A Short Oral History Of My Adoption And My Early Family History On All Four Family Sides

H. Kent Craig

A Short Oral History Of My Adoption And My Early Family History On All Four Family Sides By H. Kent Craig
When I was born, I was thrust into a situation which would be unique even in today's more or less open climate in the early Twenty-First Century but which was close to be unheard of for The Year 1956. It's a relatively interesting tale which I've told literally hundreds if not thousands of times during my life and will put it to paper here once more for the record and for your amusement and enlightenment. On July 3rd 1957 at age seven months, according to family legend I grew up hearing and didn't find out the remaining one percent of the ninety-nine percent truth I had always been told until I was in my forties, I was adopted by Harold Harding and Mildred Anne King Craig of North Carolina and became Harold Kent Craig with a new birth certificate making a brand-new officially re-birthed and reincarnated while still alive new personage, my old birth name and birth heritage all but gone. Well, not quite. My father, Harold H. Craig, was from one of the oldest family lines in North Carolina, his ancestor, a lady with the surname of "Brillhart" (spelling approximate, also possibly "Brilhart" or "Brillheart") moving to what was the western American frontier of what is now Wilkes County N.C. in 1710 when the lands of west of it were truly "Indian Country" claimed by no white man and Daniel Boone was just beginning his explorations westward into what would eventually become Kentucky and Ohio from there. "Mrs." Brillhart, according to Craig family legend, was a single lady who opened up a tavern at a ford on the Reddies River in Wilkes County and had twelve children all without initial benefit of marriage before she married the true ancestor of the clan, a "Mr. Craig" and settled down and began the Craig family legacy of ministers and artists and writers and craftspeople and charismatic charmers which my father was a direct descendent from. My mother, Mildred Anne King's (also spelled "Keene" and "Keen" as in a "keen edge" from other sides of the same family) lineage was from an even older unbroken North Carolina blueblood patriarchal family lineage, her ancestor being one of the original "Carolina Charter" land grantees from King Charles II of England who gave him most of the land in central North Carolina from the western boundary of what is now the town of Four Oaks N.C. about 40 miles south of Raleigh eastward to "the isles of The Neuse" which actually are a series of tiny islands, large sandbars more than islands, in the Neuse river at what is now the Wayne/Johnston County line. The King family line was one of beneficent patriarchy, but they all worked hard as everyone had to back then if they did have a certain asset base that many didn't have in their real estate holdings which were slowly chipped away at over the succeeding generations. My grandfather Walter E. King, "Mum's" father, gave me a barrel stave shaver which had belonged to his own grandfather, his grandfather being a "cooper" or barrel maker. Yes, the descendents of the King family owned land (but never slaves, as far as can be determined by the historical record) but also had to work for a living, they weren't plantation owners, just land owners. The King family legacy was one of public service in politics (Mum's/mine direct ancestor was William Rufus Devane King who was Vice-President Of The United States under President Franklin Peace in the mid-1800's, for example) and government and public service and business (Mum's youngest brother is CEO of a Fortune 500 company). Speaking of slaves, I need to clarify that in addition to the King family never owning slaves (apparently), the Craig family never did, either, but that shouldn't come as any surprise. North Carolina has three distinct regions, the "Down East" region from geographic "the fall line" where rivers become shallower on their way to the Atlantic ocean, the "Piedmont" or foothills where most of the population and urban areas of the state are, and the Appalachian mountains in the western part of the state. "Down East" has always been traditionally Democratic, the Piedmont more or less apolitical, and the western part of the state always traditionally Republican. "Down East" being pro-slavery during the Civil War, the Piedmont being too poor to care and just wanting to be left alone and the mountains being solidly Pro-Union during The Civil War. The Craig's, being a mountain people, would have never owned slaves, not a chance. Anyway, I digress. Myself, my birth parents couldn't have been from further different stock and how they met and married would take too long to begin to explain here so let me stick to me for now. My "birth" mother, and Jesus, I do so sincerely hate modifying if not insulting terms like "birth" and "adoptive" when speaking of what should be one universalis of "family", was Wava Jean Hoops. Her/my ancestor was a "Daniel Hoopes" with an "e", who came over in one of the last of William Penn's original ships, he and the other colonists founding what is now the state and Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania. It was in the mid-1800's that half of the Hoopes family line converted to what was then the new religion/denomination of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints i.e. "The Mormons" and the other half didn't that the half that didn't convert didn't want to be formally associated with them so they dropped the "e" and became "Hoops" instead of "Hoopes". The Hoops were spectacularly unspectacular as a family line as far as I know, but even though I was an open adoptee and there any many links which I'll get to shortly I still don't know as much about either "birth" side of those sides of my families as I do about my "adoptive" ones. I do know that my birth mother, Wava Jean Hoops, was