TATTOO OF A STORK LEADS TO HIS LOST DAUGHTER

This story begins at the end.

George and Lois had been trying to make their marriage work for five long years, but they were tired. The arguments, mostly over money, had become too much to bear. They had married too young, they figured, and now, both wanted out. So, in 1962, they went their separate ways.

Still quite young—in their early twenties—they both needed a fresh start. George Jensen left Kansas to make his way in the world, and he eventually wound up in Vallejo, California. He remarried, built a new life, and for a long time, everything was good again. But then, he could never have anticipated the incredible twist that was yet to come.

Early this year, George noticed a lump in the muscle by his shoulder. It was innocuous at first, but it kept getting larger. The other day, his wife grew concerned and told him, “You’d better not put this off any longer.” She took him to a clinic in Vallejo—The Family Doctor Medical Group on Broadway.

A medical assistant named Allison Forcia was the first to examine him. Allison instructed George to take off his shirt, which he did. She was about to read his blood pressure when she noticed something she had never seen, nor ever imagined she would see.

You see, Allison isn’t a medical doctor, but she didn’t have to be to identify what she saw on George Jensen’s chest. Her spontaneous diagnosis affected her so profoundly that she had to leave the room. Right there in the middle of the examination, without a word, she just got up and walked out.

Naturally, George grew worried. The woman who had been examining him had said nothing, yet it was clear that something was terribly wrong. Finally, Allison returned. Perhaps she had jumped to the wrong conclusion, she thought, but there was something Mr. Jensen really ought to know. It was then that she told him.

George left the clinic in tears, but he is all right now. The lump in his shoulder muscle was just a cyst; it was drained, and it is gone. But what had so unnerved the medical assistant, Allison Forcia, was a pair of faded green tattoos on George Jensen’s chest: a pair of storks, beneath which were inscribed the names George Jr. and Edie Joe.

You see, when George and Lois had split up in 1962, they had concluded that neither had the means to support their two small children, George Jr. and Edith Josephine— “Edie Joe” for short. With heavy hearts, they had put their youngsters up for adoption and had lost track of them completely and intentionally. They would not seek to interfere with their children’s new lives.

But George Jensen would keep a remembrance of the son and daughter he had lost—literally, close to his heart. He never imagined he would be reunited with them.

Yet this very summer, he was. Because a medical assistant had recognized the names inscribed in those two faded green tattoos, and she recognized one of them as her own. For the birth name of Allison Forcia, the name she had before she was adopted, was Edith Josephine. And her daddy had always called her Edie Joe.

That’s right. Allison is George Jensen’s daughter—lost, and now found.

And now you know the rest of the story.