Minka Disbrow Reunites With Daughter After 77 Years
There is new meaning to the phrase “good things come to those who wait.” For a mother the one thing she desired more than anything took her 77 years to receive.
First reported by AP, Minka Disbrow, put her newborn baby girl up for adoption in 1928. She then spent the rest of her life searching, writing and praying to see her child again.
Disbrow was the child of Dutch immigrants who settled in Sioux City, South Dakota. Childhood was not glamorous for her as she worked on dairy farms milking cows.
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But one fateful day Disbrow was coming home from a picnic with a friend of hers when the two girls were stopped by three men who raped them both.
Disbrow explains that she had no idea what to do: “We didn't know what to do. We didn't know what to say. So when we went back, nothing was said.”
When her parents noticed she was pregnant they sent her to a Lutheran home for pregnant girls. While there she gave birth to a baby girl and named her Betty Jane.
She never met the couple who ended up adopting Betty Jane, she did not even know their names. Disbrow would end up writing countless letters to the adoption agency to see if she could find anything else about her daughter.
The agency was diligent in replying, sending word of any new updates. However, that stopped when there was a change in administration at the adoption center and the two parties fell out of contact.
Every year, she thought about Betty Jane on her daughter's birthday, May 22. Five years ago, Disbrow prayed she might get the chance to see her. “Lord, if you would just let me see her,” Disbrow remembered praying. “I promise you I will never bother her.”
On July 2, 2006, she received a phone call from a man in Alabama. The man asked if she would like to speak with her daughter Betty Jane, whose name was now Ruth Lee.
The man happened to be Ruth Lee’s son and he had done research on various web directories and by chance landed upon the right listing.
Disbrow and her daughter acted like they have known each other all their lives, “It was just like we had never parted. Like you were with the family all your life.”
Ruth Lee shared in her mother’s sentiments, “It has been such a surreal, amazing experience that I still think sometimes that I will wake up and it will just be a beautiful dream.”