by all accounts one of the most pure of spirit and spiritual of souls that anyone ever met in this plane of existence, a trait which she passed on to us. And in that vein, her father, my biological maternal grandfather, the Rev. "Dad" Hoops, was a Church Of God (Anderson, IN) minister in Lyons OH outside of Toledo; this fact will shortly be tied back into the story. My biological father, Fred Viereck, was the son of sailor, a Frederick Augustus Ferdinand Viereck who as a 10-year-old cabin boy on a German freighter, he being born in Hamburg, Germany originally, jumped ship in 1896 (approximately) in what was then Wilmington CA and is now The Port Of Los Angeles and settled in and became an American citizen and a dock worker. F.A.F Viereck also became a union activist, being a founding member of the ILWU (International Longshoremen's & Warehouseman's Union) Local 13; on the office of Local 13, there is a photo of the original founding members and he's in it. Grandfather Viereck also married an "Anita Shugren" whose surname was later changed to "Green" and whose parents were one of the two original white settler-families that settled in the 1850's into what is now Death Valley National Park. Yes, Death Valley. The other family, the Corum family along with the Shugren/Green family owned most of what is now called Death Valley because there were only two good, decent reliable wells in all of the valley and each family owned one of them, respectively. Later on, the mineral borax was discovered in abundance in Death Valley and the Greens became wealthy from its mining and from owning shares in what became The American Borax Company; think of the iconic "20 Mule Team Borax Hand Soap" and that's what their land and they helped create. They apparently lost all their stock in it during The Great Depression but that's another story. Anyway, to finish this accidental bit of babble up, the Corum family later sold their land to the US Government for an air base and the government also took some of the old Green property which became "Muroc Field" ("Muroc" is "Corum" spelled backwards") which eventually became Edwards Air Force base. So, grandfather Viereck married Anita Shugren/Green and begat a series of children, one of which was my biological father, Fred Viereck, who married Wava Hoops and begat myself and my sibling group. Originally, there were three of us: the oldest, my sister Stephanie born in 1954, my brother Gary born in 1955 and myself born in 1956. When we were put up for adoption in 1957, my uncle Roy Hoops, who was head of Church Of God Missions for East Africa, took Gary and Stephanie to East Africa, specifically Kenya and Tanzania where his mission work was and I was adopted by his best friend and his best friend's wife, Harold and Mildred Craig. My uncle Roy was my biological mother's 2/3rds brother. How is that possible? Their father, the Rev. "Dad" Hoops, was married three times in succession, outliving all three wives in turn, having children by the first two wives who also happened to be sisters (to make this clear, he married the first sister, had children by her, she died, her married her sister and had children with her, she died and then he married a third, non-related lady later in his life; he lived to be 98; I remember meeting him several times as a child, as I also met Wava several times, too), Roy being born to one of the two sisters and my biological mother to the other one. Yes, Harold Craig (who was ordained a "Church Of God Elder" i.e. "lay minister) and Rev. Roy Hoops were best friends, but also were Rev. Major H. Craig, my adoptive father's father (my adoptive paternal grandfather) and Rev. "Dad" Hoops (my biological maternal grandfather) were also close friends because of their Church Of God (Anderson, Indiana synod) connection. Confused yet? Uncle Roy and his wife Magaline only wanted to take two of us three with them because life in the East African bush was so hard and my siblings were older than I and I also had some relatively major health problems as an infant so they took them to Kenya at first and later Tanzania to be raised and we all knew from Moment One that we were adopted and were not only were permitted to but encouraged to stay in contact with each other over the years as we grew up and when they would come over every four years on "furlough" to help raise money for the Mission Board we'd get to see each other and renew the family-link that way, too. After we three were put up for adoption, my biological parents Fred and Wava split up mainly because of economic reasons (I spent some time in an orphanage in Columbus, Ohio where I was born in University Hospital at Ohio State University while waiting to be adopted by "The Craig's", my parents, by the way) and then later on got back together and in 1960, never being divorced just separated, had a daughter, my youngest full sister "Kathryn". Five days after giving birth to Kathryn, my/our mother Wava died of "acute focal interstitial myocarditis" (basically, an aneurysm on the wall of her heart weakened and then exploded) at age 27. Kathryn was adopted by one of Fred's siblings, a sister, and her husband who had several children of their own, Kathryn's cousins becoming her siblings as well. For various reasons that would take too long to tell right now and that I know that Kathryn wouldn't want me disclosing in a public forum like this, Kathryn while being a full sibling to us "original three" was seldom in contact with any of us, though more in contact with Gary and Stephanie than me. In fact, it wasn't until about 1990 that I finally met Kathryn in real life. After Wava died, my biological father Fred Viereck being the charmer and very charismatic man that he always was became common-law husband to a certain "Bennie", a lady whose parents were Hispanic migrants from Mexico who originally settled in Oklahoma during the Great Depression before moving to southern California