"It must have weighed heavily on her"

Mt. Vernon-Lisbon Sun
Family, 'Net results in successful sibling search for longtime Mt. Vernon resident
by Dave Morris
December 10, 2008

It has all the elements of a good mystery: a boy whose mother left when he was young, a trunk of photos and letters stored in an attic and a meeting with a relative the boy never knew he had.

That boy grew up to be Charles Halsey, longtime Mount Vernon High School science teacher and volleyball official.

Now retired, but still active in the Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service, Halsey knew there was a hole in his past, but he never knew the details.

The search
After using the genealogy website www.ancestry.com that involved input from daughters Anne Helgeson of Chicago and Gail Bertram of Oshkosh, Wis., as well as Halsey’s wife, Linda, a half-sister, Laura Lynch of Cape Cod, Mass., was located.

But the story is not as simple as that.

What Halsey learned about his past was this: His father, Charles Henry Halsey, worked on a farm in Southampton and his mother was a kindergarten teacher. His mother, whose maiden name was Justine Comstock, left his father and him and their New York home in October 1939, when Halsey was 3.

“Dad (came home and) found me playing on the living room floor,” Halsey said. “A woman who we think was a nanny was there. My mother was gone. It was the last time I saw her.”

His mother went to Reno and obtained a divorce in November 1939 so she could marry a man named Myron Smith, who was an old college friend.

“Smith didn’t want anyone to know she’d been married and had a child,” Halsey said, noting that the man felt it would hurt his career as a sales manager with a company known as General Radio.

“My father never told me of this,” Halsey said. “I knew my mother’s name from my birth certificate.”

His father was remarried to a woman named Frances Raynor, who Halsey always believed to be his birth mother. When he was 6 or 7, he was told by a friend’s mother that that was not the case, but he had few other details.

Sixty-plus years later, on July 13, 2008 – the Monday after Mount Vernon Heritage Days – turned out to be a turning point in the search. Linda suggested that the online search should include Myron Smith’s name. When his name was entered in the search, up popped information on his and Justine Comstock’s dates of birth and death.

It was a match.

The information had been submitted to the website years earlier by a woman named Laura Lynch. The Halseys’ daughter Anne e-mailed Laura, and it became clear that there was indeed a connection. Soon, the e-mails were flying between Cape Cod-based Laura Lynch, 66, and Charles Halsey, 72, in Mount Vernon. Laura is the daughter of Halsey’s mother and Myron Smith. Another daughter, Bonnie, died about 10 years ago.

To say that Halsey was surprised to find a living relative might be understating it.

“I had no inkling – zip, zero,” he said.

It apparently wasn’t as big of a surprise to Laura as it was to Halsey. She had seen her mother occasionally going through a trunk in the attic reading letters and looking at photos. After her mother’s death, Laura and her sister opened the trunk to find pictures of a little boy, a boy’s outfit, letters from the elder Halsey and a bank book with young Halsey’s name and her mother’s on it. When the daughters asked their father if their mother had been married before, he would only answer “maybe.”

It also turned out that it was during the year of Justine Comstock’s death – 1971 – that Halsey’s father briefly mentioned her to him.

Halsey has few memories of his earliest days, but one in particular had stuck with him: It was a long car trip in a Willys to a big white house with a turret. Laura, too, had memories of that home, which was their mother’s parents’ (their grandparents) home in Winsted, Conn.

The meeting
After many e-mails and phone calls, Laura Lynch arrived on Sept. 12 at the airport in Cedar Rapids. Charles and Linda were there holding a sign that simply read “Laura.” They spotted each other from a distance, and before they could even say hello, Laura shot a photo of Halsey with the sign. After a big hug, they spent a few days getting to know each other. On hand were the Halseys’ daughters and their families. The visit happened to coincide with a memorial service for Halsey’s aunt, Abigail Fithian Halsey Van Allen (widow of James Van Allen), so Laura met many of Halsey’s relatives.

“We had a remarkably wonderful time. She brought lots and lots of letters and pictures that were in the trunk,” Halsey said. Laura also confirmed that a photo given to him by his aunt was indeed his mother.

While here, the Halseys took Laura on a tour of flood-ravaged parts of Cedar Rapids. This was of particular interest to Laura, since she and her husband travel in their RV to disaster-stricken areas of the nation as FEMA employees.

The Halseys also showed her around the Mount Vernon area, but the time was mostly spent getting to know each other.

“We really had a good time,” Linda said.

“It was just a wonderful experience,” Halsey added. “It answered a lot of questions I’d always had. I’d always wondered what my birth mother was like. It closes one chapter of my life and opens a brand new one.”

Halsey understands why his mother made the choices she did.

“I hold no animosities whatsoever. Justine did whatever she felt she needed to do,” he said. “It must have weighed heavily on her – I hope it didn’t hurt her in any way.”

The future
The Halseys continue to communicate by e-mail and phone with Laura, who currently is with her husband in Texas doing FEMA work.

Plans are brewing to attempt to meet again in March and to perhaps get the two families together this summer.

“It’s been a rather remarkable, interesting and fun experience,” Halsey said.