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German man finds out genealogist is a relative

April 24, 2005 1:08 am

The plane landed three hours late.

But they were waiting for him, with smiles and cameras and four shiny helium balloons.

At 57, Harald Stoelting was finally coming home, to a family he'd never met.

Home, he'd learned over the years, wasn't just a place you lived. It was a place that grounded you, a place where your toes dug into the soil like roots and made you grow. Helped you thrive.

Harald never had that. But on a cool and rainy Saturday afternoon in April, he was about to find it.

After a dozen failed attempts to find his family and a weather-delayed flight from London to Washington, Harald walked into the embrace of cousins.

Into his history.

There were no tears. Only smiles and introductions and pictures.

And then a scurrying to baggage claim so they could get out of the airport and back to Stafford County where the journey would really begin.

On Oct. 8, 1947, less than two years after the Nazis were defeated, a young, unwed mother gave birth to a baby boy in war-weary Germany.

AnnaLisa Stoelting, unable to raise her child, turned baby Harald over to foster care.

Years later, AnnaLisa would tell Harald this much about his birth father: His name was James Clark. He was an African-American World War II veteran from Virginia, stationed briefly in Bremerhaven. During the mid-1940s, he'd lived with a sister on Early Street in Lynchburg.

It was little to go on.

No one in the U.S., it turned out, knew Harald Stoelting existed.

At 15, Harald wrote to his dad: Dear Mr. Clark, I want you to know I am your son.

He mailed the letter. No response came, but the envelope was never returned.

In 1980, Harald, by then a German merchant marine, was stationed briefly in Chesapeake. On a cold weekend in November, he hopped a Greyhound bus to Lynchburg and found Early Street. For hours, he asked every black person he saw if they knew James Clark.

No one did.

Over the years, Harald would contact the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Army, the Social Security Administration and the Federal Records Center.

But all responded the same way. Without a Social Security number, without a veteran's service number, they couldn't help him.

In Germany, Harald had faced discrimination, as one of thousands of offspring of black American servicemen and German mothers during World War II.

They were called "Brown Babies."

Harald's foster parents died before he turned 20. He never made inroads with his German family. There was no one to call brother or aunt or cousin.

Harald married in 1980 and had two children.

Still, he felt alone, an orphan without footing.

"I was flying," Harald explained, "and not steering."

In 1998 his marriage ended. He loved his wife, but he said he wasn't the husband he should've been.

In the aftermath, he backed off from his search.

"I decided to leave it for a couple of years."

Last year, he was ready to try again. With the help of a friend, Harald discovered the Virginia Genealogical Society's Web site. There, listed as an African-American genealogy researcher, was a Stafford County woman named Char McCargo Bah.

Maybe she would be his link.

His e-mail came on a late afternoon in mid-February 2004.

Char read his story and wondered if she should take on the case. So little information. And James Clark was a common name. What if she couldn't find his family? And what if she found them, and they wanted nothing to do with Harald?

"I didn't want to take him on and have him hurt again," she said.

In Char's more than 20 years of genealogical research, she'd seen it happen.

"Some are success stories," she said. "Some are not."

But Char was drawn to Harald. He shared her only daughter's Oct. 8 birthday. Both Harald and Char's daughter are social workers.

Char had a great-uncle named James Clark, also a World War II veteran.

Wouldn't it be funny, she joked, if they were related?

On a Friday last March--her day off from a government job in Washington--Char traveled to Richmond's Library of Virginia and asked for the 1937 to 1940 Lynchburg city directories.

Char found the rows of red, leather-bound books on the second floor, in the East Reading Room.

She flipped through the first three books. Pages of Clarks. Three James Clarks. None on Early Street.

On to 1940. There, on page 279, was a James Clark who lived at 801 Early St. A "C" by his name meant "colored." An "R" meant he rented.

Char was almost certain she'd found Harald's father. On a whim, she decided to look for her great-aunt, who lived in Lynchburg at the time.

