
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 4, 1992                   TAG: 9203040148
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium

WOMAN, HOMELESS TWIN REUNITED AFTER 35 YEARS

Thirty-five years after they were adopted as infants by different families, a homeless Massachusetts man and the twin sister he didn't know existed have been reunited.

"I feel like a void has been filled," Peter LaLonde said after he stepped off a bus Monday in Charlottesville to meet Claudia Lam.

"I had always felt that something was missing in my life," Lam said. "I didn't know what it was, but I knew something wasn't right."

Lam, of Fort Defiance in Augusta County, ended a four-year search Saturday night when the phone rang and she heard LaLonde's voice.

"We could have cried a bucket," she said.

Lam had traced LaLonde to a Cambridge, Mass., homeless shelter, and eventually to a residence where he checked in for messages while he was living under a bridge.

Lam's search started four years ago when she contacted an adoption agency in Burlington, Vt., and learned she had been separated from a twin brother in infancy.

Lam spent the next four years calling agencies and police departments.

She said her search was given greater urgency by a need to relay medical information about her congenital heart disease.

A year and a half after a stroke prompted her to request that adoption records be opened, Lam received a letter two weeks ago revealing her brother's name.

She would not say where the letter originated but it included a 35-year-old address and that was enough.

"I started in on all the states in New England and Canada and just kept going," she said.

Within 24 hours, she said, she found her brother's adoptive parents.

Eventually, Lam traced LaLonde to the Cambridge shelter, and on Friday she traced him from there to a friend's residence. LaLonde wasn't there but found out about Lam's quest when he checked in for messages, she said.

Lam said LaLonde had lost a job as a chef in December.

LaLonde called his sister, who wired money for a bus trip to Virginia. He arrived with "just the shirt on his back," Lam said.

Lam said she would like to meet their biological mother.

"All I know is that her name at the time was Redinger and she gave up two sick twins, named Darryl and Darlene, who were born August 31st, 1956," she said.

"The only other thing I know about her is that she gave us up out of love."

by CNB