Father, daughter reunited at last
Published: February 14, 2006
While some people who have had the opportunity to know and talk to both of their parents during their lives take that time for granted, one Dover woman spent more than 15 years of her life for that one chance.
Denise Robinson, 32, recently had her life changed forever when she found the man she had wondered about since she was a child.
As a young wife and parent, Robinson says her mother was apparently faced with some difficult decisions. A turn of events caused her young mother to leave her father, Mike Pitts, just weeks before she was born.
“Apparently, their families got too nosy,” Robinson said of the situation that caused her mother to leave. “She was young and just did what her mom told her to do.”
Although details of the events surrounding the separation more than 30 years ago are hazy to her parents now, Robinson said her mother and grandmother moved from their Georgia home to Virginia without telling her father where they were going. He tried to track them down with little luck, she said.
“So that was the last time he saw either of us.”
Search begins
When she was 16 years old, Robinson began searching for her father by requesting phone books from various locations throughout Georgia and Alabama.
But until she married her husband, Ronnie, at age 20, she had little money or encouragement to continue her search. Then eight years ago, she said, her husband took her to Alabama, where her father was born, to start the search at the beginning.
But even after making several trips to different states sifting through courthouse and census records, spending countless hours on her home computer searching Internet sites, and writing hundreds of letters, Robinson had only found one living sibling of her father. The one sister she located said she didn’t know where her brother was living. Another dead end.
“There were times when I just didn’t expect to get letters returned,” she said. “So I just marked them off my list. Because it was either not him, or it was him and he didn’t want to be found.”
Robinson said she has accumulated a briefcase full of documents, address listings, letters, responses, etc. from her search. She collected helpful books, maintained message boards and kept notebooks on all of the people she had contacted.
“There are many men all over the country who have gotten a call or letter from me about who I am,” Robinson said with a laugh. “I knew it may or may not be him, but I had to try.”
Search ended
Then in November, although she didn’t know at the time, Robinson’s lengthy search ended when she found an address of a Michael Pitts she had never seen before while checking the online white pages — as she had done several times before.
She sat down to write the letter she had written more than 100 times, giving statistics about herself and her parents, and asking the recipient to please call — even if he was not her father — so she could update her records.
But when it was time to mail the letter, something was different. She held on to this letter for a few days and finally had her son mail it for her on the Monday before Thanksgiving 2005.
“It was just one letter,” she said, recounting all of the letters she had sent before. “What were the chances really, of that being him? … “But it made me very nervous. I think I just knew.”
She was right.
Her gut instinct proved correct on Thanksgiving Day when she received a phone call shortly after returning home from work.
The call was an odd one, she said, explaining the man on the other end of the line was stumbling and stuttering over his words. She was about to hang up when the man said, “I’ll just come out and say it: I’m your daddy.”
“I’ve never been speechless a day in my life,” Robinson said of her reaction. “And the only thing I could get to come out was, ‘OK.’ … I was not expecting to pick up the phone that day and here that.”
Long-awaited meeting yields permanent change
Robinson learned after the first three-hour conversation with her father that he was living in Georgia and wanted to see her.
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