A smiling nurse brought a bundled baby to a new mother at Akron City Hospital on Thanksgiving Day 1939. “Here’s something to be mighty thankful for,” the nurse said cheerfully, presenting the 8-pound, 3-ounce girl in a soft blanket.
The 19-year-old mother, weary from labor, gazed proudly at her beautiful daughter before sadness overtook her. “Please, please take her away,” she said.
The young woman felt ashamed. She had no job, no training and no way to look after the girl. She and her former boyfriend had drifted apart after he lost his factory job, and she never did tell him that she was expecting their child. She decided it would be best to give up the baby.
Learning of the woman’s plight from her worried mother, the Beacon Journal published a story Nov. 25 headlined “Want Baby for Christmas?”
“There’s a blue-eyed, dark-haired baby girl at City Hospital, waiting for a home in which to spend her first Christmas,” reporter Mabel Norris wrote. “She is to be made a Christmas present to anyone who will take good care of her and love her a great deal.”
She nicknamed the baby “Miss Thanksgiving” in a series of articles that tugged at the heartstrings of readers. Dozens of prospective parents offered to adopt the infant, but it soon became clear that Christmas would arrive too soon for such a life-changing decision.
“I want my baby to have a good home,” the young mother said. “I have no way to take care of her, but I can’t just give her up to anyone.”
The 18-day-old girl named Andrea was transferred to the Florence Crittenton Home, a temporary residence for unwed mothers, where plans were made for her adoption. The birth mother signed away all rights.
“That is another point we must insist on in handling the adoption of children,” Helen Knight, executive secretary of the Family Service Society, explained in late 1939. “The home of the child must be kept absolutely secret so far as the mother is concerned, to avoid any future difficulties.
“Some day she may change her mind about wanting the child, and though it may seem cruel to keep it from her, it would be just as cruel to the child and the new parents to attempt to make adjustments then.”
In February 1940, Elizabeth Hitch and her husband, Vernon, a vice president of the Akron Chemical Co., welcomed a 3-month-old baby. They provided a loving home on Greenwood Avenue for their only child, a girl they renamed Nancy Hitch, and celebrated the February adoption with a holiday they called Nancy Day.
“It was like having two birthdays because they would celebrate in February and they would celebrate in November,” recalled Nancy Swearingen, 77, who resides today in Carefree, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix.
She always knew she was adopted, but never knew the circumstances. “I never asked,” she said. “I never thought about it.”
Swearingen has fond memories of Akron, calling it a wonderful place to grow up. She remembers catching the Delia Avenue bus as a girl and traveling downtown. “I would shop all day long,” she said. “I would look and look and look. Then I would take the bus home.”
She attended Rankin Elementary School, graduated from Old Trail School in 1957 and majored in education at Purdue, returning to Rankin to teach first grade. She met her husband, Skip, at the wedding of a childhood friend in Akron.
“We were the only two attendants in the wedding, so we had a lot of time to talk to each other,” she said.
They got married in 1965 and made their home in Indianapolis, where daughter Linda was born, before Skip Swearingen’s steel-industry job was transferred to Milwaukee, where son Doug was born. The family settled in Northbrook, Ill. After her husband’s retirement, Nancy and Skip moved to Arizona.
For more than 75 years, Swearingen never cared to learn the identities of her birth parents, even though her daughter Linda Oliverii occasionally pestered her about it.
“I was happy the way I was,” Swearingen said.
In 2015, however, she decided to try. She wrote to the Ohio Department of Health in Columbus, paid a $20 fee, received a copy of her birth certificate and learned the names of her birth parents along with her original name.
Oliverii put on her detective’s cap and began to fill in blanks. With phone calls and online research, she discovered the tale of “Miss Thanksgiving.”
“I was like a private investigator finding out all this information,” said Oliverii, 49, who lives in Libertyville, Ill.
Oliverii learned that Swearingen’s birth father died in the 1990s and her birth mother died in 2007. In a strange coincidence, both had moved to California. Oliverii found the courage to call the birth mother’s second husband and stepson on the West Coast, and found a cousin’s daughter in Mentor.
“Everybody’s very surprised because nobody knew that the birth mother had this baby,” she said.
The husband said his wife, who never had another child, volunteered for the last 15 years of her life at the Los Angeles Police Department. She always seemed to be doing research like she was searching for someone.
“He thought that she was looking for her cousin or something, but I’m sure that this is who she was looking for — although she never would have found her because the names were changed,” Oliverii said.
Last summer, Oliverii took her mother on a road trip to Akron, conducting library research and piecing together the past. Obviously, a lot has changed over the past 60 years.
“The downtown is so different than when I was going down there,” Swearingen said.
One of the highlights was visiting the long-lost cousin in Mentor and comparing life stories.
“We stopped to meet her, and that was fun to do,” Swearingen said.
Oliverii is glad to unearth family history to pass down to her children, Tommaso, 15, and Antonio, 12, and she knows her mother is pleased, too.
“I think she’s really happy to know all of this,” Oliverii said.
“Oh, my gosh, yes,” Swearingen agreed.
However, she does wish she’d tried years ago to find her birth mother.
“Unfortunately, she passed away in 2007,” Swearingen said. “I’m sorry that I didn’t think about it sooner.”
That young mother in 1939 wanted to find a good home for her baby. She’d be happy to know “Miss Thanksgiving” didn’t just find a good home.
She found a good life.
Beacon Journal copy editor Mark J. Price can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.