They Are Family

Gail Taylor thought she was prepared to make the call to her long-lost sister, Evelyn Granit of Dover Township.

After searching for years, she finally had a telephone number and was ready to make contact.

"I had written everything down, exactly the way I was going to introduce myself," Taylor said from her home in Toronto, "calmly, in an easy manner.

"Instead, when she answered the phone, I just blurted out the name of our birth mother and told her I was her sister," Taylor said. "We both started crying."

It had been 50 years since they had seen or heard from each other. Their home, in Long Branch, had been broken because their parents were ruled unfit.

"We were all brought to the Family and Children Society in Long Branch," Granit said.

She was about 13 years old. Gail, whose name was Edith at the time, was 2, and sister Judy, then known as Pat, was 3.

The two younger girls were soon adopted by the Taylor family of Maplewood.

"My sister Gail always wanted to know about her older sister," said Judy Taylor, now 53.

Little by little, Gail Taylor started gathering information from her adopted father about her background.

It was Jun 2 when she made the first call. On June 3, Judy Taylor called Granit, and the following weekend all three got together, along with a fourth sister, Betty Yasson of Point Pleasant.

"Betty and I had both been in foster homes and made our own way," Granit said. Yasson was about 10 when the family was broken up.

"I always wondered about my other sisters," Granit said. "I just never knew how to go about finding them."

But Gail Taylor was driven to find out.

Edith Maracle's death gave the sisters a chance to search newspapers for an obituary.

"Madeline Morris of Whiting was part of an adoption search site called Search Angels," Judy Taylor said. "She helped Gail by searching through the libraries of different newspapers in New Jersey in search of the obituary.

When they found it, it had Granit's and Yasson's names and home towns. From there it was just a matter of looking in the phone book.

"She knew our mother's first name was Edith. She did a search throughout the United States for people with that first name born at about the time my mother was born," said Judy Taylor, of Ashland, Ohio, who is spending this week in Dover Township with Granit.

"I couldn't help but cry," Granit said about the reunion. "I knew that they were so young that they might not even remember me. But I always thought about them."

Her mother, a full-blooded American Indian, had remarried - to James Stophel, who fathered three other daughters, Judy and Gail Taylor and a younger sister, Margaret, who was 6 months old when the courts took the children away from the parents in Long Branch.

"We're still looking for Margaret," Gail Taylor said.

Granit stayed in Long Branch until 1973, moved to Point Pleasant and finally to Holiday City in Toms River five years ago. She had five children, 11 grandchildren, and even allowed her mother in their lives late in her life.

Judy Taylor eventually ended up in Ohio, while Gail Taylor went back to her family's reservation outside Toronto to begin trying to understand her roots.

"It's just wonderful to have my family again," Granit said. "Even my former husband was happy when he got the news we were together again."

*Joe Adelizzi: (732) 557-5735