Carl Manger had just paid for soda pop and a newspaper in a Ricker’s gas station in Chesterfield. As Manger turned, a stranger stood in his way and asked, “Do you know any Hazelwoods?”

The stranger, Brad Scott, would later recall, “He just looked like my wife’s uncle. There was a family resemblance, around the face.”

Manger, 65, told the stranger that his name had once been Hazelwood, more than 50 years earlier, before he was adopted as a young boy from the Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s Home in Knightstown.

Manger grew up with his adopted family in Chesterfield, unaware for decades that he was within driving distance of other brothers he had all but forgotten.

Intrigued by the stranger’s question, Manger went with Brad and Cynthia Scott to their children’s Little League games.

There, Manger met two long-lost brothers, Melvin Hazelwood, living in south Anderson, and Paul Hazelwood, of Jonesboro in neighboring Grant County.

The family tree had more branches.

Manger found he was one of 15 children born to General Sherman Hazelwood. Some had been adopted; others had been sent to the children’s home as youngsters.

After five decades, Carl Manger was being reunited with siblings.

“It was just a relief in one way,” says Manger. “I’ve got a second family now. ... I thought I had a younger brother and sister down there in Knightstown with me, but I find out I had four brothers down there.”



A broken family

In the mid-1940s, Cordelia Faye Hazelwood, born in 1917, and her Union hero-named husband, General Sherman Hazelwood, nearly 39 years her elder, often spent a good part of their evenings in taverns near Austin, Ind., about 40 miles north of Louisville, Ky.

General Sherman Hazelwood had been a railroad worker who sold vegetables on a fruit route as he and his wife struggled to raise nine children.

One night in 1947, the two stopped at a bar and left their five sons in the car. Police were called. The husband and wife were taken to court, accused of neglect. They were told to clean up their lives or lose their children.

Within a week, they lost their nine children.

Welfare workers came to the Hazelwood home, a two-bedroom house where the children slept on mattresses, in surprising comfort, on the floor.

Caseworkers first came for the infant girl, Mary Lou. She was crying in her bassinet. Brother Melvin, 6, picked her up. She was pulled from his arms.

“It hurt real bad, but there was nothing I could do but give her up,” recalls Melvin, now 68.

The four girls were quickly adopted by families. However, the five boys were shipped to the children’s home in Knightstown.

Carl was at the home for six years, leaving when he was nine to be adopted in 1953 by Ralph and Margaret Manger of Chesterfield. Ralph Manger co-owned Forkner-Manger Lumber Co. on East 29th Street in Anderson.

Brothers Melvin, James and Paul were taken in by the Tatlock family in Salem, Ind. They kept their last names, a fateful move that may have helped Melvin find other siblings. If he had become a Tatlock, perhaps his nephew, while walking through a convenience store in 2009, would not have linked an unsuspecting Carl Manger to the Hazelwood name.

The fifth brother, George Alfred Hazelwood, was adopted. The remaining family members have no trace of him or whether Hazelwood is still his name.

They also cannot find Mary Lou, the crying infant taken from her brother’s grasp.



Knightstown wards

The financially-troubled Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Childrens’ Home in Knightstown was shuttered in 2009 after 144 years of taking in orphans and destitute children.

Founded in 1865 south of Knightstown, the home provided care and education for children of Civil War Union Army veterans. The state took control two years later.

General Sherman Hazelwood had served in the Army, so when he and his wife were found neglectful, their children were sent to Knightstown.

When it closed this year, students were sent to public schools.

Melvin would still like to find two long-lost relatives. He can be contacted at (765) 649-4544.

Though the Knighstown home is closed, its adoption records are being treated as anywhere else in Indiana.

People seeking adoptive relatives — when their parents have deceased, as in the Hazelwood case — can fill out a form available online that allows them to be placed on a state registry, says Mary Hinds with the Vital Records Division of the Department of Health.

“We get a lot more during the holidays,” Hinds says. “They start thinking about their son or daughter they gave away. Others want to find their parents and ask, like, why did you give me up?”

If the relative they seek has also applied — and there are 15,000 in the registry — then the process links them together.

But if a relative does not want to be found, chances are that he or she won’t be.



Resolving the past

Melvin Hazelwood refused to take the name of his adopted family.

At 17, he enlisted in the Army serving at Fort Knox, Ky.

He married his wife, Karen, in 1974, and worked 11 years at a Lawrence, Ind., sheet metal shop from which he retired. He worked various odd jobs including one as a cemetery gravedigger in Noblesville.

When he was in his early 20s, after the Army stint, he visited his birth parents living in Franklin, Ind. An older sister had kept tabs on the couple.

“We talked about trying to find the rest of the family, trying to get together,” says Melvin. “Mom and Dad couldn’t raise us so they put us in that home. ... They never did come up and see us, but I could see their point.”

Melvin stayed in touch with their parents up through their deaths. His father died in 1969 in Franklin.

His mother passed away in 1979 at Noblesville, where she moved after her husband’s death. She died when she rang a doorbell at a home and a shock went through her pacemaker, killing her.

She was buried in Oaklawn Cemetery.

By her son.

“I was working at Oaklawn at the time and I dug the hole,” Melvin says. “It wasn’t easy at all.”

Melvin is trying to stay close with his siblings. Now the hub of efforts to reunite the family, Melvin smiles when he thinks of finding Carl.

“It was a thrill to see him after all those years. I was tickled to death. I wish I could find George and Mary Lou before anything happens. Life is getting too short and I’d love to see them and I’m trying to find them.”

Contact Scott L. Miley at 648-4230 or scott.miley@heraldbulletin.com

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On sale now

A longer version of this story appears in the current issue of Madison magazine. Madison is available at local participating retailers and The Herald Bulletin, 1133 Jackson St., Anderson.

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Looking for more lost relatives

The Hazelwoods are still looking for two lost relatives, last known as George Alfred Hazelwood and Mary Lou Hazelwood. If anyone knows of either one, please call Melvin Hazelwood in Anderson at 649-4544.

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The Hazelwood Family

Father: General Sherman Hazelwood, 1878-1969. (His namesake, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, died in 1891.)

Mother: Cordelia Faye Hazelwood, 1917-1979.

Children and birth dates (Girls were adopted; boys were sent to Knightstown home):

-- Anna Marie, Aug. 17, 1934 (Now deceased)

-- Lelia Faye, Nov. 16, 1935 (Now deceased)

-- Alice May, Nov. 14, 1937

-- James Leland, Aug. 8, 1940

-- Melvin Lee, July 3, 1941

-- Paul Richard, June 8, 1942

-- Carl Fred, July 8, 1944

-- George Alfred, Feb. 22, 1945

-- Mary Lou, Feb. 27, 1947

Stillborn:

-- Pearl Louise, Nov. 26, 1932

-- Violet Leonna, July 23, 1933

Later, Sherman and Cordelia Hazelwood had four sons:

-- Sherman Edward, Dec. 3, 1953

-- Thomas Dale, March 14, 1957

-- Kenneth Ray, May 28, 1958

-- Walter Roscoe, June 8, 1962

Also, General Sherman Hazelwood had two children from a previous marriage:

-- Dwight Sherman, Dec. 9, year unknown

-- Lois, Aug. 28, year unknown