Quest to find birth father taking Cressona man to Germany
Jun. 20—CRESSONA — Maybe it's instinct, or love, or just plain stubbornness, but Timothy W. Bayliff insists on searching for the father he never knew, 66 years after he was born in Germany.
Seeking to fill a void that he's felt his entire life, Bayliff will leave next week on a 40th wedding anniversary cruise of Scandinavia. With his son and daughter, he'll make a side trip to Augsburg, Germany, where he hopes relatives can give him clues to locating his birth father.
"I've got a chance to find my father before I die," said Bayliff, a Cressona contractor.
Though fully recovered, open heart surgery last year caused him to focus on a mission he's been talking about for much of his adult life.
In advance of reaching Augsburg, a cultural center in Bavaria and one of Germany's oldest cities, Bayliff plans to place an ad in a newspaper noting that DNA sampling has linked him to a cousin in Stuttgart.
"I am still searching for my birth father," he said. "Maybe somebody who knows something will see the ad."
Pages of time
Leafing through a photo album on a coffee table in his living room, Bayliff relives a complex and compelling life story.
He was born to unwed German parents in Heilbronn, Germany, at the height of the Cold War on Aug. 18, 1956. Christened Siegfried Dalke, he was assigned his mother's maiden name.
Mathilde Dalke subsequently married an American GI stationed in Germany, but put her 4 1/2 -year-old son Siegfried up for adoption because her husband was abusive to him.
Harold and Evelyn Bayliff, an American couple with Schuylkill County connections, adopted the young German boy and changed his name to Timothy Wayne Bayliff.
Chief Warrant Officer Harold Bayliff, originally from Shenandoah, was somewhat of a genius involved in top secret projects with the Defense Atomic Support Agency.
Tim Bayliff still carries his adoptive father's Army credentials.
When the elder Bayliff retired after 30 years in the Army, the family moved to Schuylkill Haven when Tim was a freshman in high school.
"We lived all over," Tim Bayliff recalled. "My adoptive mother was tired of it and just wanted to settle down."
Finding mom
Over the years, while running a growing construction business and raising two children, Tim and Tori, with his wife, Robin, Bayliff managed to locate relatives in Germany.
One of them, Eugen Bueter, turned out to be a half-brother by Mathilde, who had remarried. The two have met several times in Cressona and in Germany.
In 2015, Bayliff hired celebrity investigator Pamela Slaton to find his birth mother. He knew his mother loved him. For six years after he was adopted, she made phone calls, asking what had happened to Siegfried.
Three weeks and $3,000 later, Bayliff met his birth mother for the first time in Newport News, Virginia, in 2015. She was in a nursing home, afflicted with Alzheimer's, and didn't recognize him at first.
He showed her an old toy train given to him as a child and a photo of him wearing an outfit she'd given him.
"Siegfried," the ailing woman shouted, giving her son a hug and showering him with kisses. It was a momentary reunion before she slipped back into the haze inflicted by Alzheimer's.
"It was nice that she recognized me after all these years," Bayliff said, acknowledging it eased some of the pain he'd carried over being put up for adoption.
What of dad?
Bayliff knows his birth father would be in his late 80s, if not older, assuming he hasn't passed away. Still, he wonders what he looks like, how his voice sounds, what kind of work he did.
An old photo in his album shows that Tim Bayliff carries a strong resemblance to his maternal grandfather, Gottlieb Dalke, yet he wonders if he retains any of the look of his birth father.
Then, there are the lingering wounds of having been given up for adoption.
"I know it's a long shot," he said of his quest to find his birth father, "but it's something I've got to do."
Contact the writer: rdevlin@republicanherald.com; 570-628-6007