in the 50's (approximately). From the union of Fred and "Bennie" came my/our half-brother (and Jesus, I hate the terms "half" and "full" when talking about sibling relationships) out of that, "Alfred" ("Fred" being part of "Al-Fred") being born in 1968 in San Pedro CA where he still lives. While I've spoken to Alfred several times over the years, we're not particularly close and we've never met, though if/when I am ever in his neck of the woods and have some time to spend with him I hope we could at least do that. Some miscellaneous odds and ends. Wava is buried in Palos Verdes Estates cemetery near Los Angeles, supposedly on a knoll there overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Oldest sister Stephanie has been living in northern California, in a small town north of Sacramento, since approximately 1988 or so. Steph had six girls, one of which died in infancy; her oldest daughter, Michele, and I are close and stay in frequent contact. Gary has spent his entire life in Tanzania and is a successful businessman there, first owning a safari company for the first part of his life which made him a comfortable living and now since 1991 (approximately) owning an 18,000 acre farm, "Circle H Ranch Ltd" just south of Arusha, Tanzania, adjacent to Ngoro Ngoro Crater National Park; step out his front door and Mt. Kilimanjaro dominates the skyline; no, I've never been to see him, the old story of when I have the money I don't have the time and when I have the time I haven't had the money; in 1997 he married one of the most stunningly beautiful women in the world, "Gillian", and they have three children; he was married once before and has a daughter, "Larissa" from that marriage who is the same age as my son Brian, 23 years old, and he also had a long-term relationship between his marriages that didn't work out, she got tired of living in the bush after so many years and left him and then he met Gillian when he was 41 and she was 23 and was an airfreight clerk at Arusha International Airport and looked like a cross between the models Iman and Naomi Campbell and had been raised in Catholic boarding schools; yeah, Sigh; sister Kathryn and her then fiancé' now husband Ronnie came down from West Virginia where she had been living and moved in with me and my family, son Brian and then first wife Cathy for about a month in 1990 and then decided they didn't like this area and moved back to West Virginia and in the couple of years after that we just lost touch and I haven't heard from her in years; Kathryn, having being raised Church Of God also almost converted to Islam as an adult but then became disillusioned with its treatment of women and then promptly converted to Judaism, no, I'm not kidding, which is why I like to joke that my spiritual and religious beliefs aside of all souls having just one color and that's God that it's impossible for me to be prejudiced since I am a Southern Redneck (if an intellectual one) whose siblings are African, Hispanic and Jewish, respectively; now, if only a half-sister would turn up who is lesbian and also a pygmy Inuit, we'd have every prejudice covered. Oh, why did my parents, "The Craig's", want to adopt instead of having their own biological children? Because in 1947, they having gotten married in 1945, they had a son "Kerry" who died within days of his birth from hydroencephylitis i.e. "water on the brain" and again in 1948 had a daughter "Hope" who also died within days of her birth of the same condition, they deciding at that point not to try again to have children of their own since their genes evidently weren't compatible and had to wait until 1957 for me to come along and be available for adoption. Yes, I do consider Kerry and Hope to be as much my "real" siblings as my blood siblings are. Why wouldn't I? We have the same mother and father, after all. No, not the same blood lines, but the same mother and father. For, in the end, isn't this what it's all about? In the end, isn't all about love, nothing more, nothing less? Aren't we all part of one larger family of souls that were created by our God-Father and His Spirit Of Love? When it boils down it, aren't we truly all family, of one color of soul, in the end? Oh, what was the "one percent of the truth not told" I mentioned in the early part of this oral history? While I lived with Harold and Mildred Craig from 1957 until 1960 as their son and they told everyone I had been adopted, the "real" truth was that I wasn't officially adopted until 1960, how I found this out I'd rather not say publicly and at this point in my life it doesn't matter anyway, but I was legally adopted in 1960, not on July 3rd 1957 as my parents always told me and everyone else, a couple of months before my birth mother Wava died. I have never asked my parents about this and never will; like I say, at this point, it's not important, I'm just mentioning this for the record. My parents' personal attorney who arranged for the adoption as he took care of all matters personal and business for them, my father being one of his first clients back in the 40's, was Armistead J. Maupin of Raleigh, of the firm Maupin Taylor & Ellis, Mr. Maupin being arguably one of the greatest and most influential attorneys in the history of the state of North Carolina, so it's not he didn't know what he was doing or that I couldn't have been legally adopted way before 1960. Yeah, "hhhmmm". Even in so-called "normal" families there are more secrets than could ever be told and adoptive ones are no different, the effects of secrets in adoptive families are just more magnified seemingly because most adoptions are closed and even with open adoption situations there are always things that should be said that never are and things that shouldn't ever be mentioned allowed that are, just like any other family. I hope you've enjoyed this rendition of my oral history recitation chorus. Your questions and feedback are always welcome.

