By JEAN ZEHRINGER GIESIGE
Standard Correspondent
For as long as she can remember, Jenny Lynne Butler Wheeler
has known she was adopted.
She knew she came to her adoptive parents, Tom and Sue Butler,
then of London, Ohio, as an infant. And she knew a few other
things as well. She knew that her birth mother’s last
name was Roebuck. And she knew that she was born in Mercer County,
Ohio.
Beyond that, she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to know.
“I’ve always known that I came from Celina, but
I had lived in London all my life. I was always told, growing
up, that because I was adopted, I was special,” said Wheeler,
who had a happy childhood, growing up next to her parents’
flower shop.
She has always enjoyed a very close relationship with her adopted
family, she said. There was no outward reason for her to go
looking for her birth family. And still, questions sometimes
surfaced in her mind. On her birthday, especially, she thought
about her birth mother. What were they like, the people she
came from? What were they doing now? And what would they think
of her?
Then one day last summer, Wheeler, now 28, was traveling with
her adoptive parents from her home in London to visit relatives
in Fort Wayne, Ind. They took U.S. 33, which passes just a few
miles north of Celina.
“We’d been through Celina before, and I’d
always looked for clues about my birth family. On this trip,
I was looking out the window, and I saw a little sign along
the highway that said, ‘Roebuck Cemetery,’ ”
she said. “My dad said, ‘Let’s stop,’
and he pulled over. I was really nervous. I didn’t know
what I was going to find.”
What the family found was a small country cemetery, full of
silent gravestones that offered no obvious clues to Jenny’s
history. Her father could have let the matter drop, but he didn’t.
He went to a farmhouse next to the cemetery and knocked on the
door. In doing so, he took the first step on a path that would
lead his daughter to her second home.
On that day, Tom Butler knocked on the door of Lyle and Esther
Sniders’ home. Esther Snider was happy to talk with them.
“They were a very nice family,” she said. “They
raise flowers, and I raise flowers, and we talked about that.”
Then the Butlers asked Snider if she could tell them anything
about the Roebucks, and explained why they wanted the information.
“That got me interested,” Esther Snider said. “It
just grabbed me. I always loved my mother — I thought,
if I was a young girl, how would I feel if I was searching for
my mother?”
In the meantime, Wheeler wasn’t the only one who was searching.
In their comfortable home in Celina, Marianne Roebuck Hines
and her daughter, Jenna Linn, also were searching.
As Wheeler’s parents had told her she was adopted, Kevin
and Marianne Hines also had always been candid with their family.
Their children knew that they had a baby together in 1975, before
they were married. They knew that the baby had been given up
for adoption.
“I wasn’t ready to be a mother when I got pregnant,”
Mariann Hines said. “I was single, living in a little
apartment and laid off from Mersman’s, where I was making
$50 a week. My family supported me — they wanted me to
move back home. They would have helped me raise the baby. But
I just wasn’t ready. I made the right decision for everybody.”
She gave birth to a daughter at Gibbons Hospital on May 5, 1975.
She knew the baby was a girl, but that was all she knew.
“I never even got to see her,” she said.
She and Kevin married in 1978 (they’ll celebrate their
28th anniversary in April) and had two children, Jenna and Josh.
Mariann Hines was always aware that she was a mother of three,
not two, “but you can’t sit and dwell on it, or
you’ll go crazy,” she said. She hoped her older
daughter was safe and happy, “and it was always in the
back of my mind that someday we would meet.”
As Jenna Hines grew older, she began searching for her sister
on the Internet. With her sister’s date and place of birth,
it didn’t take her long to come up with the name of Jenny
Butler. But the Hines’ hunt for Jenny Butler went along
in fits and starts — it’s not as easy as it sounds
to pick up a phone and call someone who may be a long-lost sibling.
Mariann Hines said she was always aware that a call from a biological
mother may not be welcome.
“I would never, ever have tried to find her until she
turned 21,” she said.
So both mother and daughter were searching, neither with much
confidence. It was Esther Snider who eventually brought the
two together. Armed with the name “Roebuck” and
Jenny Butler Wheeler’s birthdate, she went to the Mercer
County District Library in Celina and began her search for Jenny’s
mother.
“I looked through yearbooks, and the librarians helped
me,” she said. Before long, she thought she had found
the right person: Mariann Roebuck. Snider then turned to her
friend, Joann Counterman, who knew someone who knew Mariann
Roebuck Hines. In that circuitous, small-town way, the message
was passed from daughter to mother: I’m searching for
you — are you searching for me?
The Hines then had Jenny Butler Wheeler’s name, address
and telephone number.
“As it turned out, we had the right address all along
and didn’t realize it,” said Jenna Hines, who married
last year and is now Jenna Jackson. “It just must not
have been the right time.”
The right time came last summer, when Mariann Hines called the
Butlers’ house in London.
“On July 5, I got a phone call from my adoptive sister,
who told me that someone had called our house and it was my
birth mother,” Wheeler said.
A reunion followed soon after, on July 7, as Wheeler traveled
to Celina to meet her birth family. She was nervous and relied
on the steadying presence of her husband, Chad.
“When we met, we just sat around looking at each other,”
Mariann Hines said. The two sisters marveled at their resemblance
— “A lot of people think we’re twins,”
said Jenna Jackson — and at the coincidences that run
through their lives, such as their similar names, their addiction
to cute clothes, the fact that they are both allergic to cats
and that both spread butter on steaks.
“We compared our hands and our feet. We talked about everything,”
Jackson said.
They learned that Wheeler has her master’s degree in education
and teaches kindergarten and preschool children at a Christian
school in London. They heard all about her adoptive family.
And Wheeler learned all about her birth mother and father, and
the sister and two brothers (Josh and Kevin’s son, Jason,)
she had never known.
“I love to come and visit them,” Wheeler said. “I
can’t get enough of them.”
Mariann Hines remains grateful to Jenny’s adoptive family,
whose generous spirits allow them to share their daughter.
“Stories like these don’t always have a happy ending,”
she said. “But I wanted to tell my story so that people
can see the good that can come out of it. We don’t want
to take over her life. If we can just have some of her time,
we’ll be happy.”
There is nothing but good in this story, said Mariann Hines’
mother, Shirley Roebuck, who with Mariann’s sister, Dawn
Jones, was one of the few people who had seen Jenny as a newborn
before she went to join her adoptive family. The circle of her
family has grown a little wider, and that suits her perfectly.
“I have eight grandchildren, if I count her,” Shirley
Roebuck said. “And in my heart, I always did.”
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