When Jim Marblestone was 10 years old, he found his adoption papers.

Until then he had thought his adopted parents were his biological ones.

That began a search that ended nearly a half-century later with the scattered pieces of a puzzle put together to form a picture of his dysfunctional life.

Horrors of childhood

Jim took the last name “Marblestone” from his ex-father-in-law, partly because he wanted to erase his adoptive last name. “My natural mother, Eleanor Searfoss, was raising five children on her own and without a job,” he said.

“She decided she couldn’t do it anymore so she gave me and my sister Billie Jo and my brother Raymond away for adoption, and my other two siblings, Laurel Ann and Richard were raised by my grandparents who lived in Ashfield.

“I was 3 years old at the time, but the adoption wasn’t finalized until three years later,” Marblestone said.

That was August 1966.

The adoptive children were split up and Jim was sent to live with a family in South Whitehall. Not long after his arrival, he would face the wrath of both his adoptive mother and her 17-year-old son.

Jim said the son attacked him with a chain saw, cutting his shoulder and fingers.

“On another day he fired a shotgun at me. Thank God he missed.”

Back in the ’60s, domestic violence often went unreported. Jim twice tried to run away, but was caught and brought back for more beatings.

“I guess they hated me because I wasn’t biologically one of them,” he said.

A Mother’s Day miracle

His adoptive father died in 1984. At age 25, Jim embarked on a mission to find his biological mother. On Mother’s Day in 1985, after six unsuccessful phone calls to members of the Searfoss family, Jim finally connected with Robert Searfoss, his mother’s estranged brother, who said that Eleanor was living somewhere in Lansford.

“I called the police department and they gave me her address, ” said Jim.

So on Mother’s Day, Jim drove to Lansford to find his mother, whom he had not seen in nearly 20 years.

He knocked on the door. “Come in,” said a raspy voice. Jim entered and found two women sitting in the living room.

“What do you want?” asked the raspy voice.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Jim said. One of the women turned her eyes toward him.

“Do you remember giving birth to a baby boy on April 11 in 1960?”

She glared back at him.

“Hello, Mom,” he said calmly.

Eleanor’s jaw dropped. “You’re not my Jimmy!” she shouted. She ran upstairs and returned with a picture of a 3-year-old boy.

“This is my Jimmy,” she said.

“I have the same picture at home,” Jim told her.

“Prove it,” she said.

He drove back to South Whitehall and returned to show her the identical picture.

They hugged and wept in each other’s arms. Jim then met his sister, Billie Jo, age 20, and his brother, Raymond, age 17.

“My grandmother saw me, too, and without anyone telling her who I was, she looked at me and she immediately knew I was her grandson.”

Dad and DNA

When he asked about his father, Jim’s newly found mother, who now lives in a Louisiana nursing home, said his dad was either James McDowell Ogden, or Eleanor’s husband at the time.

I wanted so much to know who my father was,” said Jim. “I lived a long time without the answer to this question. I even checked Billie Jo’s and Raymond’s birth certificates. There was no father listed in either one.”

Then in April of this year, the daughter of Jim’s fiancee, Sheila Valdez, gave him a DNA test kit for his birthday. The results came back stating that James McDowell Ogden was indeed Jim’s biological father. After 47 years, he finally had a rightful last name, but the story behind the man he now could call his father was going to send Jim on yet another painful journey of discovery.

James McDowell Ogden had fathered seven children with four women. He was married three times. When Sheila put Jim’s family information on Facebook, Katherine, born to Ogden’s second wife, was able to identify Jim as her half brother. Soon more connections were made with other siblings fathered by Ogden.

On this past Nov. 4, Jim met his half brother Randall and his half sisters Sharon and Katherine, all born from Ogden’s multiple marriages.

They had dinner together at the Heritage Restaurant in Telford.

“It was weird, but wonderful, too,” he said, “The room was filled with love and you could tell that we all looked alike. They showed me a picture of my father and I fell apart. I look a lot like him.”

To honor his last name

Jim’s father died in 1999 of complications from diabetes. Jim has lived with both anger and disappointment for never knowing his father, but he feels he may have actually met him.

“I was driving a truck from Bethlehem Steel and I often made deliveries to a warehouse in Telford. I found out my father had worked there. He might have actually signed off my deliveries right in front of me.”

His father lived in Quakertown for years, just 20 minutes away from him.

“And when I was a kid, my buddies and I would go to a baseball card store owned by my (half sister) Kathy’s mother, but of course, we never knew we were related.”

When asked what he would have said if he could have spoken with his father, Jim collected himself through his tears.

“ ‘Hello Dad,’ I would have said. Why didn’t you come and rescue me from my adopted family?”

The physical and emotional scars of his brutal childhood have taken their toll on Jim, who has five children of his own. He is a recovered alcoholic and drug addict.

“I love my kids to death,” he said. “After my first was born, I stopped drinking and drugging.”

He met Sheila on an online gaming site in 2009. During a snowy winter night, they had their first date at the Bowmanstown Diner.

“She’s helped me so much. In fact she was contacted by a woman named Tracy, who calls herself a Search Angel, and in her research into my family tree, Tracy discovered she herself was my cousin. There’s also a suggested possibility that Sheila’s DNA might have a remote connection with mine. What a small world it is.”

“Jim needs to feel complete,” said Sheila. “He found out who he is and it’s a means for him to move forward.”

Jim plans to take two more steps in his quest to validate himself.

“Gov. Wolf just signed a bill that will allow me to get my original birth certificate,” he said. “I doubt my father’s name is on it, but now I have my DNA to prove that I was born to Eleanor Searfoss on April 11th, 1960, in Allentown Hospital.”

He would like to legally change his last name from Marblestone to James McDowell Ogden Jr.

“My father lived a life that I’m certainly not proud of,” said Jim, now an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. “But the Bible says, ‘Honor thy mother and father, and so with the grace of God, I could bring honor and goodness to our name.”

“God works in mysterious ways,” said Sheila.

An act of redemption could restore further pride and self-respect in what would be Jim’s choice to have his third and final last name.

No one should disagree if he wants to take his time to make this important decision. After all, it took 47 years to reach this point.