ST. LOUIS (AP) — Two St. Louis sisters were reunited with their brother after he disappeared more than 50 years ago.
Carol Brewster, Marie Jordan and James Clark got together in Detroit this month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Brewster said the siblings had a difficult upbringing being raised by an aunt in St. Louis. She said Clark walked out of the house one day and never came back.
“The day he left it hurt me really bad,” Brewster said. “I was 13, and I didn’t understand. We had a lot of pain within our immediate family. I felt connected to him.”
While Brewster tried to track down her brother over the years, she didn’t have any success.
“The leads I got, they went nowhere,” Brewster said. “When websites got popular for locating people, I’d get hundreds of (results), because he had a very common name.”
Brewster and Jordan attended the Greater St. Louis Area Missing Persons Event in Jennings in May, where they met St. Louis police Det. Janet McKern.
McKern was able to locate Clark’s birth certificate and learned that he had a middle initial and a different birth date than the sisters had remembered. They used NamUs, an online clearinghouse, to find a James Clark in Detroit.
“I made a phone call to the Detroit Police Department and told them the story about a missing man who has been gone for (57) years and his sisters are desperate to find him,” McKern said. “And 30 minutes later they called me back and said they’d located him in a senior living facility.”
Clark said he traveled around the country for years before settling down in Detroit as a city maintenance worker.
“In a way I was happy, and I was sad,” Clark said of when his sisters reached out to him. “I didn’t want to put my troubles onto them. But I realized they’d moved on with their lives. I was glad to hear that.”