'Gertie's Babies,' sold at birth, use DNA to recover past.

Byline: Kirk Johnson

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho -- Sue Docken's start in life in 1951, with a no-questions-asked cash adoption at the hands of a midwife, had strong elements of the crime scene that it was.

Her adoptive father was told to stay in the car and keep the motor running. His wife went into a nondescript office building in Butte, Montana, where she met with the midwife, Gertrude Pitkanen, and was handed the hours-old infant and the afterbirth, offered a peek through a curtain at the young mother lying in a bed, and told to leave. The afterbirth was thrown out the window on the drive home, Docken was later told by her adoptive parents, who paid $500 for her that day.

Docken is one of about two dozen people, mostly in the West, belonging to a self-styled club whose members call themselves "Gertie's Babies.'' More are believed to be out there, unknown perhaps even to themselves. Their lives are diverse, connected only by a common thread -- Pitkanen. Also sometimes known more grandly as Gertrude Pitkanen Van Orden, she delivered and sold babies, performed abortions and mostly evaded legal consequences in Butte from the 1920s through the 1950s. The secrets she left behind have fueled a search for origins and answers, in some cases lasting decades.

Now, some of the back stories of the Gertie's Babies have started to come to light through DNA-matching research sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com, to which people can send a cheek swab in hopes of finding a match with relatives who have also submitted a DNA sample. Tales have emerged of desperation, betrayal and secrets taken to the grave, but also of joy and newfound connection, like Heather Livergood's.

Livergood, 69, a retired secretary, lives on a tidy street in this northern Idaho community with her husband, Steve, also 69, in a home that smells of fresh coffee and muffins. She grew up loved, she said, no question about that -- the parents who bought her from Pitkanen in February 1946 could not have been better. But she was also haunted until last year by the fragments of the story she had: her father's memories, the day he bought her in a motel room for $100 and the mostly false birth certificate signed by Pitkanen that said her mother's name was Violet Wilson.

Through an Ancestry.com match last year, Livergood found a cousin, who combed family records and memories and found a Violet who had lived in Grantsville, Utah, about a 45-minute drive from Salt Lake City.

The rest of the story...