The photograph was worn at the edges, folded and refolded so many times the creases had become permanent scars across the faces of five children. In the image, an eight-year-old boy with a buzz cut holds a baby, his small arms cradling the infant with a tenderness that seems far too old for his years. Standing beside him are three other children—siblings frozen in time, captured in a moment before everything changed.

For Dave Carlson, that photograph became both his lifeline and his burden. He carried it through the jungles of Vietnam, tucked inside his helmet as bullets flew past and helicopters fell from the sky. He carried it through sleepless nights in small-town Iowa, through marriages and birthdays, through decades of dead ends and sealed records that told him his search was impossible.

The faces in that photograph haunted him—not as ghosts, but as unfinished promises, as pieces of himself scattered across a state he could never stop searching.

This is the story of five siblings torn apart by circumstance in 1958, raised in different homes with different names, who spent forty years carrying the same inexplicable feeling that something was missing. It’s about an eight-year-old boy who made a promise to his grandmother that would define every day of the next four decades of his life.

And it’s about what happened on one Thanksgiving Day in 1997, when the impossible finally became real.

The Day the World Ended

July 1958. Grinnell, Iowa. A bottom-floor apartment half a mile from the town square.

Their mother was young—barely more than a teenager herself when she had her first child at sixteen. She lived in that modest apartment with her five children, trying to make ends meet in a world that offered single mothers few options and even less grace. Times were different then. A woman alone with children faced judgment from every corner, struggled to find work, battled constant financial pressure.

When she told her mother and her oldest son Dave that she needed to get away for a couple of days, taking only her two youngest children with her, no one questioned it. Everyone needs a break sometimes. Everyone deserves a chance to breathe.

But she didn’t come home.

On the third day, Dave’s grandmother sent the eight-year-old boy back to the apartment to gather more clothes for himself and his two remaining siblings who’d been staying with her. The walk was familiar—Dave had made it hundreds of times. Just half a mile down Main Street, past the pharmacy and the hardware store, to the building where his family lived.

What Dave Carlson saw when he opened that apartment door would sear itself into his memory forever, a scene so traumatic that even sixty years later, every detail would remain crystal clear.

The apartment was suffocatingly hot. Iowa summer heat turned the small rooms into an oven. The smell hit him first—the overwhelming stench of unchanged diapers, spoiled milk, and the unique horror of neglect that children should never have to witness.

In the sweltering heat, his younger brother Jim, not quite two years old, lay listless in a crib, his small body barely moving. Next to him, six-month-old Mary Jo lay silent. Too silent. Her tiny chest rose and fell, but just barely.

They’d been alone the entire time. Three days. Seventy-two hours. No food. No water. No one to change them or comfort them when they cried.

“It was hot as hell, and the whole place stunk to high heaven,” Carlson would later recall, his voice still carrying the weight of that discovery decades later. “They hadn’t eaten.”

An eight-year-old child should be worrying about baseball games and summer vacation, about which friends to play with and what adventures to have before school started again. Instead, Dave Carlson became a rescuer that day. He gathered his baby brother and sister into his arms, gave them baths in the apartment’s small tub, tried desperately to get them to eat something, anything.

But Mary Jo wouldn’t drink the formula. Her tiny body was limp, unresponsive. Dave felt panic rising in his chest. She was dying. He was sure she was dying.

With a baby in each arm, balancing their heads above his shoulders the way he’d seen adults do, Dave Carlson walked that half mile back down Main Street in the middle of the morning. Tears streamed down his face as people passed by, some stopping to stare, others hurrying past. “I was crying my eyes out because I thought Mary Jo was dying,” he remembered.

His grandmother called a doctor immediately. The children were examined, fed, given fluids. Slowly, they began to respond. Mary Jo’s color improved. Jim started to show signs of his normal energy. For a brief moment, it seemed like things might return to some version of normal.

But normal, as they’d known it, was already gone forever.

The Courtroom

The five children were summoned to court a few weeks later, their belongings hastily packed into suitcases that were too big for their small hands to carry. Dave, at eight, understood more than the others what was happening. He’d overheard whispered conversations between his grandmother and social workers. He knew the word “orphanage” even if he didn’t fully understand what it meant.

Cheryl, a year younger than Dave, clung to his side. Tom, just three and a half, held Dave’s hand tightly, sensing something was wrong even if he couldn’t articulate it. Jim, barely two, was carried by their grandmother. And baby Mary Jo, now recovered but still fragile, was held by a woman in an official-looking suit.

