Susan Kelly of Dublin, Ireland, is on a trans-Atlantic mission that could end in Temple.
Ms. Kelly is searching for a brother, Stanton Maurice Lout Jr., who was left as a baby by their father in a bar in Temple in the 1970s.
“I only recently found out about him,” said Ms. Kelly, who is trying to find more information but is not getting very far. “I keep running into dead ends.”
Ms. Kelly said she realizes that the story may seem sad to some, but is very important to her.
“A day does not pass when I do not think about my little brother - wondering if he is dead or alive,” she said. “I will never stop my search for him. He is in my heart and my thoughts. My heart aches for the truth. I have run into so many dead ends and I pray that someone out there may know what happened to him.”
She knows her brother was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1974 or 1975. According to Ms. Kelly’s father, Maurice Lout, he left the boy at the Foxy Box bar in Temple around 1976 or 1977.
The only other clues she has about her brother’s time in Temple is that there was a German woman named Johnnie or another woman named Texanna “who might know what happened to him.”
Lout mentioned a man at the bar named James Hill who could have information.
Ms. Kelly met her real father, Lout, “not too long ago.” He was dying of cancer and made a deathbed confession about the brother. Lout Sr. was born Jan. 25, 1933, and died in Chapel Hill, Tenn., on May 8, 2003. Ms. Kelly’s father was from Wills Point and worked on oil rigs.
Ms. Kelly was born in 1972 and raised with a brother, Johnny, and sister, Lorraine, in the Dallas area by an adopted family. They had been placed in an orphanage and were adopted together.
Their mother, who was born Shirley Ann Mcghee, also used White, Walker and Lout as surnames. She was born in Alabama - possibly Atmore - and gave birth to four other children, who were abandoned in Alabama, before moving to Texas where she met Lout. She then had another family - Susan and her two brothers and sister.
Mcghee later met a man named Walker and had two sons who she raised. Mcghee died in a nursing home in Gulfport, Miss., on Feb. 20, 2000.
Ms. Kelly has found all of the siblings except the one brother. “It took me a long time and a lot of money to track them all down,” she said.
One of those siblings is Elaine Knight, who lives just outside Jacksonville, Fla. Mrs. Knight grew up in South Florida, then spent 23 years in Mobile, where she moved when she was 15 years old.
She said she found out about Susan and the other siblings in 1994, but they only made contact last March. “She got in contact with me. I didn’t know where she was,” said Mrs. Knight, who added that she “didn’t even know what our mother looked like until a few months back.”
Still, the sisters are “desperate to find” the younger brother.
“We’ve gone about as far as we can,” Mrs. Knight said. “We don’t know if he was adopted or kidnapped. We don’t know what happened to him. We have nothing more we can go on.”
Mrs. Knight said that finding out some of the information about her mother has been disconcerting. Still, she looks at the positive side. “All I want to come out of this is to be able to physically meet and touch my brothers and sisters,” she said.
People with information on Stanton Maurice Lout Jr. may e-mail Ms. Kelly at susankelly72@hotmail.com.
