Jenny West came all the way from Australia, Susan Lopez from Pacifica, Calif., to visit the

Jenny West came all the way from Australia, Susan Lopez from Pacifica, Calif., to visit the childhood home of their mothers and the city their great-grandfather, James A. Campbell, built into one of the nation's great steel-making centers.
Campbell helped to establish Youngstown Sheet & amp; Tube and was its president and a dominant presence in the U.S. steel industry for more than 25 years. The city of Campbell is named for him.
The women, first cousins, visited Youngstown, Campbell and Liberty earlier this month, researching Campbell family history, visiting the family homestead, and examining portraits of their ancestors at the Butler Institute of American Art and Campbell City Hall.
"I didn't find out I was adopted until three years ago. Can you imagine? Finding out at 57 that you aren't who you thought you were," said West, who was born and reared in London.
She discovered that she had been adopted after receiving a letter from the British government denying her a copy of her original birth certificate because, the letter stated, she had been adopted. By then, West's adoptive father had already died and her mother was suffering from dementia.
"I totally lost my identity. Who the hell am I? My mother could have been a prostitute. I thought she was English. I was stunned when I found out she was American. Then, I found out I came from this great family in the States," she said, eyes open wide, voice high-pitched and excited as if the news is still too incredulous for her to believe.
West is the daughter of Uretta Campbell, James A. Campbell's granddaughter.
Uretta was married and divorced twice before taking up with a man 12 years her junior, West explained.
From what she's learned, Uretta met Evan Tatum Powell in Jamaica about 1939.
The couple went to London a year or so later, and shortly thereafter Uretta gave birth to a baby girl, Patricia.
Uretta and Powell had not married and decided to send the baby to Jamaica to be brought up by her paternal grandparents, West said.
"Three years later, they had another baby. That was me," she continued. "They couldn't tell anyone they'd had another baby and still weren't married, so I had nannies."
After about six months, one of the nannies adopted Jenny.
Uretta and Powell split up when one of Uretta's friends from the United States came to visit. Powell took up with the woman's 19-year-old daughter and left Uretta to marry the girl, West explained.
Uretta eventually married an Australian geologist, West said, but had no more children.
West found her older sister, Patricia, living in South Africa.
As a child, West said, Patricia believed her mother was dead. But at age 21, she met Uretta in London and told West that their mother was a very chic, stylish and eccentric woman who wore a red pill box hat and two different colors of nail polish decades before decorated fingernails were the rage.
West never had the opportunity to meet Uretta. She died in Brighton, England, a few months before West learned she was adopted.
"I wish I could have gotten to meet her. I think I would have gotten on with her," she said.
West and Patricia have grown very close and have been surprised by how much alike they are.
One day while West was visiting her sister, they both showed up wearing the same outfits -- in different colors. Neither she nor Patricia knew they owned the same clothes and certainly didn't plan the coincidence, West mused.
West celebrated her birthday with her sister and as a surprise; Patricia's daughter presented her with Uretta's wedding ring. "And it fits perfectly -- of course we don't know which husband it was from," she said, chuckling. Patricia also gave her sister Uretta's diary.
Since learning that she was adopted, West has been seeking out all of the relatives she didn't know she had.
She found a cousin, Carol Casey White in California. White is Uretta's sister Louise's daughter.
Uretta and Louise were the children of James A. Campbell's only son, Louis.
Through White, West was put in touch with another of Louise's daughter's, Susan Lopez.
Lopez, who was also put up for adoption, and West have formed a bond, seeking and sharing information via the Internet as they uncover their common roots.
Louise, Uretta's younger sister, was a sportswoman who was good with horses and guns. Her life took a tragic turn when she shot and killed her mother, Cordelia, on Christmas Eve 1937.
According to news reports, Louise wanted to leave the family gathering but could not locate the keys to her car. So, she brought a gun inside and, in an attempt to get attention, began shooting at candles on the table.
Her mother tried to wrestle the gun from her, the reports state, but was struck in the abdomen when it discharged. Cordelia died a few hours later.
Louise was jailed briefly, but was cleared of all charges in time to attend the funeral.
Sometime after that, Louise moved west, Lopez said.
She married a man named Jack Casey, and they had four children, Lopez continued. Eventually, Louise and Casey divorced, and she and the children moved to Texas and then to an artists' and writers' colony near Santa Barbara, Calif.
The Bohemian community was known for its wild parties and what Lopez referred to as "an alternative subculture."
In an apparent attempt to shed her tragic past, Lopez said, Louise cast off luxuries, moving into a trailer with her children and working day-after-day casting adobe bricks that she planned to use to build her own home. After years of brick-making, the house still wasn't finished, and a fire destroyed what Louise and her children had accomplished.
In the meantime, Louise had become pregnant by a family friend, Robert McKee Hyde, a poet, Lopez said.
Hyde was married with five children and was supposedly very happy with his wife, she continued.
"It was an embarrassing situation. They were both older. Louise was 41, and he was 50 or 51. I don't think they really had an affair. It was more of an indiscretion."
So, Louise hid her pregnancy, even from her children, and when Susan was born, she was placed with a childless couple in San Diego.
"They were older too," Lopez said. "I think the doctor that made the arrangements did that on purpose."
Louise was already dead when Lopez started searching for her, about three years ago, but she succeeded in locating her nine half-siblings: four on her mother's side, five on her father's.
When Lopez contacted them and explained who she was, they were "stunned but not shocked," she said. "They said, 'Hmm. That explains a lot of things.'"
Although she has not met all of her siblings, Lopez said she does have a lot in common with many of them.
She is fluent in Spanish, teaches English as a second language and, like her father, writes poetry.
One of her brothers on her father's side is a retired professor of Spanish at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Lopez said, and two other siblings write poetry.
Lopez said there are also parallels between her life and her father's. "We both graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and we both studied Chinese while we were there."
Lopez said she also bears a striking physical resemblance to her father's other children.
Unlike West, Lopez has known that she was adopted since childhood but always assumed that her birth mother was an unwed teenager. She said she was surprised to learn that her great-grandfather "was a pillar of industry. You don't expect that your mother is an heiress."
She also recognizes similarities between her and her siblings on her mother's side, she said. "And my oldest sibling on the Campbell side lives on Lopez Island."
Referring to Uretta and Louise, Lopez said, "They were very wild. Rich and wild. Nothing on TV today has anything on them. I think both of them were very bright and interesting -- very unconventional people."
After visiting the Youngstown-Mahoning Public Library, Arms Museum, Butler Institute, Youngstown Center of Industry and Labor, Campbell City Hall and Elmcourt, the former Campbell estate in Liberty, West was off to Las Vegas to meet two more cousins; Lopez was headed back home to California.
West has a son who is a pilot and a daughter who is a writer/musician and just signed a recording contract. Lopez has one son, who is a college student in Washington state.
They are still searching for other distant relatives and are both planning trips to meet relatives they haven't yet seen.
kubik@vindy.com