The courtroom was intimidating—wood-paneled walls, high ceilings, rows of benches that made the children feel even smaller than they were. Their mother sat at a table with a lawyer beside her. She didn’t look at her children.

A judge—stern but not unkind, a man who’d probably presided over dozens of similar cases—reviewed the documents before him. He looked at the mother, then at the five children arranged before him, and offered one final chance.

One more opportunity to reclaim her children. To promise she would do better, be better. To take them home and try again.

The courtroom fell silent, waiting for her answer.

She declined.

No explanation. No tears. No last-minute change of heart. Just a simple, quiet refusal that sealed the fate of five children in an instant.

In that moment, with a single decision, Dave, Cheryl, Tom, Jim, and Mary Jo Carlson became wards of the state of Iowa. They were loaded into a vehicle—Dave held Mary Jo while Cheryl climbed in beside Tom and Jim—and driven 150 miles east to Davenport.

Their destination was the Annie Wittenmyer Home, an orphanage that had been taking in Iowa’s unwanted children since 1864, when the Civil War had created the state’s first generation of orphans. The building was large, institutional, designed to house dozens of children waiting for someone to want them.

Before they left Grinnell, Dave’s grandmother pulled him aside. She was elderly, in no position to raise five young children herself, but her eyes were full of pain as she looked at her grandson.

“You look after your brothers and sisters,” she told him. “You keep them together.”

Dave Carlson, eight years old, looked up at his grandmother and made a promise that would shape the rest of his life.

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

He meant every word.

The Orphanage

The Annie Wittenmyer Home was a place designed for transitions—a waystation where children waited to be chosen, to be wanted, to begin new lives with new families who would give them new names and, everyone hoped, better futures.

But transitions are rarely clean, and the waiting was agony.

The orphanage had dormitory-style rooms, communal dining halls, and play areas where children of all ages mixed together. Dave did his best to keep track of his siblings in the chaos. He made sure they ate at mealtimes, checked on them at night, tried to be the parent they no longer had.

But he was eight years old. There was only so much he could do.

Prospective parents came regularly, walking through the corridors on tours led by staff members, observing children at play, looking for something—a spark of connection, a face that reminded them of someone they loved, a child young enough to forget their past and embrace a new future.

They came with good intentions and empty bedrooms, ready to love but also to select. And selection, by its nature, means leaving others behind.

Baby Mary Jo was the first to go.

At just nine months old, she was exactly what many couples wanted—an infant young enough that the adoption would be seamless, her memories of before erased by time and new experiences. Byron and Marjorie Reed, a farm couple from Peterson near the Little Sioux River in northwest Iowa, chose her.

Dave watched as they carried her out of the orphanage, this tiny sister he’d rescued from that sweltering apartment, this baby whose life he’d probably saved. He wanted to run after them, to make sure they understood how special she was, how much care she needed. But he was eight, and nobody asked eight-year-olds what they thought.

Mary Jo disappeared into a new life, and Dave felt the first piece of his family torn away.

Next was Cheryl.

She was taken 250 miles south to Chariton, adopted by a schoolteacher and a welder who wanted a daughter. On the day she left, Dave stood at the orphanage gate as she was loaded into the back of a car. He could see her face through the window, confusion and fear mixed together.

“I ran to the gate,” Dave later recalled, his voice still breaking decades after the fact. “But it was too late. The car pulled away before I could say goodbye.”

Two siblings gone. Three remaining.

Brother Tom experienced a different kind of torture. Prospective parents kept taking him on what the orphanage staff called “test drives”—visits where couples would pick him up, take him out for ice cream or to a park, ask him questions, evaluate whether he’d fit into their families.

Tom, desperate to connect, desperate to find solid ground in a world that kept shifting beneath his feet, would ask each couple if they had horses. He loved horses. He dreamed about horses. Surely if they had horses, everything would be okay.

Five or six different couples took him out. Each time, Tom would come back to the orphanage with stories about the nice people he’d met, the places they’d taken him, the toys they’d bought him. And each time, those toys would be promptly locked away in a storage room, out of reach.

“I got a feeling I was just a handful,” Tom later reflected. “And it got to the point where they felt I couldn’t take much more” rejection.

Eventually, Leland and Carol Crew—a concert pianist and a teacher from Fairfield—decided Tom was the right fit for their family. They signed the papers, packed his belongings, and took him to his new home 60 miles away.

Three siblings gone. Two remaining.

Jimmy, at age two, was adopted by a couple in Gladbrook in Tama County. He was young enough that his memories of his siblings would fade quickly, replaced by new experiences with new parents who would love him and give him opportunities he might never have had otherwise.

