Siblings reunited after 72 years
Published: February 12, 2006
Mary Beck’s first child, Frieda, was born in 1914. Her last child, also a girl, was born in Minot May 27, 1933. In between, she bore three other daughters and three sons.
Mary Beck died in early June 1933 of uremic poisoning and other complications from that final childbirth. Frieda wanted to take the baby home, but Mary said no - she knew her other children couldn’t take care of a newborn and themselves as well. So she asked the doctor to find a good, loving home for this baby.
The children’s father and mother had divorced before the birth, and Mary Dockter had taken back her maiden name, Beck. Around this time, the children’s father moved out of state with another woman, leaving the first seven children, the youngest 4 years old, to be cared for by Frieda, 19, and Alfred, 17.
Mary Beck was buried in the Velva cemetery. It was 1933, during the Great Depression. Very few people had anything, said her son, Walter J. Dockter, 80, a longtime Bismarck resident now living in Walnut Creek, Calif.
“We were dirt, dirt, dirt poor,” he said. “How we made it, I don’t know.”
“One thing I’m grateful for, we learned to work together and help each other.”
Dockter, only 8 when his mother died, said he just learned recently that his older siblings remember seeing that baby girl.
“They didn’t talk about it,” he said. “They wanted to spare us the pain. All of us were concentrating on trying to survive.”
In July, when Velva celebrated its centennial, Wallace Dockter and his younger brother, Lloyd, of Brush Prairie, Wash., who was 4 when their mother died, came to North Dakota for the celebration.
It was there that Wallace Dockter broached the subject that was on his mind.
“If I can just find our sister, I can go in peace,” he said. Lloyd Dockter said it had been on his mind, too.
“We realized that time was not on our side,” Wallace said. With the siblings in their 70s, 80s and 90s, “we were concerned that we might lose any one of us” at any time, he said.
So on July 17, the family petitioned the district court in Minot for information about that baby girl born in 1933, whom none of them had seen in 72 years.
“I tried to couch my words that, if she wasn’t interested, at least she would let us know. Everything was “please,’” Wallace said. “We wanted to respect her privacy.”
With the help of Julie Hoffman, state adoption services administrator in Bismarck, and Bismarck attorney Sarah Vogel, Wallace Dockter and the others found the names of their little sister’s adoptive parents, Walter and Evelyn Eklund. Through the Social Security death index, they found obituaries for both; among the survivors, a daughter named Patricia Essen of Powers Lake.
Wallace Dockter made his first call from California to the Essens in Powers Lake about noon Pacific time on Nov. 17, four months to the day since the first petition to the court, he remembers.
No answer.
A couple of hours later, he called again. Still no answer except the machine.
So he left a message:”I’m Wallace J. Dockter. I’m doing genealogy work, and maybe Pat Essen can help me.”
The third time he called, it was suppertime in North Dakota.
This time Ken Essen picked up the phone. Wallace Dockter delivered his message again.
Pat was not at home, Ken said. He told him to call back about 10 o’clock.
At 10, Wallace Dockter dialed the phone for the fourth time, with his wife, Grace, sitting beside him.
Learning about adoption
Pat Eklund Essen was 13 when her parents told her she was adopted.
She’d had no inkling. Shocked, numb, “Inever said anything for a week,” she said. Finally, she thought, “they’ve been my mom and dad all these years; they’re still my mom and dad.”
In the years afterward, she did wonder about her biological family, because she knew there were siblings. She tried searching for the family but didn’t know her biological father’s last name.
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