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Letter to the editor

Long-held secret adds names to a family tree

By JACKIE RIPLEY
Published June 8, 2007

Finding out you're adopted can be a life-changing event no matter when it happens. Finding out you're adopted when you're well past middle age is the stuff that family legends are made of.

Meet Evelyn Stewart.

"It's the strangest thing that could happen to anyone, " said Stewart, a businesswoman with children and grandchildren. "I didn't believe it."

It was only a few years ago that Stewart, 74, learned she has a whole other family.

The story goes back several decades to Baltimore, where 9-year-old Evelyn Brooks lived with her parents and sister. That was the year her mother left the family for a man who lived in Texas.

It was only after her mother died that the man, for whom she had left the family, called to set the record straight.

"The day has come that I've got to tell you this, " Stewart recalled the man saying. "You're not a Brooks. Your name was Chestnut."

That's when Stewart and her husband, Ray Stewart, began a serious inquiry into her roots.

"I made about a year's worth of calls, " said Stewart, who believes that her birth father, Glen Chestnut, never even knew she existed even though her mother, as a young girl, lived next door to his family.

"She was 15 at the time and he was 16, " Stewart explained. "You have to realize that in those days when a girl got pregnant, she was kept inside the house and not allowed out, ever."

It wasn't long before Chestnut went away to school and Stewart's mother moved away and married George Brooks, a man 15 years her senior.

The secret would remain hidden for half a century.

"I was with my mother at her death bed and even then she never told me, " Stewart said.

But dogged determination by the Stewarts led them to a country store in Charleston, W.Va.

Stewart called the store, asking for a call back from anyone knowing of a Chestnut family.

The call came. It was from a man named Buck Chestnut of Belle, W.Va.

"I think I'm your brother, " the man said.

After decades of secrets that took more than a year to unravel, the search was over.

That phone call was followed by six weeks of letters and calls between Stewart and what would turn out to be not just one brother, but five.

Stewart's birth father, Glen Chestnut, had died by this time. But all five Chestnut brothers welcomed her with open arms.

"I was so happy to have a family, " Stewart said.

The couple moved to Tampa in 1979 for Ray Stewart's career at Household Finance, International. They bought a house in east Carrollwood and finished raising their three children, Kurt, Bruce and Lisa, who by that time were teens.

Stewart always had a loving relationship with George Brooks. She credits his fathering skills with some of her success. It was Brooks who told her to surround herself with pretty people because they would always make her look good.

Stewart took his advice literally. Today the Evelyn Stewart Model & Talent Agency has 5, 000 models and actors as clients, casting them for everything from cable television shopping shows to movies. And while much of her time is taken up with the business, Stewart still makes time to go to visit family in West Virginia at least two or three times a year.

"At least one or more of my brothers calls almost every day, " she said. Recently she attended a family reunion in which she met more relatives, 106 of them.

Jackie Ripley can be reached at ripley@sptimes.com or 813 269-5308.

[Last modified June 7, 2007, 07:37:54]