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 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. 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 not just a story about adoption, though adoption statistics tell us that 2 percent of American children share this experience. This is a story about what happens when a promise made by a child becomes the defining mission of a man’s life. It’s about five siblings torn apart by circumstance, raised in different homes with different names, who spent forty years carrying the same inexplicable feeling that something was missing—until one autumn day in 1997, when the impossible became real.​

The Day Everything Changed

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

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. 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, the details remain crystal clear.​

The apartment was suffocatingly hot. The smell hit him first—the overwhelming stench of unchanged diapers, spoiled milk, and the unique horror of neglect. 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, Mary Jo—just six months old—lay silent. Too silent.​

They’d been alone the entire time.​

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

An eight-year-old child should be worrying about baseball games and summer vacation. Instead, Dave Carlson became a rescuer. He gathered his baby brother and sister into his arms, gave them baths in the apartment’s small tub, and tried desperately to get them to eat. But Mary Jo wouldn’t drink the formula. Her tiny body was limp, unresponsive.​

With a baby in each arm, balancing their heads above his shoulders, Dave Carlson walked that half mile down Main Street in the middle of the morning, tears streaming down his face. “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, and 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, 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. Cheryl, a year younger, clung to his side. Tom, just three and a half, and Jim, barely two, were confused by the formal setting and serious faces. Mary Jo, the baby, was held by strangers in official-looking clothes.​

A judge—stern but not unkind—offered their mother one final chance. One more opportunity to reclaim her children, to promise she would do better, be better. The courtroom fell silent, waiting for her answer.​

She declined.​

In that moment, with a single decision, five children became wards of the state. They were loaded into a vehicle and driven 150 miles east to Davenport, to the Annie Wittenmyer Home—an orphanage that had been taking in Iowa’s unwanted children since the Civil War had created the state’s first generation of orphans.​

Before they left, Dave made a promise to his grandmother—a vow that would shape the rest of his life. He would look after his siblings. No matter what happened, he would keep them together. He would protect them.​

He was eight years old, and 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.​

Prospective parents came regularly, walking through the corridors, observing children at play, looking for something—a spark of connection, a face that reminded them of someone, a child young enough to forget their past. They came with good intentions and empty bedrooms, ready to love but also to select.​

Baby Mary Jo was the first to go. At just nine months old, she was scooped up by Byron and Marjorie Reed, a farm couple from Peterson near the Little Sioux River in northwest Iowa. She was young enough that the adoption would be seamless, her memories of before erased by time and new experiences. Dave watched her leave, his promise to his grandmother echoing in his head.​

Next was Cheryl. She was taken 250 miles away to Chariton, adopted by a schoolteacher and a welder. Dave stood at the orphanage gate as she was loaded into the back of a car. He ran toward her, his small legs pumping, desperate to say a proper goodbye. But the car pulled away before he could reach it. “I saw her being loaded into the back of the car,” he later said. “I ran to the gate, but it was too late.”​

Brother Tom experienced a different kind of torture. Prospective parents took him on “test drives”—five or six different couples who would take him out, introduce themselves, buy him toys, and evaluate whether he’d fit into their families. Each time, Tom—trying to connect, trying to find solid ground—would ask if they had horses. Each time, he was returned to the orphanage, and the toys he’d been given were promptly locked away, 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. Another sibling gone.​

Jimmy, at age two, was adopted by a couple in Gladbrook in Tama County. Four children placed. One left.​

Dave Carlson remained at the Annie Wittenmyer Home for eighteen months after his siblings were taken. He was offered adoptions—two different families who wanted him. But Dave remembered his promise. He had vowed to look after his siblings, to make sure they were settled first. 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.​

Byron and Corine Carlson—a plumber and a nurse from Sibley—became his new parents. They gave him their last name, a room of his own, and a future. But they couldn’t give him back what he’d lost.​

As Dave Carlson left the orphanage for the final time, 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 Separated

Five children. Five different homes. Five completely different childhoods.​

In Fairfield, Tom Crew grew up with loving adoptive parents who had struggled to have biological children because his mother had polio. He had vague memories—images that felt more like dreams than actual events. He remembered having older siblings, a younger brother. But he had no memory of his birth parents. He didn’t even know their last names.​

