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Quest for Answers Unites Brother and Sister

by Jennifer Osborn

ELLSWORTH — Imagine finding out after 50 years as an only child that you had a sister.

Kevin Bland of Ellsworth doesn't have to imagine it.

Bland and his family spent last weekend in Litchfield, Ill., where they traveled to meet Bland's sister, Karin Butcher.

Bland and Butcher share a German mother, light blue eyes and a stubborn streak. Often, instead of replying “yes” to a question put to them, both are known to reply, ‘Is the Pope Catholic?'

The similarities were obvious the moment they met face to face.

The Blands arrived at the St. Louis International Airport, about an hour from Litchfield, late Thursday, Aug. 18. When Butcher first saw her brother in the airport terminal, she ran to him with open arms and tears streaming down her face, said Beth Bland, Kevin's wife and high school sweetheart.

“I was thinking, ‘he's so handsome,' Butcher said. “I told him, ‘you look just like a Kraut.'”

“I had a flood of emotions … when I first saw her, I could see a resemblance,” Bland said.

“If we were any more alike we'd have to be the same person,” said Butcher. “It's absolutely eerie.”

Bland first spoke to his sister July 11 while standing in the backyard of his youngest daughter, Becky Boudreau. He had wanted to talk to his newly found sister, but wasn't sure what to say. Finally, Boudreau dialed the number and handed the phone to her father.

When Butcher answered in her thick German accent, he said, “This is Kevin Bland. I think you and I have something in common.”

The search began last February, when Becky, the youngest of Kevin and Beth Bland's three grown children, asked her father if she could try to find his biological parents.

As to finding his biological parents, “I thought it'd be kind of neat to know,” Bland said. But “I didn't think it was going to happen.”

Kevin was born in Frankfort, Germany, in 1952. He was removed from an orphanage a month shy of his third birthday by a U.S. serviceman and his wife who would officially adopt him a year later.

Bland's adopted mother died in 1985. He is estranged from his adopted father.

Armed with her father's birth certificate, which listed his mother's name, Irmgard Anna Sophie Seidel, and Kevin's birth name, Siegfried Seidel, as well as a few adoption papers, Boudreau began scouring the Internet.

“It's my family, too,” Boudreau said. “I wanted to know.”

Boudreau began looking through Frankfort phone directories for the name Seidel.

“I started calling random people in Germany,” Boudreau said. Only knowing a phrase in German, she asked people on the other end whether they spoke English and whether they were related to Irmgard.

Eventually, Boudreau got the number of a town hall in Furth, where a particularly helpful registrar assisted in the search.

The registrar found that Irmgard had a daughter, Karin.

That's where the trail to Irmgard went cold. The family knows she moved to Frankfort, where Bland was born, as well as a daughter, Ingrid, who died at age 29.

Boudreau discovered Karin Butcher lived in Germany until she was 20 and had married a U.S. serviceman named Thomas B. Ressler. The couple had moved to the United States.

Searching the Web site, military.com, led Boudreau to the correct Thomas Wrestler, one of at least 100 listed on the Web site.

A phone conversation with Wrestler revealed that he and Karin were no longer married, but still were in contact through their children. Wrestler gave Boudreau a phone number for the couple's daughter, Birgit.

Boudreau called Birgit and explained three or four times, who she was and why she was calling. Birgit, in turn, called her mother, Karin Butcher, to tell her about the call — and her brother.

Butcher said she was cynical at first. Then she said she got goosebumps.

“I couldn't believe it,” Butcher said. “I was so excited.”

Brother and sister share the same views on life, religion and politics.

Recalling a conversation she had with her brother, Butcher said to him, “‘I know most of the people in your neck of the country are Democrats. You aren't are you? He said, ‘stifle yourself.'”

Bland, a Bangor Fire Department lieutenant, and his wife, Beth, a nurse, had planned to travel to Canada last weekend. Those plans were set aside to see Butcher.

Traveling with Bland and his wife were two of their three children: Becky, pregnant with the couple's fifth grandchild, and her two-year-old daughter, Jocelyn; and Rachel Downs and her daughter, Morgan. The couple has a son, Tim Bland, a Bar Harbor police officer.

Butcher's son and daughter traveled from Tennessee and Springfield, Ill., respectively, for the weekend.

“It was a lot of fun just sitting there talking,” Bland said. “It got pretty intense at times.”

As to Kevin and Karin's mother, the Blands had more information about her than Karin did.

“My parents divorced when I was very small,” Butcher said. She was raised by her father and stepmother.

German records state that the mother still is alive, Boudreau said. “She'd be 83 now,” Bland said.

Butcher said she keeps photos of Bland around her house, including by the telephone.

“Jack, my husband, thinks I've created a shrine,” Butcher said, laughing.

When asked how he felt meeting his sister, Bland said there is no way to describe it.

“It was like something in my life had been missing for so long,” said Bland, who e-mails his sister several times a day.

“I've got a whole new side of a family that I never knew I had,” he said. “It's pretty neat.”

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