Former Detective Richard Brzozowski, 76, holds a photo of William Daugherty, the biological father he would spend decades tracking down. Photo by Dave Chan / The Globe and Mail
It’s a promising spring morning in Orleans, a suburban community east of Ottawa. Richard Brzozowski, tall, upright and fit at 76, walks through a park that is exploding with leaves and flowers.
A career police officer and detective in Ottawa and previously in Nottingham, England, this forensic expert has just solved his lifelong mystery.
His life.
They needed decades of diligence, a little luck, and in the end it all came down to … chopsticks.
But in the end, he knows who his father was and what happened to him.
He stands under a green maple and stretches out his long arms.
“It simply came to our notice then WHO he was.”
But as it turned out, it was what he was the one who made such a happy ending.
These elements, including the three chopsticks at the bottom right, would be important clues in Mr. Brzozowski about his father.
Mr. Brzozowski was born in Nottingham in the mid-summer of 1945. World War II was coming to an end, as was his mother’s unhappy marriage. Shortly after her birth, Elsie Rowland, the now divorced mother, placed her baby in a foster home, where she remained for seven long years. Elsie eventually remarried and her new husband, Tadeus Brzozowski, a Polish aviator who had stayed in England after the war, adopted Richard and gave the child his last name.
When Mr. Brzozowski reached adolescence, he learned that there was a brother, Graham, who was nine years older. They had never met.
He was an unhappy child, but grew up tall and strong and joined Nottingham Police, spending two of his five years as a detective deemed especially adept at solving complicated cases.
In 1970, Brzozowski and his wife and two children arrived in Montreal with the Empress of Canada. They came in with $ 240. Brzozowski lined up police work in Ottawa, where the recruitment of State Sergeant Kingsley (King) Ackland lent money to take the family until he could start work.
Mr. Brzozowski moved quickly through the ranks. Suddenly he joined the forensic unit for more than a decade as a police officer, then returned as a staff sergeant in charge of the unit. He completed a master’s degree in criminology from the University of Ottawa.
He and his first wife divorced. When he became interested in writing mysteries, he attended a workshop taught by Ottawa writer Anne Stephenson. They were married in 2000, the same year that Mr. Brzozowski retired from the rank of Detective Inspector.
“You couldn’t say he was a police officer without a uniform,” says Ian MacLeod, who covered the police beating for the Ottawa Citizen for many years.
And yet, without a uniform, Mr. Brzozowski was still the detective, trying to solve a mystery that sometimes seemed insoluble. His mother had died in 1967, carrying all the secrets he kept in his grave.
After living in Canada for more than a decade, Mr. Brzozowski returned to England and met his older brother Graham in Nottingham. It was not a pleasant visit. There was rage in the air. The old man handed the Canadian visitor a photograph of his mother with a man dressed in the uniform of an American soldier.
“This is your father,” a dry Graham told his little brother. “‘Uncle’ Richard visited his mother before you were born. You’re the bastard son of a Florida chicken farmer!”
“I will never forget those words,” says Mr. Brzozowski. “I was blown away. I always thought Graham and I had the same father.”
There were other photographs and more information. Her mother’s divorce, Graham said, was the result of her affair with this man in the photo. Mr. Brzozowski was left wondering if his father was really a chicken farmer who had fought in World War II.
The next day, he went to the Nottingham registry office and received a copy of his original birth certificate. His mother had registered his names as “Richard William”. But to his surprise, the last name listed was one he had never heard before: “Dugherty.”
He had a name for his father. He had a face. But it still had no history.
“I had spent my whole life policing,” says Richard Brzozowski at the end of his morning walk through the park. “I should have known the rest.”
It was the early eighties. There are no DNA records. Without internet. He began methodically picking up addresses from Richard and William Daughertys in Florida, where the “chicken farmer” had allegedly lived. He found 76 variations, wrote letters by mail to each of them, and waited. Many letters were returned unopened. Some replied, “You were wrong man,” but there is no hopeful answer.