A Short Oral History Of My Adoption And My Early Family History On All Four Family Sides

By
H. Kent Craig

When I was born, I was thrust into a situation which would be unique even in today's more or less open climate in the early Twenty-First Century but which was close to be unheard of for The Year 1956. It's a relatively interesting tale which I've told literally hundreds if not thousands of times during my life and will put it to paper here once more for the record and for your amusement and enlightenment.

On July 3rd 1957 at age seven months, according to family legend I grew up hearing and didn't find out the remaining one percent of the ninety-nine percent truth I had always been told until I was in my forties, I was adopted by Harold Harding and Mildred Anne King Craig of North Carolina and became Harold Kent Craig with a new birth certificate making a brand-new officially re-birthed and reincarnated while still alive new personage, my old birth name and birth heritage all but gone. Well, not quite.

My father, Harold H. Craig, was from one of the oldest family lines in North Carolina, his ancestor, a lady with the surname of "Brillhart" (spelling approximate, also possibly "Brilhart" or "Brillheart") moving to what was the western American frontier of what is now Wilkes County N.C. in 1710 when the lands of west of it were truly "Indian Country" claimed by no white man and Daniel Boone was just beginning his explorations westward into what would eventually become Kentucky and Ohio from there.

"Mrs." Brillhart, according to Craig family legend, was a single lady who opened up a tavern at a ford on the Reddies River in Wilkes County and had twelve children all without initial benefit of marriage before she married the true ancestor of the clan, a "Mr. Craig" and settled down and began the Craig family legacy of ministers and artists and writers and craftspeople and charismatic charmers which my father was a direct descendent from.

My mother, Mildred Anne King's (also spelled "Keene" and "Keen" as in a "keen edge" from other sides of the same family) lineage was from an even older unbroken North Carolina blueblood patriarchal family lineage, her ancestor being one of the original "Carolina Charter" land grantees from King Charles II of England who gave him most of the land in central North Carolina from the western boundary of what is now the town of Four Oaks N.C. about 40 miles south of Raleigh eastward to "the isles of The Neuse" which actually are a series of tiny islands, large sandbars more than islands, in the Neuse river at what is now the Wayne/Johnston County line.

