80 years ago her sister disappeared. Now she finally knows what happened
This Christmas was very special for Frances Turner Radwich of Greece.
A mystery has been solved. A disappearance has been explained. New connections have been made. Some closure has been reached.
Frances, who is 95, had spent nearly 80 years wondering what happened to her younger sister, Wyona.
When Frances was 15 and living in Rochester in 1942, Wyona, then 14, ran away from home, never to be seen by Frances again.
They had recently come to Rochester from their home in Steuben County. Life there had not been easy, as their mother had died when the girls, and their brother, Edwin, were all young. Their father soon remarried and had two more children.
Money was scarce; jobs were hard to find, so the family moved to Rochester so their father could find more work.
“We moved up here, and we were homesick,” Frances says. “We had lived out in the country. I know we both hated it in Rochester.”
Their father was not easy to live with, and, one night, he gave the girls a “whipping,” Frances says. The next day, Wyona didn’t come home from school.
“My dad claimed he notified the police department,” Frances recalls, “but during the war nobody cared. All I could think was, when she comes back, all hell is going to break loose.”
Wyona never came back. There was a phone call, a letter, and then silence.
“The communication stopped, and she never was head from her again,” says Frances’ daughter Robin Bordonaro of LeRoy.
And then, earlier this year and thanks to a DNA registry, a mystery was solved.
Robin had a new match on AncestryDNA. She reached out to the person, who turned out to be Wyona’s son, Phil Westheimer.
Thus, Robin had found a cousin she didn’t know she had. More importantly, she had made contact with someone who could shed light on what happened to Wyona after she left Rochester.
It turned out that Wyona had settled in New York City, changed her name from Wyona Turner to Toni Webster, inverting the first initials of her first and last name, Phil notes.
As Toni, his mother met a soldier, Edgar Westheimer. They married, and, in the early 1950s, moved to his hometown, Jackson, Michigan.
Wyona died almost seven years ago, in January 2016. “She was married for almost 60 years, had three kids and a loving family, everything she needed,” Phil says.
During this time, Frances Radwich married and raised six children, for a long time on her own. All the while she wondered, what had happened to Wyona.
“We never stopped looking,” Frances says. “But I always thought she had been murdered.”
The discovery of what happened to Wyona came too late for her and Frances to meet again. But on the weekend after Thanksgiving, Phil and his wife, Pansy, came to Greece from their home in Jackson.
“I got introduced to my aunt. It was one of those, odd eerie feelings,” Phil says. “As soon as I walked in, it was, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my mom, her mannerisms, the way she talked, moved her hands, the sarcasm. That’s my mom.’”
For Frances, it was love at first sight when she met Phil. “He was the most vivacious person,” she says. “It was like he was in the family forever.”
Phil and Pansy have 12 children, so Frances learned that her number of great nieces and nephews had significantly grown.
And it was especially comforting to learn of Wyona’s life, to know that after running away she found happiness.
“I can’t explain the feeling,” Frances says. “Well, it’s closing the books.”
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott, writes Remarkable Rochester, who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Frances Radwich finds missing sister Toni Westheimer after 80 years