Mr. Brzozowski maintained this research for two decades until DNA testing became widely available to the public. He quickly followed the new development, sending a sample of his own DNA to Ancestry.com and later to 23andMe.com. He received reports of possible second, third and fourth cousins, after a possible cousin, once eliminated. The younger man was not a Daugherty (the DNA link was through his mother) and did not live in Florida. Mr. Brzozowski tried to contact him in Texas several times, even writing to the man’s parents, but to no avail. He received no answers.
Both DNA websites provided family trees and Brzozowski eventually traced his inheritance to John Jack Daugherty, born in 1847 and father of 12 children, seven of them children. He found one of John Jack’s sons, James Oscar Daugherty, born in 1884 in Alabama. Could this be your grandfather?
Investigating meticulously, family members might obsessively say, Mr. Brzozowski found World War II enlistment records of James Oscar’s children, but there were no details on where the soldiers had been stationed. He needed one who had been in Nottingham during the fall and winter of 1944-45.
Then he was lucky. A letter from the burst of correspondence he had sent to possible connections with Daugherty brought a reply. Sara Kirchner, a young woman and distant cousin from Texas, told her that her own family history showed that James Oscar had four children, a girl and three boys, and thought that one of the boys, William Ray Daugherty, was “the most likely candidate to be my father “.
Unfortunately, William Ray Daugherty’s name had never appeared in the thousands of family tree searches conducted by Mr. Brzozowski. One of the three children had been too young for the war, the other much younger than the soldier in the photograph with Mr. Brzozowski’s mother. William Ray Daugherty was a possibility.
Kirchner knew that William Ray had become an optometrist in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and that he had flown a plane. He was known by several names: “William”, “Willie”, “Bill”, “Willie Ray” – and a 1942 enlistment was found for a young optometrist who was born in Gause, Texas, in 1909. age would be more or less correct.
“He’s not a Florida chicken farmer,” says Mr. Brzozowski, “even though he might have told my mother he was.”
Now convinced that his father could really be William Ray Daugherty, Mr. Brzozowski turned to Google last summer and found an optometry practice in Oklahoma City that had a website with a “About Us” section. The practice was purchased in 1979 from “Muskogee optometrist Dr. Bill Daugherty.”
Eureka! … Almost.
Gathering William Daugherty’s war record would become an important part of Mr. Daugherty’s investigation. Brzozowski.
In early September, Mr. Brzozowski drew up a detailed package containing what he knew so far, as well as a photograph of his mother and the soldier, and mailed it to the current operators of the optometry office. Ten days later, he received a reply from Dr. Jerry Coburn, the owner.
Regards Richard, I must say that your correspondence, which I received today, took me by surprise! Let me not find myself in the bush. Bill Daugherty is definitely your dad! You look a lot like him because of the photo you sent. I know he was in the Air Force during World War II and was actually a glider pilot!
An additional correspondence convinced Mr. Brzozowski that at last, at the age of 76, he was able to say, “I know who my father was.” But I still didn’t have absolute proof.
He then devoted his forensic talents to reviewing available military documents. In November 1943, several American glider units were transported from the European theater to the “Nottingham Forest area of England”.
He connected with an office of the National Association of World War II Glider Pilots, located in the Silent Wings Museum in Lubbock, Tex. The office confirmed that Flight Officer William R. Daugherty was a member of the 53rd Troop Transport Squadron. They had a photograph of the pilot, as well as the dates of their missions and decorations.
Mr Brzozowski now knew for sure that his father had been parked at Barkston Heath Field in Grantham, near Nottingham. He found a memoir of Steven C. Franklin, which said that the men stationed there were well treated. “When they didn’t want to,” Franklin wrote, “the men kept up with movies at the base theater, weekly Red Cross dances with the local girls.”
Brzozowski assumed that his mother had been a regular at the Palais de Danse in Nottingham. Her date of birth suggested that she would have become pregnant around November 1944. Her father received her transfer orders in March 1945 and left Nottingham in May.
“They’ve known each other for months,” he says. “It was not a one night stand.
“He must have known.”
An archive photo shows William Daugherty (in detail, and the eighth from the left in the back row) with his squadron at Barkston Heath.
What a flight officer William …