I solved the shameful secret that has haunted my family for generations… clues stashed in a shoebox are easier to unravel now

Diana Troop was 11 when her mother, Elizabeth, showed her and her nine-year-old brother, Michael, a battered shoebox hidden in a closet.

She emptied the contents which consisted of a tiny note with the words, ‘Baby Vera,’ handwritten in ink, a faded newspaper clipping and a small gold ring.

But, before Elizabeth got the opportunity to explain what they were, the children’s grandmother stormed into the room, grabbed the items and hurriedly stashed them away.

It would be seven decades before Diana learned the shocking truth contained in that box.

Her mother had been abandoned as a baby. Rejected by her birth mother, she was then denied the story of her origin by her adoptive parents.

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Diana explains: ‘It became a forbidden topic. Neither Mom nor Grandma were ever comfortable discussing the fact that my mother had been adopted in circumstances that were clearly painful — and, unfortunately, shameful — to them both.’

The unhappiness that the mystery engendered cast a pall over both her mother’s youth and Diana’s own and ultimately inspired the San Diego mother-of-three to do what her Elizabeth never could – solve the mystery of her birth.

Looking back, Diana attributes much of her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and true intimacy to the fact that her own history was hidden from her.

Pictured: Elizabeth with her daughter, Diana, as a baby. Elizabeth had been abandoned as a newborn. Rejected by her birth mother, she was then denied the story of her origin by her adoptive parents.

 A cutting from a newspaper that covered the Tulare region of California. The June 1924 report focuses on the abandonment of a baby on a doorstep and the significant number of families who wanted to adopt the foundling.

‘We are sure it must have contributed to her addiction,’ she says. ‘She was unhappy because she didn’t know her biological roots and identity.’

Diana remembers her childhood home in Los Angeles, California as an unsafe and unstable place, where her mom would sometimes become violent towards their beloved father, William.

As a result, they were scared to the point where they stayed out of the house as often and as late as possible when they were kids.

On one occasion, Diana recalls, Elizabeth threw an iron at her husband’s head during an argument over her drinking.

‘He dodged it, but it hit the wall,’ Diana, now 80, says. ‘After that, we had a permanent hole in the wall to remind us of the terrible fight’

The marriage fell apart the year that Diana turned eight. She and Michael went to live with their father.

William moved them 120 miles south to San Diego and got remarried to a woman whom his young children adored.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth was in and out of institutions as her kids reached their tween and teenage years. The incident with the shoebox happened when the children were visiting their grandparents who cared for Elizabeth each time she’d been discharged from rehab.

They allowed her to stay in their spare room and only see the kids when she was sober. Diana believes that, had her grandmother not objected, Elizabeth would have told them about what they later discovered was her abandonment as a baby.

Heartbreakingly, Diana later learned, her mother only discovered she was adopted when, at the age of 13, she found that shoebox containing the fragments of her history.

Elizabeth had been found on the doorstep of a doctor’s house in Tulare, California, at a few weeks old on June 11, 1924. The handwritten note with her name — ‘Vera’ — was pinned to her clothes and the ring was placed nearby.

If Diana had been allowed to see the newspaper cutting, she’d have read that some 60 couples wanted to adopt Vera. The report said the law dictated that she couldn’t be formally adopted until a year had passed in case her birth mother came back to claim her.

She never did. Instead, the baby was adopted in 1925 by a childless couple, Frederick Heid, an attorney in Tulare, and his wife, Letha Bell, who changed her name from Vera to Elizabeth.

Diana would later learn that, after Elizabeth got over the initial shock of this discovery, she started to look for her birth parents, doing so in earnest after the death of her adoptive mother, in 1964.

Elizabeth went as far as hiring a private investigator who produced a few names, but his leads came to nothing.

Today, Diana is convinced her mother was scammed. ‘It upsets me to me that she got her hopes up, only for them to be dashed.’

Elizabeth, who had re-married twice after her divorce from William, gave up after that. She succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver and then throat cancer in 1971 at the age of just 47.

Pictured: Elizabeth as a young woman. Sadly, she became an alcoholic and often fought with the father of her two children, Diana and Michael. The couple divorced and the kids went to live with their dad in San Diego while Elizabeth sought help for her addiction.