Four children placed. One left.

Dave Carlson remained at the Annie Wittenmyer Home for eighteen months after his last sibling was adopted. Eighteen months of watching other children leave, of sleeping in dormitory beds, of trying to hold onto memories that were already starting to blur around the edges.

He was offered adoptions himself—two different families who wanted to take him home. But Dave remembered his promise to his grandmother. He had vowed to look after his siblings, to make sure they were settled before he left. So he refused both opportunities, waiting until Mary Jo, Cheryl, Jim, and Tom had homes of their own.

“The last time, the people at the home told me I’d better go because I was getting too old at 10 years old,” Dave recalled. In 1960, ten was considered almost too old to adopt. Families wanted younger children they could mold, children who wouldn’t remember their past lives.

Byron and Corine Carlson—a plumber and a nurse from Sibley in northwest Iowa—became his new parents. They gave him their last name, a room of his own, and a stable future. They were good people who loved him genuinely.

But they couldn’t give him back what he’d lost.

As Dave Carlson left the Annie Wittenmyer Home for the final time in 1960, he carried with him that photograph of five children, a promise to his grandmother, and a determination that would define the next four decades of his life.

He had looked after his siblings by ensuring they were all adopted before him. Now came the harder part: finding them again.

Growing Up Scattered

Five children. Five different homes. Five completely different childhoods unfolding across the state of Iowa.

In Fairfield, Tom Crew grew up with loving adoptive parents who had struggled to have biological children because his mother had contracted polio. He had vague memories—images that felt more like dreams than actual events. He remembered having older siblings, a younger brother. He remembered being in a place with lots of children. But the details were fuzzy, dreamlike.

He didn’t remember his birth parents. He didn’t even know their last names. His adoptive parents told him he’d been adopted, were honest about that fact, but they didn’t have information about his biological family.

Two years after his adoption, tragedy struck the Crew family. A driver ran a red light at an intersection in Fairfield, causing a devastating accident. Tom’s adoptive parents were seriously injured, and his adoptive sister—a girl they’d raised since infancy—was killed.

Suddenly, Tom was an only child again. Or at least, that’s what everyone told him. But the feeling persisted, that inexplicable sense that somewhere out there, he had siblings who remembered him.

“I wasn’t an easy child to raise,” Tom admitted years later. “I had a lot of questions. But no understanding of what had happened, no calm.”

He told himself a story that helped him sleep at night: If he really had an older brother and sister like his hazy memories suggested, they’d surely come looking for him. He just had to wait. Be patient. They’d find him eventually.

In Peterson, Mary Jo Reed grew up on a farm, completely unaware she’d ever had another family. At nine months old when adopted, she retained no memories whatsoever of her birth mother, her siblings, or that sweltering apartment in Grinnell.

Byron and Marjorie Reed loved her completely. They gave her a happy childhood, taught her to work the farm, celebrated every milestone. To Mary Jo, they were simply Mom and Dad. She knew she was adopted—her parents were honest about that—but it was just a fact about her origin story, not something that defined her daily life.

But sometimes, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she’d feel a strange emptiness. Like something was missing from her life, though she couldn’t articulate what.

In Chariton, Cheryl grew up with her adoptive parents, carrying fragmented memories of a time before. She remembered brothers and sisters. She remembered being in a car, looking out the window, seeing a boy running after them. The memory was like a dream—vivid but impossible to fully grasp.

Jimmy, adopted in Gladbrook, retained even less. Just vague feelings, impressions, the sense that his life had once been different but he couldn’t remember how.

And in Sibley, Dave Carlson grew up as the son of a plumber and a nurse, attending school, making friends, living what looked from the outside like a completely normal Iowa childhood.

Except he never forgot. Not for a single day.

He kept that photograph tucked away in a drawer, taking it out when he was alone to study the faces of his siblings. He wondered where they were, what they looked like now, whether they ever thought about him the way he thought about them constantly.

The Soldier Who Carried Ghosts

Dave Carlson turned eighteen in 1968—the year the Vietnam War reached its bloody peak, the year the Tet Offensive shattered American confidence, the year young men were drafted by the thousands and sent to a jungle half a world away to fight in a war most Americans didn’t fully understand.

Dave was drafted and sent to basic training, then on to Vietnam as part of the massive military buildup. He was assigned as a door gunner on helicopters—one of the most dangerous positions in a war that specialized in danger.

