Sibling reunion a touching story of patience, family

Family means everything to Ray Lawrence, perhaps because he never had one of his own growing up.

Now 63 and living in Wasilla, Lawrence was 5 years old in Ohio in 1951 when his father died, leaving his mother alone to raise nine children. Within a year, the mother had suffered a mental breakdown and the children were placed into state care. It wasn’t until 13 years and 13 foster homes later when Ray joined the Navy that he found anything that gave him a sense of family.

More than 55 years after being pulled from his childhood home and decades since the last contact he’s had with any of his siblings — a sister three years his junior, Evelyn — Ray has been reunited with one of the many missing pieces to his family puzzle.

Evelyn, 60, and Ray have spent most of the past week together and share their touching story of family, heartache and healing in today’s Frontiersman (Valley Life, page A9). Brought together through the efforts of Ray’s son Douglas, the pair’s story is an emotional one.

In the course of the daily journalistic grind of council meetings, zoning decisions and police reports, every once in awhile we’re privileged to tell stories like the Ray and Evelyn’s. At a time when most are considering retirement, Ray finally gets to be the big brother he’s always dreamed he could be. Evelyn, who suffers from the effects of a serious auto accident when she was a child, is learning to read and revels in the attention from Ray.

Ray and Evelyn have, to the best of their knowledge, six brothers and a sister still unaccounted for. One man Ray tracked down who may be a sibling talked to him once, then hung up the phone. But for the former career Navy Seabee who’s waited nearly 60 years to be a big brother again, he’s embracing family in a way many of us take for granted.