According to Diana, her mother was sober and had become a more approachable person by then. ‘She was delighted to meet Michael’s son – her first grandchild – and doted on him.’

Sadly, Elizabeth went to her grave having not tracked down her biological parents. Meanwhile Diana’s life became busier as she juggled her career in health insurance with raising her children, now adults.

She put the thoughts of finding her biological grandmother to the back of her kind — until, seven years ago, she was persuaded by her daughter, Lisa, to take an at-home DNA test through Ancestry.com.

Diana recalls: ‘It seemed crazy not to take advantage of modern science and the ability to trace genes.’

But modern science didn’t offer the quick fix that Diana and Lisa, now 52, had hoped for. Ancestry.com led to the discovery of a handful of relatives but they were too far removed from Diana and Elizabeth to unlock the enduring mystery of her mother’s birth.

Then, in March 2024, Lisa, an accountant, found out about DNAngels, a non-profit staffed by volunteer genealogists who specialize in solving cold cases like Elizabeth’s.

It was just the charm they needed. The family’s volunteer, Tara Crawford, took less than a week to make progress.

Tara said: ‘I was fascinated by the complication of the abandonment and extremely motivated to help the Troops.’

She worked Diana’s DNA matches to find closer relatives and used their names to establish that Elizabeth’s mother could have been a woman called Mary Harriet Gordon.

Pictured: Diana Troop, 80, who solved the mystery of her mom’s abandonment with the help of her daughter, Lisa, 52, and a volunteer from the non-profit genealogy organization, DNAngels.

Pictured: Elizabeth (left) and her daughter, Diana, on Diana’s wedding day in 1965. The pair had reconciled to a degree because Elizabeth had become sober towards the end of her life. She died six years later of cancer.

Meanwhile she accessed 100-year-old news reports about abandoned babies in the Tulare area. She found two stories about a certain infant called ‘Vera’, dated June 1924. 

The articles told how Vera had been left on the doorstep of a respected doctor in the city. The publicity resulted in 60 families offering to adopting her. First, however, the authorities had to try and establish the identity of her biological parents.

They examined birth certificates in the county to find newborns called Vera delivered in the spring of 1924, unearthing paperwork for a child, Vera Constance, born on April 20, 1924. Her mother and father were listed as William Constance, 21, and his wife, Mary Harriet Gordon, 19.

Tara could barely contain her excitement — Mary Harriet Gordon had been one of the possible matches on Ancestry.com.

Next, she read a report in the same newspaper from October 1924. It said that Mary Harriet Constance, a resident of Salt Lake City, Utah had suddenly showed up in Tulare asking for information about the welfare of a baby born earlier in the year.

Word got around and she was summoned to the office of the county probation officer. The report merely said she ‘talked over the situation’ and promised to return the following day for a second meeting.

It implied she would have been given the chance to either claim Vera as her own or sign official adoption papers.

Sadly, the young woman didn’t come back and that was the last the authorities saw or heard of her.

Tara did more research on Ancestry.com and found an in-depth family history uploaded by relatives of Mary Harriet that included her photographs. She read that she’d gone on to lead a full life and nobody had known about baby Vera.

Pictured: Mary Harriet Constance Gordon. At the vulnerable age of 19, she felt compelled to abandon her newborn baby, whom she named Vera, on the doorstep of a doctor’s house in the city of Tulare.

But why did she abandon her child? That is a question that will never be fully answered. Perhaps the truth lies in the fact that, as Tara was also able to establish through Ancesty.com records on her paternal side, Elizabeth’s biological father had not been William Constance.

She had been conceived by Mary Harriet and a soldier called Allen McIlvain. It is not known if the couple had an affair or Mary Harriet was sexually assaulted.

‘It explained the shame around my mother’s existence back in the day,’ Diana says. ‘I feel so bad for my biological grandmother to have been in the position she was. It helps explain why she abandoned my mom.’

A year on, she says she feels that she, Lisa and Tara finally solved the mystery that cast a shadow over Elizabeth’s life and haunted three generations.

‘It feels like closure,’ she says. ‘I only wish Mom had known about this while she was alive.

‘If she’s looking down at us from above, I think she’d feel at peace at last.’

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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk