NEW YORKER HEALS FAMILY CIRCLE, FINDS HER NAVAJO ROOTS.

Byline: Royal Ford The Boston Globe

She crossed the sidewalk before the fine hotel with a nervous grace, but because she also was crossing all 43 years of her life, the grace turned to a shuddering joy as she hugged the sister she thought she would never see.

Yvette Silverman Melanson, out of Palmyra, Maine, clutched Lora Chee, just in from Page, Ariz., as quizzical New Yorkers paused on the sidewalk to marvel.

Chee was clutching the person she knew only as the sister stolen from their Navajo family, along with a twin brother, in 1953. To Chee, this was the missing child, Minnibob Monrow.

``I was so afraid to come here alone,'' Chee said after they had retreated to their hotel room in the Essex House, bordering Central Park. ``But then I thought, this is my sister and she has been traveling alone all these years.''

``Welcome to my hometown,'' Melanson told her, a reference to her upbringing in Brooklyn as the adopted daughter of wealthy Jewish parents.

Friday night's meeting was a nervous reunion that has loomed since a month ago, when Melanson used the computer in her Maine farmhouse to reach an electronic bulletin board in the Southwest where, unknown to her, her family had posted a notice saying it was looking for its lost twins.

Chee said that Melanson and her twin brother, born in a hogan on Navajo lands, had been taken away by a public health nurse, never to be seen again.

The spiriting away of Indian children from their families was common in the 1950s and into the 1970s, said advocates who have acted on behalf of missing Indian children.

Melanson's story of her ``disappearing'' was a dramatic one.

She was adopted by a family in Brooklyn. She grew up an only child, spent winters at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami and lived for a time in Israel, even standing guard as a military volunteer at her kibbutz.

Melanson did two stints in the Navy - the family's wealth going to her late father's second wife - and then began a search for her own roots.

She found them on the electronic highway.

And when New Englanders read her story in the Globe on Thursday, expressions of admiration and offers of help - some with motive, others from the heart - poured in.

NBC television flew Melanson and her sister to New York for this weekend's reunion - and an appearance Saturday on ``Saturday Today.''

In Newton, Mass., Mia Abbott, who traces her own origins to a small Greek town where she was given up for adoption on a decision of the mayor, got on the telephone to help.

``What motivated me was my heart,'' said Abbott, who called travel agents looking for one who would provide tickets so Melanson could fly to meet her family in Arizona.

She found one in Karen Murphy, the owner and manager of Travel Agents International of Woburn.

``I come from a big family, a close family, and I only thought of how sad it would be to lose that,'' Murphy said.

``Look, it's not going to cost me a lot of money to make somebody happy,'' she said of the tickets her agency will provide.

The trip to New York this weekend, and the ticket that will later take her to Arizona, will reunite Melanson with a family she feared was lost forever.

After Chee told her she had a twin brother, she remembered a boy who used to appear with his own family at the Fontainebleau when the Silvermans were there.

They became friends, joked to other guests that they were brother and sister - and, Melanson realizes now, may very well have been just that.

There was never a secret in her family about her being adopted, Melanson said. But once she was old enough to start asking questions about her roots, visits with the boy and his family were abruptly and permanently terminated.

The questions of her origin, she said, have always lingered. And it was only on the night she typed the word ``adoption'' into her computer, looking for a site on the electronic Web, that she neared an answer.

There is, on the Web, a site for ``Lost Birds,'' children taken from Indian families decades ago and given to whites to raise.

She was connected with Chee, and after telling Chee of a scrap of paper handed down in her family - bearing the names Yazzi and Betty Jackson - the two realized they were sisters. Yazzi is their father, a medicine man still living in Arizona, and Betty Jackson was the maiden name of their late mother.

The connection was confirmed.

Now, this self-proclaimed ``loud New Yorker, Jewish to the core,'' worries about how she will be received in her native land.

``I'm just not sure how I should behave,'' she said. ``My culture is so different.''

Chee assured her Friday night that life among her Arizona relatives cannot be any more perplexing than life in New York City.

``This is so big, and everyone is in so much of a hurry,'' Chee said. ``My cab driver almost hit 20 people just coming in from the airport.''

Friday night, as New York life hummed and honked outside, the two sisters said they would stay in their hotel room and talk of the lives they must reconstruct.

Melanson recalled that she was given to her adoptive parents in a room at the Fontainebleau and a family circle was broken.

Friday night, in a warm and colorful room at the Essex House, she went back to her birth family, and the sisters moved to be sure the circle would now be unbroken.

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Photo

Photo: Yvette Silverman Melanson had been searching for her birth family for decades when she found that they had been looking for her, too.

The New York Times