This Michigan woman hadn't seen her brother in decades. Here's how she found him
LANSING — Elizabeth Michalski can remember countless times over the last two decades when she nearly gave up looking for her younger brother Gilbert, who was given up for adoption as a child.
"There were times I just wanted to just say, 'I'm done. You know, I'm never going to find him.' I was ready to accept that," Michalski said.
But her family wouldn't let her, she said; they knew Michalski wouldn't be whole until she found Gilbert.
Michalski, 60, who lives in Sault Ste. Marie, finally found Gilbert last year living in Minnesota. She hopes to meet him later this year.
Troubled family history split family
When Michalski was little, her family lived near Laingsburg. Her father, Merlin Fournier, was a merchant marine often away from home working aboard a ship.
The family moved to to Sault Ste. Marie in the early 1970s. Michalski, the oldest of all her siblings, was 7 when her mother, who was bipolar and schizophrenic, and struggled with alcohol and drug use, left their home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a husband and five children.
Before Loretta died in 2001, she had four more children, including Gilbert. Michalski's four half-siblings were scattered around the country.
Michalski's relationship with her mother, whose last name was Fournier when she was married to Michalski's father and when Gilbert was born, was strained, and almost nonexistent in the two decades before Loretta's death.
Over the years, Michalski searched for and found all of her other siblings born to her mother, including her younger sister Christina, who lives in Florida. But finding her brother proved to be more difficult and frustrating.
She started looking for him in 2001, after Loretta's death from a heart attack. Her late mother left her a photo album filled with photographs, records and keepsakes from Gilbert's birth on Aug. 26, 1973, at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing.
Michalski believed Loretta lost custody of her brother and that Gilbert was in Lansing when he was adopted — but it would take years, a DNA search and some help from a stranger who's made a hobby out of helping people find their relatives to connect with her long-lost brother.
"I'm just glad that my husband and everybody just kept pushing me," she said. "I feel whole."
A DNA kit and help from a stranger
Two years ago, when Michalski first talked with the State Journal about Gilbert, she was hoping his birth certificate and spreading the word about her search for him would lead her in the right direction. The story prompted interest, she said, but no real leads about Gilbert's whereabouts.
Her only memory of Gilbert dates to when she was 11. Loretta visited her and her siblings at their home in Sault Ste. Marie in 1975. Gilbert was 2 then, a little boy with curly hair. By the time Michalski saw her mother again five years later, Gilbert was no longer with her.
Michalski said there were times when the search became overwhelming and felt nearly impossible.
"When it got too overwhelming, I put it on the back burner for a little bit, then started back up with it," she said.
Her first breakthrough came in the form of a gift from her sister-in-law, an Ancestry.com DNA kit she received in March 2023. The second was meeting Denise Donnelly through an online group that helps people find their families.
Donnelly, who lives in Illinois, has been helping others find their relatives since the mid-1990s. Offering to help people like Michalski is second nature now, she said.
Searching for people is a skill she learned "as I went. I'm nosy by nature so that helps a lot," Donnelly said. "I know how to look for clues, so to speak. I also have an extreme amount of patience, where I can sit and look through documents, yearbooks, make phone calls."
Today, DNA helps immensely, Donnelly said. She used Ancestry.com to find Gilbert less than a month after she started to look.
"She found a Gilbert that was born in Lansing and was adopted and she had a gut feeling that was him," Michalski said.
Donnelly sent Michalski his name, Gilbert Jordan, and contact information for people she believed knew him.
'...I knew then, that was my brother'
Along with the information Donnelly gave to Michalski, there was a photograph of Gilbert, now 50. That was all the proof Michalski felt like she needed.
"Just looking at him, his picture, he looks just like my brothers," she said. "He looks just like my relatives on my birth mother's side. Yeah. And I knew then, that was my brother."
Michalski reached out to the mother of Gilbert's 12-year-old son. They talked for an hour about Gilbert's life and his desire to find his birth family. The phone call eventually led to a text conversation with Gilbert, who is recuperating from an injury suffered just before Christmas and was unavailable to speak.
"I was honest with him," Michalski said. "I told him everything that I know about our mother and what happened."
She's hopeful the two will meet one another in person later this year.
"God answered my prayers," Michalski said. "After I talked to Gilbert people asked me, 'What do you want for Christmas?' I told them, 'I got it. I got everything I ever wanted. I found my brother. I found all my siblings.'"
Contact Reporter Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ .
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This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan woman's brother, given up for adoption, located in Minnesota
