Father and daughter reunited
Published: June 25, 2005
Daniela Stewart always thought her father had died. Then, her mother told her that her dad was alive. And she could meet him.
Daniela Stewart received a unique gift just before Father’s Day.
She got to meet the father she never knew she had.
“I had always been told my father had died,” the Plano woman said. “No one would give me any details. I never questioned it.”
Then on May 15, Stewart’s mother changed her life with only a few words.
“My mother and stepfather came to visit and she said, ‘Your father is still alive, and if you want to get in touch with him, you can,’ ” she said.
Stewart was shocked. She still doesn’t know why her mother had kept the secret for nearly 40 years or why she decided to tell her on that particular day. Stewart thought about it for a couple of days before turning to the Internet to search for her long lost father’s name using the search engine Google. Within five minutes, she had an e-mail address.
“I’m a happily married wife and mother. I would just like to know my family history,” Stewart wrote in an e-mail dated May 17 after introducing herself and giving details about her life. “I didn’t want to interrupt anyone’s life. I needed to have some type of closure.”
Meanwhile, in Searcy, Ark., Stanley Cohorn had just returned home from a meeting and got on his computer to check his e-mail.
“There it was,” he said this week by phone. “It was just wonderful!”
Stewart’s German mother and Cohorn – then a U.S. Army soldier – met in Germany, where Cohorn was stationed, and had a relationship for about a year. Stewart was born in Germany in 1965. When she was 10 months old, Cohorn was sent back to the United States.
“I tried to extend my enlistment but it was denied,” Cohorn said. “I had a problem with alcohol.”
Stewart’s mother married an American GI and the new family moved to the United States when Stewart was 6 years old.
“I always had questions about my real father, but was never given very good answers,” she said.
Cohorn’s alcoholism only got worse after he got back to the states. He said he drank until Jan. 4, 1972, when he finally got some help. Eventually he began to search for Stewart, but he ran into some snags. In his searches, he had one letter missing from her first name and had spelled her last name wrong. He kept looking for her in Germany over the last 20 years.
“I suffered guilt and remorse,” he said. “I didn’t know what her mother had told her.”
Cohorn contacted an attorney in Georgia who said he could find anyone. Cohorn said some of the information he had given the attorney came up in Stewart’s Google search and that’s how she found him.
“It’s amazing,” Cohorn said.
On June 11, Stewart and Cohorn met halfway between Bowling Green and Searcy in Jackson, Tenn.
“I got there first. When we saw each other, it was like we haven’t been apart for 39 years,” Stewart said. “He brought his wife. She’s wonderful. She was crying.”
Father and daughter noticed similarities right away.
“I definitely take after his side of the family,” she said with a laugh. “We look alike, We think alike. We act alike.”
Cohorn agreed.
“If there had been 100 people where we were, I would’ve known which one to pick,” he said.
Stewart found out she has three half-sisters and a half-brother. She hasn’t met them face-to-face, but they have been getting to know each other by computer.
“They’ve been friendly. They’ve welcomed me with open arms,” she said. “They knew about me from the beginning. They’ve all taken turns trying to find me in Germany.”
As Cohorn’s children and grandchildren grew up, he would tell them about Stewart.
“All of them knew about Daniela. They had been looking forward to finding her,” he said. “She has always been a member of this family. She was never a deep, dark secret.”
Finding Stewart was a dream come true for Cohorn. He has been in poor health for a number of years, he said. He had talked about finding his daughter various times with his boss, a Baptist minister who died recently.
“My boss was being buried in Morgan, Kentucky, within 15 minutes of when Daniela’s mother shared information about me,” Cohorn said. “I never expected to have the chance to find her.”
Stewart believes her mother has found some peace in letting her get to know Cohorn.
“She’s happy about it,” she said.
Cohorn said he doesn’t feel any animosity toward Stewart’s mother for not letting their daughter know about him.
“Daniela was well cared for and well-raised,” he said. “She was better off with them the first year I was gone.”
Since their first meeting, father and daughter have talked on the phone only three times. Their main source of communication is the computer, Stewart said.
“We don’t like talking on the phone,” she said with a laugh. “Instead, we instant message and e-mail each other every day.”
Stewart, her husband, Darrell, and their 13-year-old daughter, Haley, will see Stewart’s father and stepmother, as well as her siblings and nieces and nephews, in July. She will meet one of her nieces in a couple of weeks in Nashville.
Haley said she is excited about meeting her grandfather.
“I’m glad she met him,” she said of her mother. “I thought it was really cool that she found him the way she did.”
Stewart said she, too, is glad she decided to find her father.
“I’ve always felt like I didn’t belong. Now I know where I come from,” she said. “It’s made a big difference in my life.”
She and her father have only one big regret, Stewart said.
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Only Love Is Real : A Story of Soulmates Reunited“The biggest regret for both of us is that it took so long,” she said. “We know that God has a reason why it had to be that long.”
Cohorn said finding Stewart is a miracle.
“My wife’s family lives in Kentucky and we used to drive through Bowling Green to visit them,” he said. “It’s weird how it all came about.”
Stewart advises people who are looking for long lost relatives to never give up the search.
“I know a lot of these searches don’t end positive, but this has been positive all the way around for me,” she said. “I couldn’t have dreamed anything better. I got a whole new life because of this, and I’d hate for anybody to miss out on something like this.”
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