Reunited brothers visit old orphanage
Published: July 26, 2006
Two brothers whose paths parted at the Annie Wittenmyer Home for Orphans in Davenport found themselves back at the same spot Sunday, 75 years later.
Jonathan Skinner was 4, and baby brother Kenneth was 9 months when their widowed mother dropped them off and five other siblings at the orphanage in 1930. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, Kenneth was adopted two months later, and the rest of the kids never saw him again.
Until Sunday.
The men — who both use a cane, have scars from years of military service and smoke — strolled around the mostly deserted red brick buildings, getting to know each other. As Skinner told tales of life at the complex — which housed orphans from 1865 to 1975 — one could almost feel ghosts awaken.
Skinner recalled catching stray cats with some of the other boys and nudging them off a second-story window ledge to test the theory they always landed on their feet.
“Oh my, did we get our (rears) whomped for that!” he recalled.
They probably would have got whomped as well for sneaking across Eastern Avenue to Oakdale Cemetery to rendezvous with young ladies from the girl’s side of the orphanage.
Then there were the times the orphans would slip out of the cottages at night in the winter with buckets of water to ice down the steep hill behind the north side cottages.
“We’d get it slick so we could use our skates on it,” he said. “We also had a toboggan. But no one knew how to steer it. There were broken arms. Many. You’d really get up a head of steam.”
Kenneth — who was renamed James by his adoptive parents, Vannie and Bessie Finley of Ft. Madison, Iowa — smiled and laughed hearing of the long ago capers of his brother.
“It’s been good meeting everyone,” he said. “It’s fantastic to meet the family. It’s quite an experience, I tell ya.”
The brothers didn’t know of each others existence until last Wednesday. The reunion was made possible thanks to the work of a dogged genealogist who helped Finley’s wife Sandy track down her family history. Working with the adoption papers and an old World War I draft card belonging to the siblings’ father, she discovered the brothers were living less than 160 miles apart — Skinner in Bettendorf and Finley in Montrose, Iowa, near Ft. Madison.
The men have spoken on the phone every day since the news, but Sunday was the first time to meet in person.
“It brings back a lot of memories,” Skinner said. “Hopefully we’ll get together a few more times.”
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