Helicopters flew low over jungles where enemy soldiers hid in the trees. They transported troops into hot landing zones where gunfire erupted the moment the skids touched ground. They evacuated wounded soldiers while bullets punched holes through the metal fuselage. Door gunners sat in open doorways, manning mounted machine guns, completely exposed to enemy fire.

The mortality rate was devastating. Helicopters got shot down regularly. Dave saw friends die, saw aircraft fall from the sky in flames, witnessed horrors that would stay with him forever.

While other soldiers carried letters from home, photos of girlfriends, lucky coins or religious medals, Dave Carlson carried that creased photograph of five children. He tucked it inside his helmet before every mission—a talisman and a reminder of the promise he’d made a decade earlier.

“I saw helicopters go down. I saw people die,” he said simply decades later, the understatement carrying volumes of unspoken trauma.

Every time he took off the helmet after a mission, after surviving another day in hell, Dave would look at those faces in the photograph. He’d wonder where his siblings were. Who had held them when they were scared. Whether they still remembered him. Whether they ever looked at the moon and wondered if he was looking at it too.

Other soldiers talked about going home to sweethearts, to parents, to normal lives. Dave talked about going home to search for four people he hadn’t seen since childhood, four people whose current names he didn’t even know.

His fellow soldiers probably thought he was a little crazy. Maybe he was. But that photograph and that promise were what kept him alive when bullets flew and helicopters crashed. He had to survive. He had to get home. Because he’d promised his grandmother he’d look after his siblings, and he couldn’t keep that promise if he died in a Vietnamese jungle.

Dave Carlson survived his tour of duty. He came home to Iowa in 1970, carrying physical wounds and psychological trauma that would never fully heal. He returned to Sibley, trying to build a normal life in a country that didn’t quite know what to do with its Vietnam veterans.

He met a woman named Sandy. They fell in love, got married, started a family of their own. Dave became a plumber like his adoptive father, worked hard, bought a house, and on the surface looked like any other middle-aged Midwesterner.

Except he never stopped searching.

The Impossible Search

In the pre-internet age—before Google, before social media, before anyone could find anyone with a few keystrokes—finding people who’d been adopted meant navigating a labyrinth of sealed records, confidentiality laws, and bureaucratic red tape.

Iowa’s adoption laws in the 1970s and 1980s were particularly strict, designed to protect the privacy of both adoptive families and birth parents. Birth records were sealed permanently. Adoptive names were confidential. Information about biological siblings was locked away in court files that could only be accessed with a judge’s permission, and judges rarely granted such permissions.

The logic made sense from a certain perspective: adoptive families should be allowed to raise their children without interference from biological relatives. Adopted children should be allowed to start fresh, unburdened by traumatic pasts. Birth parents who’d given up children deserved privacy, especially in an era when single motherhood carried enormous social stigma.

But those policies also meant that siblings like Dave and his brothers and sisters were kept apart by law, prevented from reconnecting even as adults, their family bonds severed by government decree.

Dave wrote letters to state agencies. He filled out forms requesting information about his siblings. He contacted the Iowa Department of Human Services, the courts in Poweshiek County where they’d been removed from their mother’s custody, the Annie Wittenmyer Home in Davenport.

Every response was the same: The records are sealed. We cannot provide information about adoptive placements. It’s the law.

He made phone calls that led nowhere. He visited courthouses, where clerks looked at him with sympathy but told him their hands were tied. He hired a lawyer who confirmed what he already knew: without a court order, he had no legal right to information about his own siblings.

Years turned into decades. The 1970s became the 1980s. Dave’s own children grew up hearing stories about the uncle and aunts they’d never met, these mythical siblings their father talked about with such longing. His daughter and son came to understand that their father carried a weight they couldn’t fully comprehend, a loss that shaped his entire worldview.

And still, Dave kept searching. Kept hoping. Kept believing that somehow, someday, he’d fulfill that promise to his grandmother.

His wife Sandy watched him chase dead ends for years. She saw the disappointment every time another lead went nowhere, every time another letter came back with “records sealed” stamped across it. She saw how the search consumed him, how he’d sometimes sit alone late at night looking at that photograph, wondering.

“I just wouldn’t give up,” Sandy later explained. “I knew how important this was to him. How could I give up?”

In the late 1980s, Sandy convinced Dave to try a different approach. If the government wouldn’t help them, maybe a private investigator could. They hired their first PI—a retired police detective who specialized in finding people—and began what would become a years-long, expensive, often frustrating collaboration with multiple investigators.

