My  Birth Mom---Beadie Coley Crook

Sweet are the memories I have of my short time span with my birth family. That of running and playing with my older brother and sister, Willard and Gladys and cousins, roaming the woods, wading the creeks, playing in the sawdust of a lumber mill, getting my granddad to give me a plug of his sweet chewing tobacco, tasting mom's snuff, YUK!!, My dear older brother Willard would make us younger kids toys to play with, like finding the biggest empty tin cans he could find and putting wire in them and we would walk on them like stilts.  My did we ever have fun without it costing anything money wise!  These were the days right after the depression and our family was very poor and uneducated, but doing the very best they could to make their family feel loved and provided for.  We didn't know we were poor, so we didn't miss anything we didn't have.  We had each other!  I remember gathering dandelion greens and wild onions out of our yard for mom to make us a salad with that she would pour hot grease over and my was it ever delicious!  I remember my birth mom, I was six years old at the time.  This is the mom that I hold so dear in my memory that sang songs and told us bedtime stories at night before we went to bed.  She dearly loved her family of five small children. Each child felt loved by her. This page is a memorial to her.Those days went by much too fast for me!.     

Then way back in May of 1941, when I was six years old, our mom, who was a young widow at this time, living with her father and five small children, had the greatest hurt a mother can ever have of having four of her children taken from her by the Sheriff and two deputies of Lafayette, TN. at 5:00 a m in the morning. My sister Gladys says she will remember that morning till her dying day hearing our mother begging and pleading with them not to take her babies from her.  The oldest child Willard, stayed with our mother and was not taken. He was twelve at the time. 

     This was during the time of the  "Black Market" of the babies, if you remember the story.  According to the report on this published in 1952 they would take two or three children out of the family so it would not look like they were after the baby. We had a brand-new baby boy, Edward in the family 13 days old at the time.  

     The oldest girl, Gladys,  was placed in a foster home and found our mother and

Willard at age 19. Together they, (Mom, Willard and Gladys) searched for years and years for the remaining three children but to no avail. Our mother never got to see her three youngest children, (Lorene, Lamon, and Edward)  again in her lifetime.  She died in 1968. Gladys kept right on searching.  After 42 years of separation, we all were finally reunited in 1983. See our Reunion page 

for giving me life on February 2, 1935, for loving me and providing for me for the first six years of my life. You have held and always will hold a special place in my  heart reserved just for you and the precious memories I hold dear of my first home and family. 

 I realize now it was not from any act of yours that I did not get to stay in the home where I felt so loved and secure and happy, but I realize  now that God had other plans for my life, when He allowed the changes and uprooting from my beloved family to where He placed me in my adoptive family.

It was a very traumatic time in my young life that I did not fully recover from until my birth family was returned to me 42 years later, minus my beloved little mom Beadie that my heart was yearning to see so much.  Enjoy your eternal rest with our Lord and Savior and look for your Lorene to join you soon.      

                                                                                      Lorene