Adopted man, siblings reunite

ROANOKE -- In the letter she left at the orphanage, Katherine Morris pleaded with social workers to treat her baby boy right.

The year was 1946, and she was leaving her 1-year-old son for reasons that may never come to light.

"Please give Tommy whole pasteurized milk, and don't cut his curls off," she wrote. She begged social workers to be good to her boy and to kiss him "every day for me. Please."

Tommy Barnhart was 9 or 10 by the time his adoptive mother, Wilda Barnhart, showed him that letter. She and her husband, Charlie, were raising him and another adopted child on their farm in Boones Mill. By all accounts, they were wonderful parents.

But for the next half-century, the plight of Barnhart's birth family ate away at him.

Eight years ago, after Wilda Barnhart's death (Charlie Barnhart had died in 1966), he contacted social workers at Roanoke's Department of Social Services for help. They took years to make contact, in part because they couldn't find the whereabouts of his biological mother. If she were alive today, she would be 95.

But a few weeks ago, he finally got the call he had been waiting for.

Not only did he have siblings, but one of them lived little more than a stone's throw from his Rocky Mount house.

Tommy Barnhart had another family, a big one, in fact.

He met most of his siblings on May 16, including an older brother, Harold Morris, who lives just a mile-and-a-half from his home in Rocky Mount. "We used to see each other all the time in Wal-Mart, but we had no idea," Barnhart said.

They were reunited at the Christiansburg home of an older sister, Virginia Morris Cumby, whose husband used to preach at a church not far from Barnhart's homeplace in Boones Mill.

Another brother, Norman Morris, operates an automotive store in Salem -- not too far from Carter Machinery, where Barnhart worked for 20 years. "We look exactly alike -- two chins and a big belly," Barnhart said.

Although Barnhart was adopted, his older siblings were farmed out to four foster-care homes. Cumby remembered that her father tried to keep his children together initially after the mother left, relying on the oldest daughter to stay home from school to watch the children who were too young to attend school.

But a neighbor got wind of what was happening and called social services. "After that, we saw each other on occasion but not too often," she said.

After eight years of calling social workers and filling out forms, Barnhart isn't sure how it was that he was finally put in touch with his siblings. But he was excited to finally meet them and thrilled -- for the first time since infancy -- to see his mother's face in a photograph that Cumby had on display in her living room.

"I thought she was right pretty," he said.

"I started crying when I finally got in touch with them, thanking God," Barnhart added. Cumby cried, too, when she read the letter her mother left at the orphanage.