The first investigator checked courthouse records in counties across Iowa, looking for adoption filings that might match the timeline and circumstances of Dave’s siblings. It was tedious work, requiring physical visits to courthouses, reviewing file after file, looking for needles in haystacks.

After months of work, the investigator found a promising lead: a girl adopted from the Annie Wittenmyer Home in 1958 to a family in Chariton. The age and timeline matched Cheryl.

Dave and Sandy drove to Chariton, their hearts pounding with hope and fear. They found the address the investigator had provided. Dave knocked on the door.

A woman answered—clearly too old to be Cheryl, probably her adoptive mother.

“I’m looking for someone who might have been adopted in 1958,” Dave said carefully, not wanting to cause alarm. “Her birth name was Cheryl.”

The woman’s face clouded with suspicion and fear. In that era, many adoptive parents viewed biological relatives as threats, as people who might try to reclaim children or disrupt carefully constructed family structures.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman said, and closed the door.

It was a dead end. Either the woman was protecting her daughter’s privacy, or they’d tracked down the wrong person entirely.

More investigators were hired. More leads were pursued. More dead ends discovered. The costs mounted—thousands of dollars over the years, money Dave and Sandy could barely afford but spent anyway because the alternative was giving up.

And Dave Carlson would never, ever give up.

The Breakthrough

In the early 1990s, attitudes about adoption began to shift across America. Adoptees who’d grown up wondering about their origins began advocating for the right to access their own records. Organizations formed to help biological families reconnect. Laws began to loosen, slowly, in some states.

Iowa passed legislation allowing adult adoptees to request non-identifying information about their birth families. It was a small step—the information couldn’t include names or addresses—but it was progress.

Around the same time, a new private investigator Dave had hired took a different approach to the search. Instead of focusing solely on sealed court records, he began checking public records—phone directories, property records, death certificates, marriage licenses—looking for patterns and connections.

The breakthrough came through a combination of luck and persistence. The investigator discovered that adoptions processed through the Annie Wittenmyer Home in the late 1950s had been handled by a small group of social workers and attorneys. One of those social workers, now elderly and retired, still remembered some of the cases she’d worked on.

The investigator made contact, explained the situation—five siblings separated in 1958, an older brother searching for his family—and asked if she remembered anything.

She did.

More importantly, she still had personal notes from her cases, kept in violation of confidentiality rules but preserved out of a sense that someday, someone might need this information. She couldn’t provide official records, but she could share details that pointed the investigator in the right direction.

Armed with this information—partial names of adoptive families, general locations, approximate timelines—the investigator began to build a picture of where each sibling had ended up.

The first solid hit came in late 1995: Tom Crew, living in Fairfield, Iowa. The investigator confirmed through multiple sources that Tom had been adopted from the Annie Wittenmyer Home in 1958 at age three and a half, matching the timeline and circumstances exactly.

When the investigator called Dave to share the news, Dave’s hands shook so badly he could barely hold the phone. After 37 years, he finally had a name and location for one of his siblings.

The First Call

Dave stared at the phone number written on a piece of paper, his heart hammering against his ribs. It was just seven digits, but they represented everything—the promise he’d made, the decades of searching, the possibility of reunion or rejection.

Sandy stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. “You can do this,” she said quietly.

Dave picked up the phone and dialed.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

“Hello?” A man’s voice.

Dave’s throat went dry. “Is this Tom Crew?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“My name is Dave Carlson.” He paused, taking a breath that felt like it might be his last. “I think I’m your brother.”

Silence on the other end. Dave could hear breathing, could sense the confusion and shock traveling down the phone line.

“How do I know you’re really my brother?” Tom finally asked, his voice careful, suspicious. He’d spent his entire adult life wondering about his origins, but now that someone was actually claiming to be family, the reality felt overwhelming.

Dave had anticipated this question. “Do you remember anything from when you were young?” he asked. “Before you were adopted?”

Tom thought for a moment. The memories were hazy, dreamlike, but they’d never fully left him. “I remember… being in a place with lots of children. An orphanage, I guess. And I remember standing at a gate or fence, and there was an older boy running toward me. But I don’t remember why.”

Dave’s eyes filled with tears. “That was me,” he said, his voice breaking. “That was me running to say goodbye when they took you away. I didn’t reach you in time. The car left before I could get to the gate.”

Tom Crew, the skeptical adult who’d protected himself with doubt and careful distance, felt something crack open inside his chest. The memory was real. The brother was real. The feeling that something had been missing his entire life—that was real too.

“Oh my God,” Tom said. And then he was crying, decades of questions and loneliness pouring out in sobs that shook his entire body.

