Eleven sisters who were separated as kids when their biological family fell apart spent 43 years searching for each other. It wasn’t until they reunited that they learned the extent of the horrors they’d each suffered, but, in sharing their pain, they formed a sibling bond stronger than ever.
Reverend Barbara Lane, the ninth of 11 sisters, is a child abuse survivor and ministerial counselor living in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, with her husband, James.
“One way or another, our mother abandoned us,” Barbara told The Epoch Times. “As the story goes, she had kicked our father out for various reasons, and then she ran away with a boyfriend. It was December in St. Louis, and it was a particularly cold December. … She turned off the heat and sold all the furniture, and just left us.
“Depending on which sister’s story you’re listening to, we must have been there about three days before the neighbors figured out what was going on,” she said.
process.”
But through it all, what was absent was Barbara’s beloved sisters. Without the DNA databases of today, she spent decades going through the telephone book to find her long-lost loved ones, calling people at random with the same last name, according to Insider. At one point she was so desperate that she hired a private detective.
‘They Found Me’
Forty-three years had passed, and it was the August of 1997 when Barbara’s late sister, the second-oldest, Ellen, traced Barbara and Kay from a powerful clue: a newspaper clipping promoting foster care that had named their foster parents. Before Ellen reached out, Barbara had a spiritual premonition while packing for a summer vacation with her husband and three kids.
She told The Epoch Times: “I was in the kitchen … it was like somebody just shook me, and I could hear—I call it a premonition for a lack of better terminology–‘If you want to find your sisters, why didn’t you just ask?’ Then in that second, that very second … I knew they were going to find me, and I knew it would happen in three days.
“On the third day, I was sitting out on the beach early in the morning. My husband called me into the condo which was right on the boardwalk and said, ‘Come in … Sit down.’ I said, ‘They found me, didn’t they?’ and he said, ‘How did you know?’”
Soon, Barbara had the numbers of two of her sisters.
Shortly after, eight sisters flew to St. Louis, Missouri. Barbara, Kay, Ruth, Ellen, Laverne, Annie, Bobby, twins Vicky and Mickey, Pamela, and Cindy were finally reunited.
“It was like we had never been apart,” Barbara said. “It was like we were six, eight years old again, playing and singing and crying and hugging, and we just couldn’t let go of each other for a second. … I struggle with the words for that experience.”
There are two additional siblings that the family has never met, making a total of thirteen of them, with one of them being a brother, but neither has yet been traced.
‘Your Soul is Still Intact’
The sisters spent the next eight years immersing themselves in each other’s lives, “recapturing youth” through quality time and sharing fun, sleepovers, and holidays. Only once they’d reclaimed their sisterly bond did they start sharing the harrowing stories from their years spent apart.
“I would say, ‘We need to share this with our sisterhood,’” Barbara said. “They asked me if I would start writing their stories, and in that process we all broke our silence, including myself. The more I heard their stories, the more I knew that the 11 of us together was a force to be reckoned with.”
“I followed my intuition as to which sister to visit first,” said Barbara, who is grateful to have chosen Mickey since she later passed away. “I’d spend time with one and they’d call and say, ‘I didn’t tell you the truth, come back,’ or, ‘I have more to tell you, come back.’ So, it was a process.”
Barbara compiled her sisters’ stories over 15 years, adding and amending details as she went. Their collective story was so immense that Barbara turned it into a book, “Broken Water.” During that time, Barbara had no idea how healing the book would be for her sisters, but also for their families and the loved ones of the five sisters that have since passed.
“My sisters did not read these stories until this book was published,” Barbara told The Epoch Times. “They all ordered a copy before I had a chance to get them a good hardback copy. They read the other sisters’ stories and learned things they never knew. … I guess it was easier to tell me and let me write it than to open up in many other ways, so for that, I’m super honored.”
Today, a grateful grandmother of six, Barbara still struggles with learned responses from her abusive foster home but wouldn’t change a thing about her past since her story has reaped life-changing lessons. It’s also helping others.