The King family line was one of beneficent patriarchy, but they all worked hard as everyone had to back then if they did have a certain asset base that many didn't have in their real estate holdings which were slowly chipped away at over the succeeding generations.

My grandfather Walter E. King, "Mum's" father, gave me a barrel stave shaver which had belonged to his own grandfather, his grandfather being a "cooper" or barrel maker. Yes, the descendents of the King family owned land (but never slaves, as far as can be determined by the historical record) but also had to work for a living, they weren't plantation owners, just land owners. The King family legacy was one of public service in politics (Mum's/mine direct ancestor was William Rufus Devane King who was Vice-President Of The United States under President Franklin Peace in the mid-1800's, for example) and government and public service and business (Mum's youngest brother is CEO of a Fortune 500 company).

Speaking of slaves, I need to clarify that in addition to the King family never owning slaves (apparently), the Craig family never did, either, but that shouldn't come as any surprise.

North Carolina has three distinct regions, the "Down East" region from geographic "the fall line" where rivers become shallower on their way to the Atlantic ocean, the "Piedmont" or foothills where most of the population and urban areas of the state are, and the Appalachian mountains in the western part of the state. "Down East" has always been traditionally Democratic, the Piedmont more or less apolitical, and the western part of the state always traditionally Republican. "Down East" being pro-slavery during the Civil War, the Piedmont being too poor to care and just wanting to be left alone and the mountains being solidly Pro-Union during The Civil War.

The Craig's, being a mountain people, would have never owned slaves, not a chance. Anyway, I digress.

Myself, my birth parents couldn't have been from further different stock and how they met and married would take too long to begin to explain here so let me stick to me for now.

My "birth" mother, and Jesus, I do so sincerely hate modifying if not insulting terms like "birth" and "adoptive" when speaking of what should be one universalis of "family", was Wava Jean Hoops. Her/my ancestor was a "Daniel Hoopes" with an "e", who came over in one of the last of William Penn's original ships, he and the other colonists founding what is now the state and Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania. It was in the mid-1800's that half of the Hoopes family line converted to what was then the new religion/denomination of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints i.e. "The Mormons" and the other half didn't that the half that didn't convert didn't want to be formally associated with them so they dropped the "e" and became "Hoops" instead of "Hoopes".

The Hoops were spectacularly unspectacular as a family line as far as I know, but even though I was an open adoptee and there any many links which I'll get to shortly I still don't know as much about either "birth" side of those sides of my families as I do about my "adoptive" ones.

I do know that my birth mother, Wava Jean Hoops, was by all accounts one of the most pure of spirit and spiritual of souls that anyone ever met in this plane of existence, a trait which she passed on to us. And in that vein, her father, my biological maternal grandfather, the Rev. "Dad" Hoops, was a Church Of God (Anderson, IN) minister in Lyons OH outside of Toledo; this fact will shortly be tied back into the story.

My biological father, Fred Viereck, was the son of sailor, a Frederick Augustus Ferdinand Viereck who as a 10-year-old cabin boy on a German freighter, he being born in Hamburg, Germany originally, jumped ship in 1896 (approximately) in what was then Wilmington CA and is now The Port Of Los Angeles and settled in and became an American citizen and a dock worker.

F.A.F Viereck also became a union activist, being a founding member of the ILWU (International Longshoremen's & Warehouseman's Union) Local 13; on the office of Local 13, there is a photo of the original founding members and he's in it. Grandfather Viereck also married an "Anita Shugren" whose surname was later changed to "Green" and whose parents were one of the two original white settler-families that settled in the 1850's into what is now Death Valley National Park. Yes, Death Valley.

The other family, the Corum family along with the Shugren/Green family owned most of what is now called Death Valley because there were only two good, decent reliable wells in all of the valley and each family owned one of them, respectively.

Later on, the mineral borax was discovered in abundance in Death Valley and the Greens became wealthy from its mining and from owning shares in what became The American Borax Company; think of the iconic "20 Mule Team Borax Hand Soap" and that's what their land and they helped create. They apparently lost all their stock in it during The Great Depression but that's another story.