They talked for two hours that first night. Dave told Tom about the apartment in Grinnell, about the day he’d found Jim and Mary Jo alone, about the orphanage, about carrying Tom’s photograph through Vietnam. Tom shared his memories—fragmentary and incomplete, but precious nonetheless. He talked about his adoptive parents, about the accident that killed his adoptive sister, about growing up as an only child while feeling like he wasn’t supposed to be alone.

“I always told myself that if I really had an older brother and sister, they’d come looking for me,” Tom said. “I just had to wait.”

“I never stopped looking,” Dave replied. “Not for one single day.”

They arranged to meet in person the following weekend at a restaurant in Fairfield. When Dave Carlson walked through that door and saw Tom for the first time in 37 years, he stopped cold.

“I saw him and I thought, ‘There’s me,'” Dave recalled years later. “We have the same nose. The identical nose.”

It was true. The genetic resemblance was unmistakable. Two middle-aged men stood staring at each other, seeing their own faces reflected back, and suddenly all the doubt vanished. They were brothers. This was real.

They embraced in the middle of that restaurant, two strangers who weren’t strangers at all, and both of them wept.

Two brothers reunited. Three siblings still to find.

Finding the Sisters

With Tom found, the search intensified. The same investigator who’d located Tom began working his network of contacts, checking records, following paper trails that had gone cold decades earlier.

Cheryl was located next. She’d been adopted by a schoolteacher and a welder in Chariton—the same lead Dave had pursued years earlier, the same door that had been closed in his face. But this time, the investigator approached differently, making contact through intermediaries, explaining the situation more carefully.

Cheryl’s adoptive mother, now elderly and having thought more deeply about what was right, finally agreed to pass along information. Cheryl, now in her forties and raising her own family, was stunned to receive a call from an investigator saying her biological brother had been searching for her for 37 years.

When Dave called her, Cheryl’s reaction mirrored Tom’s—initial disbelief followed by overwhelming emotion. She’d carried fragmented memories of siblings, of being loaded into a car while a boy ran after her. Now she knew it had been real.

“I thought I’d imagined it,” Cheryl said, crying. “I thought it was just a dream.”

“It was real,” Dave told her. “You were real. We were all real.”

Three siblings reunited. Two still to find.

The Longest Search

Finding Jimmy proved to be the most difficult search of all.

He’d been adopted by a family in Gladbrook in Tama County, but the trail went completely cold after that. The family had moved sometime in the 1960s, and nobody seemed to know where. Years passed. The other three siblings connected, shared stories, filled in gaps in their memories, but Jimmy remained lost.

The investigator checked death records, worried that perhaps Jimmy hadn’t survived to adulthood. But there was no death certificate matching his birthdate and approximate adoption date. He was out there somewhere, just impossible to find.

More years passed. More investigators were hired. More leads pursued and abandoned.

The breakthrough came almost by accident in 1996. An investigator checking old property records in Gladbrook noticed a forwarding address from when Jimmy’s adoptive family had moved in 1967. The address led to another property record, which led to a utility bill, which led to a phone number.

Thirty-eight years after they’d been separated, the investigator found Jimmy living in Iowa, completely unaware that four siblings had been desperately searching for him.

When Dave made contact, Jimmy’s response was different from the others. He was angry—not at Dave, but at their birth mother, at the system, at the decades of separation. He’d grown up knowing he was adopted but having no information about his origins. He’d felt abandoned, forgotten, unwanted.

“I had questions,” Jimmy said when they first spoke. “Lots of questions. And nobody could answer them.”

Dave had some answers—not all of them, not enough to erase the pain, but enough to begin healing. He told Jimmy about their mother’s situation, about the poverty and lack of support, about how she’d been sixteen when she had her first child.

“She was a kid herself,” Dave said gently. “She made choices I can’t defend. But she wasn’t a monster. She was young and overwhelmed and alone.”

Jimmy listened, the anger slowly giving way to something more complex—grief for what had been lost, relief at finally having answers, gratitude that his brother had never stopped searching.

Four siblings reunited. One still to find.

The Baby Sister

Finding Mary Jo Reed was simultaneously the easiest and the hardest search.

Easy because she’d never moved far from Peterson, the small town where she’d grown up on a farm. Hard because she had no memories whatsoever of her biological family and no real understanding that she had siblings searching for her.

The investigator located her through adoption records and contacted her adoptive mother Marjorie Reed first. Marjorie was protective—as any mother would be—but ultimately decided that Mary Jo, now in her late thirties, had the right to know the truth about her origins.

