AP News Exclusive! - Sunday, September 7, 2003

Florida investigator's gift is getting people together

Last year, Carty found a woman who had been adopted as a 4-year-old girl, reuniting her with her birth mother and siblings after 40 years. Her name had been changed after she was given up by her mother in 1961. Carty knew only her birth date and place, that she had red hair and was adopted by a couple from New York City's Brooklyn borough. After 14 months of fruitless searching, Carty finally wrote a letter and mailed out more than 100 copies, one to every woman in Brooklyn who was born on Jan. 14, 1957. "Everybody said, 'You're crazy, that's not going to work,'" she said. Two days later, Penny Lewis called. A subsequent DNA test confirmed she was that red-haired little girl in the old pictures, leading to a tearful family reunion in Florida organized by Carty and taped for a TV show. "I started my life the day I got that letter," said Lewis, now 46. "I had such a void all my years growing up because I knew I had siblings somewhere. It's really hard to put into words. It is life altering." Two years ago, a distraught man named Hanns Jones drove to the center span of the towering Sunshine Skyway bridge in St. Petersburg and jumped off. He fell 200 feet, slamming feet first into Tampa Bay but survived.

Among other things, Jones was depressed about his failed search for a father he hadn't seen since he was kid. Carty read about him in the newspaper and visited as he recovered in the hospital. Six days later, using U.S. Army documents and other records, she located his father out West. Months later, after his body healed, Jones went to see him.

"Every single time I make the phone call that I'm saying, 'I found your loved one,' I get a chill up and down the left side of me only," Carty said. "It's a supernatural thing. That tells me what my gift is." Her fees start at $350 and go up to about $2,100, depending on the time and effort required. When she needs legwork sometimes, she calls on one of her 32 volunteers around the country, every one of them either former clients or people she found. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for her," said Lewis, who regularly spends hours poring over New York adoption records for Carty. "I want to give back the feeling that she gave to me."

A native of Hopkinton, Mass., Carty began working as an investigator in the mid-1990s, helping attorneys identify the remains of babies after some cemetery graves were dug up by workers installing a water line. She knew she was good at it, but the work was depressing. After seeing a TV show about happy reunions, Carty created her Web site and set up shop. She did the first 50 or so cases for free to get started, in exchange for testimonials from people she worked to bring together. Today she juggles 50 or so open cases at a time, some that will take days to solve and others that may take years. She does come up empty sometimes, usually when adoption records contain inaccurate or fictitious information.

Although other companies offer people-search services via the Internet, Carty's personal touches and success rate have gotten the attention of national TV talk shows, as well as a literary agent who is shopping a book chronicling some of her more memorable cases. Single with two grown children and a third in high school, Carty had a strained relationship with her mother growing up, but they have become closer later in life. She thinks that might have helped her understand why so many people go to such lengths to put the missing pieces of their family back together. "It's everyone's basic human right to know your roots," she said.

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