, a small mining town pressed against the Tennessee border. She never got a lead on where relatives might be until she took her story to the media.
It was a story that drew national attention. During the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Jugarthy Hicks sold the babies of young women who were too poor to keep them or so rich that an out-of-wedlock pregnancy would be an embarrassment.
He listed adoptive parents as natural parents on birth certificates and kept no records, as far as anyone knows. As many as 200 babies went to couples in 11 different states.
Blasio and Linda Davis, the probate court judge of Fannin County, of which McCaysville is a part, started a confidential registration system for the birth mothers and the illegally adopted babies. So far, four possible birth mothers and about two dozen adoptees have registered. One of three matches led to a reunion that will air Wednesday on ABC’s “PrimeTime Live.”
Blasio’s break came when Carlynn Manning saw Blasio’s picture on television and noticed the strong resemblance to her friend, Kitty Self. She called Davis. “Kitty told me if she could just hide behind a tree, she wanted to see her children, " Manning recalled. “She didn’t want to interrupt their lives, but she wanted to know about their life. . . . I was doing this for Kitty. I promised her years ago that if it were ever possible to help her find her children, I would.”
For years, Self and her youngest son took refuge in Manning’s house whenever Self’s drunken husband flew into rages and beat her. (Self was killed instantly when she inexplicably veered into the path of an oncoming truck on a dry, sunny day.)
“When things got bad for Kitty she would come to my house and stay, " Manning said. “She would call and no matter what time it was, I went and got her. She’d be hiding in the bushes and people’s houses and behind buildings.”
One night, as Self sat on Manning’s porch, she told her that she gave birth to a baby boy in the fall of 1963 at the Hicks Clinic soon after she turned 13. Self, the oldest of eight children, had to give her boy away because the welfare-dependent family couldn’t support another person.
Then, in January 1965, Self had a little girl. A man with the last name of Dixon, or Dickson, fathered both children, Self had said. Manning surmises the man’s first name might have been Frank because Self told her she would have named her daughter Frankie Mae.
Manning said the resemblance between Self and Blasio would have floored her had she not steadied herself on her front door frame as Blasio walked toward her house for the first time.
“When I saw her, I was just plain startled, " she said. “I expected her to be different in some way, maybe taller or bigger, but she wasn’t.” The two are alike in so many ways, Manning said, including strong religious beliefs, a love of cooking and flower gardening. “Their mannerisms, the movement of their hands. Kitty had heavy, dark hair like Jane’s. It had a natural wave in it, like Jane’s. Jane’s got a look like Kitty has in her eyes, a quick twinkle, sort of a mischief in her eyes.”
There’s one difference Manning noticed. Their noses were different. Blasio told Manning that Self’s nose likely had a little hump on it and hung longer, closer to her top lip.
Blasio knew, because that’s what hers looked like before she had it fixed.
Even if Blasio isn’t the Tennessee man’s sister, she knows he has a brother and a sister who were sold from the clinic. She hopes they will register if they haven’t. But Manning is confident that Self was Blasio’s birth mother.
“This is bittersweet that I may have found my legacy, " she said. “It’s bitter that she’s not here, but it’s sweet that I may have found her.”
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