When Marjorie told Mary Jo that she had four siblings who’d been looking for her for nearly forty years, Mary Jo’s entire understanding of her identity shifted.

“I always felt like something was missing, but I couldn’t explain what,” Mary Jo said. “Now I knew.”

She had no memories of Dave or her other siblings. At nine months old when she was adopted, her brain hadn’t yet formed the long-term memories that might have preserved their faces. But when she looked at photographs Dave sent her—pictures of Tom and Cheryl and Jimmy, all of them with the same distinctive nose, the same eyes, the same smile—something deep inside her recognized them.

“I looked at them and I just knew,” she said. “I knew I belonged with them.”

When Dave called Mary Jo for the first time, he started crying before he even said hello. This was the baby he’d carried down Main Street when he was eight years old, the baby whose life he’d probably saved, the baby he’d thought about every single day for forty years.

“Mary Jo?” he said. “This is your brother Dave.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” Mary Jo replied, tears streaming down her own face. “I didn’t know I was waiting, but I was.”

Five siblings. All found. The promise kept.

Thanksgiving 1997

They decided to meet on Thanksgiving, a fitting choice for a reunion that would finally make five incomplete families feel whole.

They chose a restaurant in Des Moines—neutral ground, roughly equidistant from all their homes, a place where they could see each other, touch each other, prove to themselves that this wasn’t a dream.

Dave Carlson woke up that Thanksgiving morning with a feeling he’d never experienced before—the promise he’d made to his grandmother fifty-nine years earlier was about to be fulfilled. Not in the way he’d intended as an eight-year-old boy who’d thought he could somehow keep his siblings together. But fulfilled nonetheless.

Sandy helped him pick out clothes, watched him check his appearance in the mirror a dozen times. Their own children—adults now, with families of their own—came to witness the reunion, to meet the uncle and aunts they’d heard about their entire lives.

One by one, they arrived at the restaurant.

Dave and Tom, who’d already reunited two years earlier, stood together near the entrance. Dave’s hands shook as he watched cars pull into the parking lot. Would he recognize them? Would they recognize him?

Then Cheryl walked through the door.

She was in her forties now, a middle-aged woman with her own children, but Dave saw the seven-year-old girl who’d been loaded into a car while he ran desperately after her. He saw his sister. And Cheryl looked at Dave and saw the eight-year-old boy who’d tried to say goodbye, who’d promised to look after her.

They held each other and wept.

Mary Jo arrived next, her adoptive parents Byron and Marjorie Reed accompanying her, wanting to witness this moment and support their daughter through it. Mary Jo looked at Dave, Tom, and Cheryl—these strangers who were somehow family—and felt something click into place inside her chest.

Finally, Jimmy walked in. He’d been the most hesitant about the reunion, still carrying anger and questions. But when he saw his siblings standing there, when Dave opened his arms and Jimmy walked into his brother’s embrace, the anger began to dissolve.

For a long moment, the five of them just stood there in a circle, arms around each other, crying and laughing simultaneously. Other restaurant patrons watched, some wiping away their own tears, witnessing something profound and impossible and beautiful.

“The nose,” Tom kept saying, looking from Dave to Jimmy to himself in a nearby mirror. “We all have the exact same nose!”

It was true. Genetics had scattered the same features across five separate lives. The nose. The eyes. The way they all tilted their heads when listening. Small details that added up to an undeniable truth—they were family.

They stayed at that restaurant for hours, talking over each other in their rush to share decades of stories. Tom talked about the car accident that killed his adoptive sister, about growing up feeling like he was supposed to have siblings. Cheryl described her childhood in Chariton, the fragments of memories she’d carried. Jimmy spoke about his anger and his questions, about feeling abandoned. Mary Jo shared her life on the farm, about the inexplicable emptiness she’d sometimes felt.

And Dave—Dave told them about carrying their photograph through Vietnam, about never giving up, about the promise he’d made.

“I told our grandmother I’d look after you all,” Dave said, his voice breaking. “It just took me a little longer than I expected.”

Through tears and laughter, they pieced together their mother’s story as best they could. They learned she’d eventually remarried and had other children—half-siblings they’d never met. Some of them felt anger toward her; others felt only sadness for the impossible situation she’d faced as a teenager.

But mostly, they felt grateful to be together again.

Later that day, they gathered for a new photograph. Not in black and white like the one Dave had carried for forty years, but in color, vivid and undeniable. Five siblings, no longer children but unmistakably family, stood together for the first time since 1958.