Two years after his adoption, tragedy struck the Crew family. A driver ran a red light at an intersection, causing a devastating accident. Tom’s adoptive parents were seriously injured, and his adoptive sister 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 that if he really had an older brother and sister, they’d surely come looking for him. He just had to wait.​

 

 The Search and The Miracle

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.​

He served his country as a door gunner on helicopters, one of the most dangerous positions in a war that specialized in danger. While other soldiers carried letters from home, photos of girlfriends, lucky coins, Dave 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, the understatement carrying volumes of unspoken trauma.​

But Dave Carlson survived. He came home to Iowa, married a woman named Sandy, and tried to build a normal life in the small town of Sibley. He worked as a plumber like his adoptive father, raised a family, and on the surface, looked like any other middle-aged Midwesterner.​

Except he never stopped searching.​

In the pre-internet age, finding people who’d been adopted meant navigating a maze of sealed records, confidentiality laws designed to protect privacy, and bureaucratic red tape that seemed deliberately designed to prevent reunions. Iowa’s adoption laws were particularly strict—birth records were sealed, adoptive names were confidential, and intermediaries were few and far between.​

Dave wrote letters to state agencies. He filled out forms. He made phone calls that led nowhere. He hit walls again and again, told that the records were sealed, that he couldn’t access information about his own siblings, that the law was the law.​

Years turned into decades. The 1970s became the 1980s. His own children grew up hearing stories about the uncle and aunts they’d never met. And still, Dave kept searching, kept hoping, kept believing that somehow, someday, he’d fulfill that promise to his grandmother.​

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Give Up

If Dave Carlson was the heart of the search, his wife Sandy became its engine.​

After watching her husband chase dead ends for years, Sandy decided to take a different approach. She convinced Dave to hire a private investigator—actually, several private investigators over the years. Each one worked the case differently, using contacts in courthouses, checking old records, following paper trails that had gone cold decades earlier.​

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

The first breakthrough came in the early 1990s when an investigator managed to locate Tom Crew in Fairfield, Iowa. The man who’d been taken from the orphanage at three and a half years old, who’d spent his childhood believing his older siblings would come find him, was finally found.​

When the phone rang at Tom’s house and a voice on the other end said, “I’m your brother Dave,” Tom’s first response was skepticism. “How do I know you’re really my brother?” he asked.​

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

Tom thought for a moment, then described a hazy memory—being in an orphanage, standing at a gate, watching an older boy run toward him but not being able to reach him. The memory was fragmentary, dreamlike, but vivid.​

“That was me,” Dave said, his voice breaking. “That was me running to say goodbye when you left.”​

Tom Crew, the skeptical adult, dissolved into tears. The memory was real. The brother was real.​

They arranged to meet at a restaurant in Fairfield. When Dave Carlson walked through that door and saw Tom for the first time in nearly four decades, he stopped cold. “I saw him and I thought, ‘There’s me,’” Dave recalled. “We have the same nose. The identical nose.”​

Two brothers reunited. Three siblings still to find.​

Finding the Sisters

The investigators continued their work, and one by one, the pieces fell into place. Cheryl was located next, living her own life, raising her own family, carrying her own vague memories of siblings she’d been told to forget.​

When she received the call, her reaction mirrored Tom’s—disbelief followed by overwhelming emotion. The sister who’d been loaded into a car while her eight-year-old brother ran desperately after her was found.​

Then came the hardest search of all: baby Mary Jo.​

Mary Jo had been adopted at nine months old—young enough that she had no memories whatsoever of her birth family. She’d grown up as Mary Jo Reed on a farm near the Little Sioux River, loved by the couple who’d adopted her, completely unaware that somewhere in Iowa she had four siblings searching for her.​

The investigator tracked her down through adoption records and contacted her adoptive mother first. Marjorie Reed was protective—as any mother would be—but ultimately decided that Mary Jo had the right to know the truth about her origins.​

When Mary Jo learned she had siblings, her entire understanding of her identity shifted. “I always felt like something was missing, but I couldn’t explain what,” she said. “Now I knew.”​

