Father’s Day: Reunited at last
Published: June 19, 2005
Manvel man and his daughter get together 21 years after he gave her up for adoption.
Sometimes parents have to make tough decisions and just hope for the best.
Steve Schumer, a Manvel, N.D., farmer, made the decision to give his daughter up for adoption, always hoping that they would one day meet and get to know each other. He also prayed that his daughter would be raised by kind, loving parents.
Schumer was 19 years old in 1984 when he found out he’d fathered a child.
Schumer was attending school in Detroit Lakes, Minn., and had just broken up with a girl he’d been dating from Otter Tail County in Minnesota.
“Nine months later, I got a phone call from social services, and they asked if I had been dating this girl,” Schumer said. “They said she had a baby girl and that I was the father.”
Both parents agreed that the best thing for the baby was for them to give her up for adoption.
“I knew I couldn’t raise her myself,” he said.
Every few years, Schumer would contact Otter Tail County social services to get information about his daughter. They sent him a picture of her when she was 4 months old, but very little information.
“I drive the sports bus for Sacred Heart,” he said, referring to the East Grand Forks parochial school. “I would always sit in the stands during the games and wonder: Is she out there?”
In October 1990, Schumer started dating Laurie Hutton, a woman he eventually would marry. While the two were dating, Laurie, who was adopted, found her biological parents.
“I wanted to tell them I’m happy, I have wonderful parents and to thank them,” Laurie said.
Laurie’s experience finding her biological parents was so positive that it gave Schumer hope.
“My mother didn’t want to give me up, but she knew it would be the best thing for me,” Laurie said.
Steve and Laurie were married in 1992 and now have three children, Matthew, 11, Josh, 9 and Rachel, 7.
This year, Schumer had decided he was going to take steps to find his daughter, if he didn’t hear from her.
Then in January, Schumer received a letter from Otter Tail County social services.
Meanwhile …
Ashley Hart, 21, grew up an only child in Mendota Heights, Minn. She attended grade school at Emanuel Lutheran and graduated in 2002 from St. Croix Lutheran High School.
“I was really involved in sports. Softball, volleyball. I played basketball in grade school, and I was a cheerleader,” she said.
Ashley and her parents celebrated every March 16, the date they legally adopted her.
“I had always known since I was little that I was adopted,” she said.
Ashley said she always was curious about her biological parents and had a lot of questions: Where did they live? What did they do? Did they have any children? Did she have anything in common with them?
In December 2002, Ashley met Kevin Hart. They married in May 2003 and have a 16-month-old son named Chad.
In July 2004, she decided it was time to find her biological parents.
“The only thing I knew to do was to call Otter Tail County social services,” she said.
She e-mailed a social worker there, said she wanted to find her birth family and asked what she should do.
“I knew both their birthdays were in July, and I thought it would be fun to send them both birthday letters,” Hart said.
But she found out that the process was not easy and would take some time. She had to send social services all the information she had about her birth parents and her birth certificate.
In August, she and her family moved to Duluth, which pushed the search for her father to the back burner.
In October, she contacted Otter Tail County social services and was told her case worker was on maternity leave for six weeks. Nobody else was allowed to take over the case, she learned.
It was Dec. 15 when the social worker contacted Hart to tell her she had the paperwork ready and that she knew where her birth father lived.
“She asked if I was ready, and I said, yes, I’d been ready since July,” she said.
Meeting at last
The two finally talked on the phone in January and met face to face Feb. 21.
“It was a four-and-a-half-hour-drive for me, I was so nervous,” Hart said.
Laurie, who had been through a similar situation when she found her biological parents, made sure the two of them could meet alone.
She said her husband was also very nervous about the first meeting.
“He was anticipating the day for a long time,” she said.
“We hugged when I got there,” Hart said.
“I can’t say in words how it felt,” Schumer said.
“At lunch I spilled water all over the table, I think that was kind of an icebreaker,” said Hart, who spent three days with the Schumers.
The two had a lot to catch up on.
Schumer was relieved to find out that his daughter’s adopted parents were wonderful people and that she had a happy childhood.
“I had a lot of questions,” Hart said. “I knew kind of why I was given up for adoption but I wanted more details. How long the two had dated? I had picture of the two of them from prom.”
Although they just met, they share some common physical characteristics and habits. The one that surprised Laurie Schumer the most was when she heard Hart say, rapidly, “Doot, da, doot, da, do!”
“I don’t know of anyone else, other than my husband, who says that when they mess up,” she said.
Hart said she and her father have a lot in common and share their love of sports.
“I have a wonderful family and my childhood was wonderful, but there are some things that I don’t get from my family genetically,” she said.
One of those things is her height.
At 6-feet tall, she knows that gene came from Schumer who is 6′2″. Her adopted mother is 5′4″ and her father is 5′11″.
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Together Again: True Stories of Birth Parents and Adopted Children Reunited“As I grew up my mom always got the question how did you get such a tall daughter?” she said.
Along with the joy of being united, Hart and Schumer got even more.
Hart, who grew up as an only child, got to meet her two brothers and a sister.
And Schumer became an instant grandfather.
Now that they’re over the first-meeting jitters, Hart has settled in to the Schumer family life, right down to being teased, and teasing, her siblings.
“We have a very good relationship,” Schumer said.
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