Dave Carlson looked at his brothers and sisters and felt something he hadn’t allowed himself to feel for decades: peace. The promise was kept. The search was over. The family was whole.

What They Discovered

In the months following the reunion, as the five siblings incorporated each other into their lives, Dave finally told them the complete story of what he’d seen that day in the apartment—details he’d kept to himself for nearly forty years, details too painful to share even with his wife Sandy.

He told them about walking into that sweltering apartment and thinking Mary Jo was dead. About the terror he’d felt carrying two babies down Main Street, certain he was too late. About the nightmares that had plagued him for years afterward, dreams where he opened that door over and over and couldn’t save them.

His siblings wept as they listened, understanding for the first time the trauma their eight-year-old brother had endured.

But there was something else—something Dave had discovered through the private investigators, something that changed their understanding of why they’d been kept apart for so long.

Their birth mother hadn’t just disappeared. She’d remarried within two years of giving them up, moved to a nearby town, and had more children. She’d known where each of them had been placed—had been given that information before the adoptions were finalized.

For nearly forty years, as Dave searched desperately, as his siblings grew up feeling incomplete, she’d known. She could have made contact. She could have answered questions. She could have at least confirmed that they were all alive and well.

But she’d chosen to stay silent.

When Mary Jo learned this truth about the woman who’d abandoned her at nine months old, she said five words that would haunt every single one of them: “She knew where we were.”

It was a betrayal that cut deeper than the original abandonment. To be given up was one thing—their mother had been young, poor, overwhelmed. But to be forgotten? To be deliberately kept in the dark?

That was different.

They eventually located their birth mother through the same investigators who’d found them. She was in her sixties by then, living in Iowa with her second family. Dave called her, his hands shaking with emotions he couldn’t fully name.

“This is Dave,” he said. “Your son.”

There was a long pause. Then: “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

She hung up.

Some of the siblings wanted to try again, to force a confrontation or at least get answers to their questions. But Dave convinced them to let it go.

“We found each other,” he said. “That’s what matters. She made her choice a long time ago. We don’t need her anymore.”

And they didn’t. They had each other now.

The Years After

The five Carlson siblings established regular gatherings after that first Thanksgiving reunion. They celebrated holidays together, attended each other’s children’s weddings, welcomed grandchildren into an ever-expanding family.

They couldn’t recover the years they’d lost, couldn’t erase the childhoods spent apart. But they could build something new together.

Tom Crew, who’d spent his entire life believing his older siblings would come for him, finally had his answer. “I always told myself that if I really had an older brother and sister, they’d come looking for me,” he said during an interview years after the reunion. “And Dave did. He never stopped looking.”

For Dave Carlson, the reunion brought a sense of completion that had eluded him his entire adult life. The little boy who’d walked down Main Street with babies in his arms, who’d watched his siblings leave one by one, who’d kept a photograph in his helmet through a war, had finally brought his family home.

“I was scared I would die before finding them,” Dave admitted. “That was my biggest fear—that I’d break my promise. That I’d let my grandmother down.”

He didn’t break it. It took him forty years, cost him thousands of dollars, required the help of multiple private investigators, and tested his marriage and his mental health. But Dave Carlson kept the promise an eight-year-old boy made in 1958.

The photograph Dave carried through Vietnam is now displayed in his home, next to the new photograph taken on Thanksgiving 1997. Two images, four decades apart—one showing five children who didn’t know they were about to be separated, the other showing five adults who refused to stay separated.

Between those two photographs lies a story of promise kept, of love that survived abandonment and bureaucracy and time. It’s a story that began with an eight-year-old boy making a vow he didn’t fully understand but spent his whole life fulfilling.

And it’s a story that reminds us all: home isn’t always a place. Sometimes, home is the people you refuse to stop searching for.

Dave Carlson passed away in 2019 at age 69, surrounded by his wife, his children, and all four of his siblings. The last thing he said before he died was directed at his brothers and sisters: “I told you I’d find you. I kept my promise.”

And he had. Against all odds, through four decades of obstacles, he’d kept the promise an eight-year-old boy made to his grandmother.

The five siblings he’d spent his life searching for held his hands as he passed, and they all knew—without doubt, without question—that Dave Carlson had lived and died a hero.

Not the kind who gets medals or parades. But the kind who keeps promises even when the world tells you to let go. The kind who carries photographs through war zones and never stops believing that love is stronger than bureaucracy, that family is stronger than distance, that some bonds can survive anything.

Even forty years of separation.