Anyway, to finish this accidental bit of babble up, the Corum family later sold their land to the US Government for an air base and the government also took some of the old Green property which became "Muroc Field" ("Muroc" is "Corum" spelled backwards") which eventually became Edwards Air Force base.

So, grandfather Viereck married Anita Shugren/Green and begat a series of children, one of which was my biological father, Fred Viereck, who married Wava Hoops and begat myself and my sibling group.

Originally, there were three of us: the oldest, my sister Stephanie born in 1954, my brother Gary born in 1955 and myself born in 1956.

When we were put up for adoption in 1957, my uncle Roy Hoops, who was head of Church Of God Missions for East Africa, took Gary and Stephanie to East Africa, specifically Kenya and Tanzania where his mission work was and I was adopted by his best friend and his best friend's wife, Harold and Mildred Craig.

My uncle Roy was my biological mother's 2/3rds brother. How is that possible? Their father, the Rev. "Dad" Hoops, was married three times in succession, outliving all three wives in turn, having children by the first two wives who also happened to be sisters (to make this clear, he married the first sister, had children by her, she died, her married her sister and had children with her, she died and then he married a third, non-related lady later in his life; he lived to be 98; I remember meeting him several times as a child, as I also met Wava several times, too), Roy being born to one of the two sisters and my biological mother to the other one.

Yes, Harold Craig (who was ordained a "Church Of God Elder" i.e. "lay minister) and Rev. Roy Hoops were best friends, but also were Rev. Major H. Craig, my adoptive father's father (my adoptive paternal grandfather) and Rev. "Dad" Hoops (my biological maternal grandfather) were also close friends because of their Church Of God (Anderson, Indiana synod) connection. Confused yet?

Uncle Roy and his wife Magaline only wanted to take two of us three with them because life in the East African bush was so hard and my siblings were older than I and I also had some relatively major health problems as an infant so they took them to Kenya at first and later Tanzania to be raised and we all knew from Moment One that we were adopted and were not only were permitted to but encouraged to stay in contact with each other over the years as we grew up and when they would come over every four years on "furlough" to help raise money for the Mission Board we'd get to see each other and renew the family-link that way, too.

After we three were put up for adoption, my biological parents Fred and Wava split up mainly because of economic reasons (I spent some time in an orphanage in Columbus, Ohio where I was born in University Hospital at Ohio State University while waiting to be adopted by "The Craig's", my parents, by the way) and then later on got back together and in 1960, never being divorced just separated, had a daughter, my youngest full sister "Kathryn".

Five days after giving birth to Kathryn, my/our mother Wava died of "acute focal interstitial myocarditis" (basically, an aneurysm on the wall of her heart weakened and then exploded) at age 27. Kathryn was adopted by one of Fred's siblings, a sister, and her husband who had several children of their own, Kathryn's cousins becoming her siblings as well. For various reasons that would take too long to tell right now and that I know that Kathryn wouldn't want me disclosing in a public forum like this, Kathryn while being a full sibling to us "original three" was seldom in contact with any of us, though more in contact with Gary and Stephanie than me. In fact, it wasn't until about 1990 that I finally met Kathryn in real life.

After Wava died, my biological father Fred Viereck being the charmer and very charismatic man that he always was became common-law husband to a certain "Bennie", a lady whose parents were Hispanic migrants from Mexico who originally settled in Oklahoma during the Great Depression before moving to southern California in the 50's (approximately). From the union of Fred and "Bennie" came my/our half-brother (and Jesus, I hate the terms "half" and "full" when talking about sibling relationships) out of that, "Alfred" ("Fred" being part of "Al-Fred") being born in 1968 in San Pedro CA where he still lives. While I've spoken to Alfred several times over the years, we're not particularly close and we've never met, though if/when I am ever in his neck of the woods and have some time to spend with him I hope we could at least do that.

Some miscellaneous odds and ends.