The Last Brother

Finding Jimmy proved to be the longest and most frustrating search of all. He’d been adopted by a family in Gladbrook, but the trail went cold after that. Years passed. The other four siblings reconnected, shared stories, filled in gaps in their memories, but Jimmy remained lost.​

The breakthrough came almost by accident. An investigator checking old records noticed a detail that others had missed—a forwarding address, a name change, a thread that led to another thread. Jimmy was located living in Iowa, completely unaware that four siblings had been desperately searching for him.​

When Dave finally made contact, Jimmy’s response was different from the others. He was angry—not at Dave, but at the situation, at the mother who’d abandoned them, at the system that had scattered them across the state. But underneath the anger was the same longing, the same sense of incompleteness that all five siblings had carried for forty years.​

“I had questions,” Jimmy said. “Lots of questions.”​

Dave had some answers—not all, but enough to begin healing.​

Thanksgiving 1997

The date was set for Thanksgiving, a fitting choice for a reunion that would finally make five incomplete families feel whole. They decided to meet at a restaurant—neutral ground where they could see each other, touch each other, prove to themselves that this wasn’t a dream.​

Dave Carlson woke up that 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, but fulfilled nonetheless.​

One by one, they arrived. Dave and Tom, who’d already reunited, stood waiting. Then Cheryl walked through the door, followed by Mary Jo, and finally Jimmy.​

For a long moment, they just stared at each other, five middle-aged people looking at their own faces reflected back at them. Then someone—no one remembers who—took a step forward, and suddenly they were all hugging, crying, laughing, talking over each other in a rush of decades of unspoken words.​

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

They discovered other shared traits that genetics had scattered across five separate lives: a love of fishing that all the brothers shared, though none had fished together since childhood. Similar mannerisms. The way they all tilted their heads when listening. Small details that added up to an undeniable truth—they were family.​

Mary Jo, who had no memories of her siblings, found herself overwhelmed. “I looked at them and I knew,” she said. “I just knew I belonged with them.”​

They stayed at that restaurant for hours, sharing stories, filling in four decades of blanks. Tom talked about the car accident that killed his adoptive sister. Cheryl described growing up in Chariton. Jimmy spoke about his anger and his questions. Mary Jo shared her life on the farm. 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. “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. She’d been sixteen when she had Dave, young and overwhelmed, trapped in a time and place that offered single mothers few options. 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 what might have been.​

But mostly, they felt grateful to be together again.​

The Photograph

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.​

After the Reunion

The reunion wasn’t an ending but a beginning. The five siblings—Dave, Tom, Cheryl, Mary Jo, and Jimmy—began incorporating each other into their lives in ways both big and small.​

They established regular gatherings, celebrating birthdays and holidays together, making up for lost time even as they acknowledged they could never truly recover what had been stolen from them. Their children became cousins who actually knew each other. Their families expanded to include not just the people they’d grown up with, but the people they’d been searching for all along.​

Tom Crew, who’d spent his childhood 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. “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.”​

He didn’t break it. It took him forty years, thousands of dollars in investigator fees, countless dead ends and disappointments, but Dave Carlson kept the promise an eight-year-old boy made to his grandmother in 1958.​

Legacy

The story of the Carlson siblings resonates because it touches something fundamental in the human experience—the need for connection, for family, for knowing where we come from. It reminds us that the bonds formed in childhood, even when severed by circumstance, leave marks on our souls that never fully fade.​

Their story also shines a light on the complexities of adoption in America, particularly the sealed-record policies that for decades made reunions like theirs nearly impossible. While adoption provides loving homes for children in need, it also creates a unique kind of loss—the loss of biological connection, of shared history, of siblings who might grow up miles apart never knowing the other exists.​

For the five Carlson siblings, finding each other didn’t erase the pain of separation or replace the years they lost. But it gave them something equally valuable: answers, connection, and the chance to write a new chapter together.​

When asked what advice he’d give to others searching for lost family members, Dave Carlson’s answer was simple: “Never give up. Never stop believing you’ll find them. Because that belief is what keeps them alive in your heart until the day you can hold them again.”​

The photograph Dave Carlson 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, of family that proved stronger than distance, time, or sealed records. 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.