Mary Clark Martin and her husband were on page 95. They also lived at 801 Early Street.

Char screamed. Harald's father and Char's great-uncle were the same person.

That made them cousins. And that meant Harald, at last, would know his family.

Later, at home in Stafford, Char started calling Harald. On the third or fourth try, a sleepy voice answered.

She hadn't realized it was 4:30 a.m. in Germany. Char identified herself and told him the news.

He began to cry.

The research came easily after Char made what genealogists call a "hit."

She got the numbers all those government agencies needed. For a year, she gathered pages and pages of documents and records and a handful of photographs.

James Clark had one other child, a daughter, who died in her teens. He made a career out of the military and worked as a cook, traveling all over the world. He married three times, and indeed, was stationed in Bremerhaven in 1947.

In old age, he'd suffered from diabetes and arthritis. He died in 1987.

The stories would come later, from folks who remembered a funny and exotic and sometimes secretive James Clark.

Now it was time for Char and Harald to meet.

A week into Harald's visit to America, it was time to travel to Halifax County near the North Carolina line and meet his extended family.

If he'd ever wondered what faith he belonged to, Char told him, he could put that question to rest.

"When you get down to Halifax, you will be Baptist."

Harald, at last, was putting down roots. In just a week, he'd met Char's brother and sister, great-aunts and -uncles and more cousins. A camera around his neck, he went to the Library of Virginia, where, in black and white, he saw his father's Early Street address.

He'd visited the World War II Memorial in Washington. He toured Alexandria's Black History Museum and the Civil War battlefield in Manassas.

Throughout Harald's life, he built an image of how he thought his father would be.

Harald connected with everything African-American. He read James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, studied slavery and and the Civil War and black culture.

On April 10, he attended a four-hour church service at Spanish Grove Baptist Church in Scottsburg, the place his father worshipped as a child and young man.

Ninety percent of the congregation was some close or distant relation to Harald. Those who'd known James Clark recognized his half-German son.

They were the same 5 feet, 6 inches tall. They shared white hair and a slightly receding hairline, the mouth and hand gestures and way of looking off into the distance.

One remembered that, like Harald, James Clark always carried a camera around his neck. He entertained nieces and nephews with "war stories" about flying bombs and near misses in Germany, even though he'd been there after the war and worked as a cook.

James Clark played loud gospel music on Sundays, a former neighbor told them.

After church, where relatives embraced their newfound cousin or nephew as if he'd never been absent, Harald went to his father's home place.

The house was gone, but an old tobacco barn still stood.

He took a stone and a twig from the land.

The next day was warm and clear in South Boston, just south of Halifax. Harald and Char and Char's husband, Mumini Bah, walked into Rosa Garden Cemetery.

Somewhere among the headstones and tiny metal funeral home plates lay James Clark.

They walked up and down rows of graves, looking for a plate hidden in the grass. Family members felt certain there was no headstone.

Fifteen minutes into their search, though, a headstone caught Char's eye. She recognized the World War II veteran engraving. Up close, she read the inscription.

James Clark, SP-5. January 10, 1900--May 7, 1987.

"At last, you are resting here," Harald thought. "We can communicate on a different level it is now through our big family."

Two days later, he laid a wreath on the grave. He plans to have a foot stone made on a return trip.

On Harald's flight back to his London home, he felt tranquil.

"I always needed crutches. I was walking with crutches. I think I can just put the crutches in the corner now."

He carried a hundred new photographs and three pages of phone numbers and addresses for his "big, huge, large, vast African-American family."

He felt excited about something else, his future.

While in Virginia, he reconnected with his ex-wife by phone. They'd talked for hours. Harald told her he thought he was finally a grown-up, a man ready to be a real husband.

She wanted to see him. He wanted to see her.

"I am rooted. Now I choose the direction. I am rooted now."

To reach KRISTIN DAVIS: 540/368-5028 kdavis@freelancestar.com