'It's like a dream.' Five siblings who reunited last year find their remaining sister
LANSING - Melanie Rathbun grew up with no memory of her birth family, but she thought about them constantly.
Adopted when she was 21/2 by a white couple, Rathbun, now 51, grew up in the Haslett area.
"I knew I was different from everybody else," she said. "Growing up as a child, I felt like I didn't really fit in with my relatives. I just, I felt out of place."
And she often thought about her birth mother — who she was, where she was, what she was like.
Do you want to look for her? Rathbun's loved ones would ask her.
"I didn't know where to start," Rathbun said. And she feared her birth family didn't want to be found.
"I'm thinking, well, if they wanted to know where I was at, they would have been looking for me," she said.
But Rathbun's birth family was looking.
Her birth mother, Magdalena Cortez, had six children, the first when she was 15. She raised just two of them, Josephine and Philip Herrera. The state took the other four from her and they were later adopted.
Cortez died in 2015 at age 59.
Last year five of her children — Josephine and Philip Herrera, Martin McCallum and Jerry and Maria Gray — all Lansing area residents, reunited.
Then they vowed to find their remaining sister.
In November, Rathbun, who lives in Saginaw, received a message through social media
"If you were adopted, let me know," it read. "You have siblings who are looking for you."
She met them all two months ago. The reunion still doesn't feel real.
"It's like a dream," she said.
The final piece of the puzzle
Rathbun is the eldest of the six siblings, Cortez's firstborn, but Josephine Herrera says she was the hardest to find because her name was changed after her adoption.
She was born Janie Lou Salinas.
A DNA test through ancestry.com and a video plea posted to TikTok helped Josephine Herrera connect with three of her siblings, but it took help from a state-appointed confidential intermediary to find Rathbun.
She filed for an intermediary in September.
"And they told me it could take anywhere from six months to a year," Herrera said.
But just days after she was assigned an intermediary in early November, they located Rathbun, she said.
The siblings connected first over the phone and then through Facebook messenger before meeting in person at a local restaurant during a surprise party for Herrera's birthday.
"There was not a dry eye in that room," Herrera said of their first meeting.
When she was alive, Cortez often thought about the children she lost. After her mother died, Herrera had vowed to bring her siblings together. Rathbun was the final piece of her family's puzzle.
"I feel like my mom is very happy that we're all together finally because that's all she's ever wanted," Herrera said.
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'I'm grateful that they found me'
At first, the prospect of meeting her birth siblings made her nervous, Rathbun said.
But the knowledge that they all wanted to know her, that they had been looking for her, felt good, she said.
Photos of Cortez that her siblings have shared do make her think of what could have been, Rathbun said. Rathbun's three children and loved ones say she and her mother look alike.
"I don't have mixed emotions," she said. "It just sucks that she's not here, you know? I would really have liked to have seen her and just maybe have a one-on-one conversation with her."
All six siblings and their families celebrated Thanksgiving together. Then they met for dinner around Christmas.
Her adoptive parents and brother have died, Rathbun said.
"Now I have this biological family, tons of them," she said. "I'm grateful that they found me."
Contact Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ .
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lansing-area siblings who reunited last year find remaining sister
