Linda Crawford poses with four of the five siblings she found through DNA testing and records searches. From left are Donald Andrade, Wendi Barros, Warren Andrade, Linda Crawford and Donna Beverly.

Linda Crawford, left, and Wendi Barros embrace upon Crawford’s arrival in Dartmouth. Linda Crawford, left, and Wendi Barros embrace upon Crawfordís arrival in Dartmouth.

DARTMOUTH — This is a story of the heart.

In 1978, Hardrick and Linda Crawford learned that their new baby girl suffered from total anomalous pulmonary venous connection — a rare heart condition that had killed their first daughter five years before.

This time, specialists at Yale University operated and the baby survived, but the doctors had never seen the problem strike twice in the same family. They wanted to know: could it be hereditary?

Linda, adopted in 1951 at 2 months old out of a Worcester orphanage, didn't know the answer. The only thing she knew about her parents came from the explanation given for her swarthy skin and shiny black hair: Portuguese from the Cape.

She wrote to the Gardner hospital where she was born requesting medical records. The documents revealed the name of her birth mother, but the woman, white, didn't want to meet. The unplanned arrival of a "mulatto" baby "wasn't a happy story coming back into her life," said Crawford's husband, Hardrick, 63.

Instead, an aunt provided pictures and a name: Manuel Andrade, a Cape Verdean man who had once lived on Gifford Street in Falmouth and whose apparently brief fling — they were likely both unattached at the time — with Crawford's birth mother had ended in pregnancy.

And there the case ran cold.

"Manuel Andrade is like John Smith. It's a very, very common name," said Linda, who has successfully traced her husband's DNA to 1692 and the coupling of a male slave and white indentured serving woman on a Virginia plantation.

In 2011, "just curious," Linda took a $400 DNA test that matched her with distant cousins. Then, in April 2012, Andrade's name popped up in the publication of detailed 1940s census data.

"The big break was the 1940s census. ... Then, son of a gun, there he is. Now we have his sisters and brothers and his mother," said Hardrick, a former FBI agent who had taken over his wife's quest, consulting online genealogies, death certificate registries and Social Security records.

A call to Joan Barney at the New Bedford Public Library helped turn up Andrade's birth and death certificates, both from New Bedford, as well as his obituary, which listed his siblings and his five children, most of them settled in the New Bedford area. Suddenly Linda felt shy.

"I was afraid I was going to interrupt and they were going to say, 'Hey. We don't know you,'" she said. But one of Linda's DNA-matched distant cousins living in Brockton had no such compunction and sent Andrade's daughter, Wendi Barros, a Facebook message.

Shocked and intrigued, Barros connected with Linda on the phone later that night.

"I said, 'Gosh Linda, you sound just like us. The words that you use, the way you laugh, even the way you say nononono,'" Barros said.

Pictures that revealed a woman with her father's shiny black hair, cocoa complexion, dimples and sturdy build left Barros, 57, with little doubt. "Andrades have a strong gene. We all look like each other. ... Everyone agreed that she does look like us," she said.

To prove her good faith, Linda offered to pay for a DNA test (now on sale for $199). In December, Wendi took a swab of her brother Warren Andrade's cheek and on the night of Feb. 22 — Wendi's birthday — Linda found herself at her home in Clinton, Md., staring nervously at a computer screen as she pressed the button that would reveal whether or not they were a match.

"It was almost maxed out. I couldn't believe it," said Linda, who began to cry. "Seeing that, I just felt like I belonged to somebody."

The next morning she and Hardrick drove with their family to Wendi's home in North Dartmouth, where the siblings united in a once impossible to imagine celebration.

"When she came to my door, it wasn't an unfamiliar face. It was just someone I needed to hold," said Barros, who introduced her half-sister to linguica and was amazed at the similarities they found: the same bump on their chests, the same deep voices and laugh lines, not to mention the kitchenware, picture on the wall and shoes they had in common.

"It was like a sister that I've already known that was just out of town for a couple of weeks and she was just coming home."

"Early on, I didn't fully appreciate her desire, her yearning, her need to know because ... I know why I look the way I look," Hardrick said. "But when Linda went to that cemetery there on Allen Street and she collapsed on the headstone, that's when it hit me."

Doctors still can't fully explain the cause of her daughters' heart condition, but Linda, who celebrated her birthday Feb. 25 in North Dartmouth, said she knew what finding her family had done to hers.

"They opened their arms to me," she said. "I could never have ever dreamed it would be so beautiful."

By Natalie Sherman

Source: southcoasttoday.com