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'I was looking for a family tree. Now I have a forest.'

A woman, adopted as a baby, connects to her past: the mother who was forced to give her up, siblings she never knew existed.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published March 30, 2007

BRANDON - Tina Wooten couldn't sleep. She was too nervous. She gave up trying around 6 a.m. and got up. She put on the outfit she'd picked out the day before. A photographer from the paper was coming to her house in Brandon, and she wanted to look her best. And then there was Mickey, her brother. At 67, she was about to meet him for the first time.

"I feel like I'm going to have a planned Caesarean," she said. "I've seen the sonogram but not the person."

She had met two of her five brothers so far, since they found her in December.

"I was looking for a family tree," she told one of them. "Now I have a forest."

The roots of her story, and theirs, reach back through time to a small Georgia town, to a family betrayal, a mother's secret and a discovery that would change six lives.

Louise Moore gave birth alone in the fall of 1939.

She was 17, a rich man's daughter, a girl with thick arms and eyebrows plucked like a movie star's. She named her baby Peggy Anne.

Peggy Anne weighed only 21/2 pounds, but she was the joy of her young mother's life.

In a baby book, Louise recorded what people said about her child:

"She's mighty little!"

"Why, Louise, she's no bigger than a flea."

In her looping script, Louise wrote down her baby's weight each month, as Peggy Anne grew to a robust 12 pounds.

On March 1, 1940, Louise's sisters sent her to the store.

When she came back, the baby was gone.

* * *

Tina's parents told her at age 5 that she had been adopted. As she grew up, the story changed again and again.

They told her they'd picked her out at an orphanage. But that wasn't true.

Later, they told her she'd been handed over to them on the steps of the courthouse in Thomaston, Ga., by a man named Dr. Barron.

Her birth mother had been unwed, they said, and couldn't keep her.

Tina was grown, with a child of her own, by the time that detail came to light.

She wrote a letter to the postmaster in Thomaston, asking if a Dr. Barron still lived there. She never got a reply.

* * *

Louise married twice. She had five boys. She studied at night to become a nurse.

The family was poor, but their home was always full. Louise was always taking in girls and young women.

"She became like a second mother to a lot of them," her son Mickey said. "She told me at one time they were the girls she never had."

Louise died in 1995 at age 73, a matronly woman with big glasses and a dark-red perm.

After the funeral, her sons and daughters-in-law went through her things.

Anita, the youngest son's wife, insisted on prying open the bottom drawer of an old metal filing cabinet.

Inside, she found a baby book. One of the boys', Anita thought.

The book was taped shut. Anita peeled off the tape.

"Oh, my God," she said.

* * *

Inside the baby book, Anita found a letter.

"My dear Sons," Louise wrote in her looping script.

"Please try to understand that I couldn't destroy this book, because as far as I know somewhere you have a living sister ..."

Anita's heart was pounding. She knew what she would have to do.

"There was a mother and there was a baby," she said years later. "If for no one else but for the baby and for the mother, I had to find that baby and connect her back to her mother."

* * *

Randy Boutwell, Louise's youngest son and Anita's husband, went to visit his Thomaston relatives.

Yes, a cousin told him, Louise had a baby girl when she was 17. But Louise's father and her uncle - Dr. Barron - felt it was best if the baby was put up for adoption.

A letter had come years ago, the cousin said, from a woman who was looking for her birth mother.

It was sent to the postmaster, but an aunt ended up with it.

"They said my mother didn't need to know about the letter," Randy said. "They threw it away."

* * *

For 12 years Anita looked for Peggy Anne.

She searched public records for a birth certificate, but there wasn't one. She combed the Internet, but resources were scarce. She knew that Peggy Anne was out there somewhere.

This past December, a few days before Christmas, Anita sat down at the computer to do one more search.

On Dec. 27, she got an e-mail from a fellow adoption researcher: "OH MY GOODNESS. SHE IS SEARCHING FOR YOU."

The researcher had found an Internet post from Tina Wooten's daughter, looking for information about a baby handed over for adoption on the courthouse steps of Thomaston.

It included Tina's phone number.

Shaking, Anita picked up the phone.

* * *

Tina hugged her brother Mickey Boutwell at the door. He and his wife stepped inside. Tina offered them cookies.

They sat down, made small talk. How was his drive? No traffic?

Mickey presented Tina with some of Louise's treasures: well-thumbed cookbooks, a crystal powder box in the shape of a swan.

He kept looking at Tina: the way she talked, the shape of her face. The timbre of her voice.

She looks so much like his mother, he said. He corrected himself.

"Our mother."

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 30, 2007, 05:46:29]