Wava is buried in Palos Verdes Estates cemetery near Los Angeles, supposedly on a knoll there overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Oldest sister Stephanie has been living in northern California, in a small town north of Sacramento, since approximately 1988 or so. Steph had six girls, one of which died in infancy; her oldest daughter, Michele, and I are close and stay in frequent contact. Gary has spent his entire life in Tanzania and is a successful businessman there, first owning a safari company for the first part of his life which made him a comfortable living and now since 1991 (approximately) owning an 18,000 acre farm, "Circle H Ranch Ltd" just south of Arusha, Tanzania, adjacent to Ngoro Ngoro Crater National Park; step out his front door and Mt. Kilimanjaro dominates the skyline; no, I've never been to see him, the old story of when I have the money I don't have the time and when I have the time I haven't had the money; in 1997 he married one of the most stunningly beautiful women in the world, "Gillian", and they have three children; he was married once before and has a daughter, "Larissa" from that marriage who is the same age as my son Brian, 23 years old, and he also had a long-term relationship between his marriages that didn't work out, she got tired of living in the bush after so many years and left him and then he met Gillian when he was 41 and she was 23 and was an airfreight clerk at Arusha International Airport and looked like a cross between the models Iman and Naomi Campbell and had been raised in Catholic boarding schools; yeah, Sigh; sister Kathryn and her then fiancé' now husband Ronnie came down from West Virginia where she had been living and moved in with me and my family, son Brian and then first wife Cathy for about a month in 1990 and then decided they didn't like this area and moved back to West Virginia and in the couple of years after that we just lost touch and I haven't heard from her in years; Kathryn, having being raised Church Of God also almost converted to Islam as an adult but then became disillusioned with its treatment of women and then promptly converted to Judaism, no, I'm not kidding, which is why I like to joke that my spiritual and religious beliefs aside of all souls having just one color and that's God that it's impossible for me to be prejudiced since I am a Southern Redneck (if an intellectual one) whose siblings are African, Hispanic and Jewish, respectively; now, if only a half-sister would turn up who is lesbian and also a pygmy Inuit, we'd have every prejudice covered.

Oh, why did my parents, "The Craig's", want to adopt instead of having their own biological children? Because in 1947, they having gotten married in 1945, they had a son "Kerry" who died within days of his birth from hydroencephylitis i.e. "water on the brain" and again in 1948 had a daughter "Hope" who also died within days of her birth of the same condition, they deciding at that point not to try again to have children of their own since their genes evidently weren't compatible and had to wait until 1957 for me to come along and be available for adoption.

Yes, I do consider Kerry and Hope to be as much my "real" siblings as my blood siblings are. Why wouldn't I? We have the same mother and father, after all. No, not the same blood lines, but the same mother and father.

For, in the end, isn't this what it's all about? In the end, isn't all about love, nothing more, nothing less? Aren't we all part of one larger family of souls that were created by our God-Father and His Spirit Of Love? When it boils down it, aren't we truly all family, of one color of soul, in the end?

Oh, what was the "one percent of the truth not told" I mentioned in the early part of this oral history? While I lived with Harold and Mildred Craig from 1957 until 1960 as their son and they told everyone I had been adopted, the "real" truth was that I wasn't officially adopted until 1960, how I found this out I'd rather not say publicly and at this point in my life it doesn't matter anyway, but I was legally adopted in 1960, not on July 3rd 1957 as my parents always told me and everyone else, a couple of months before my birth mother Wava died. I have never asked my parents about this and never will; like I say, at this point, it's not important, I'm just mentioning this for the record.

My parents' personal attorney who arranged for the adoption as he took care of all matters personal and business for them, my father being one of his first clients back in the 40's, was Armistead J. Maupin of Raleigh, of the firm Maupin Taylor & Ellis, Mr. Maupin being arguably one of the greatest and most influential attorneys in the history of the state of North Carolina, so it's not he didn't know what he was doing or that I couldn't have been legally adopted way before 1960. Yeah, "hhhmmm".

Even in so-called "normal" families there are more secrets than could ever be told and adoptive ones are no different, the effects of secrets in adoptive families are just more magnified seemingly because most adoptions are closed and even with open adoption situations there are always things that should be said that never are and things that shouldn't ever be mentioned allowed that are, just like any other family.

I hope you've enjoyed this rendition of my oral history recitation chorus. Your questions and feedback are always welcome.

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