Man Finds Dad and Family

“On April 8, 2014, Jeff Purner started his day the same way he starts every morning. He sat in his home office, read from the Bible, then spent a few minutes worshipping God.

But that day, he had an overwhelming sense of what he was supposed to do.

He grabbed a folder that had sat untouched on his desk for a year and a half, opened it and typed “Lynn Patricia Smith” into a search engine.

Then, despite searching years earlier without results, he had a hit, an obituary. His birth mother had died in 2007.

Lynn Smith was in the chorus of “Brigadoon.” It was May 1968, and a young man named Al Deeb was the lead in the show at Sacred Heart Church in Troy.

They saw each other at rehearsals and, Al said, Lynn fell in love with him then.

The last night of the show, cast members piled into cars to head to a party. Lynn and Al ended up in the same car. “By coincidence,” Al said, “or maybe we planned it, I’m not sure.”

From then on, they were together.

When they found out Lynn was pregnant, the teenagers’ parents brought in a priest. “He said, ‘Al’s out of the picture, he doesn’t see Lynn again,’ ” Al recalled on a recent Sunday. “It was devastating.”

Al left for his freshman year of college and Lynn was sent to live with her aunt in Massachusetts.

But Al couldn’t forget the girl he loved. “I was pretty stubborn in those days,” he said.

By the holidays, Lynn’s parents had relented and invited him to join them on a visit to see her.

“We got to see each other finally,” he said, tears in his eyes.

Soon afterward, Al returned to the Troy area to attend Siena College and spent most Sundays making the trek with Lynn’s parents to see her in Massachusetts.

On April 7, 1969, Al got a phone call he said he’ll never forget. “It’s over. It’s a boy,” he was told. He broke down and cried.

Giving up the baby they named David was the plan from the get-go, he said. “It was a hard decision, but it was almost like the decision wasn’t really ours.”

A few weeks later, Lynn returned to high school. Lynn and Al, 17 and 18, respectively, went to her prom together and she graduated with her class.

They dated on and off for a few years. Then, in 1971, they were engaged. On Aug. 12, 1972, they were married.

They had nine more children, seven sons and two daughters. As those children grew, Al and Lynn never mentioned the brother who had come first.

Their romance survived his absence, or perhaps the loss drew them closer.

They were raised in Catholic families — Al’s is Lebanese, Lynn’s was German and Irish — but became born-again Christians in 1979.

And they prayed for David. They thought often of their son who was out in the world and they prayed that he, too, was close to God.

Jeff Purner was raised by Frank and Joan Purner in a Catholic family in Latham.

Jeff knew he and his brother, Jay, who is five years older, were adopted.

“There was never a time I didn’t know I was adopted,” he said.

He recalls a happy childhood, with family vacations, sporting events and a mom who made cupcakes for every occasion.

“I felt nothing but safe and loved — those are the two words I’d use to describe my childhood,” said Jay Purner, who runs a website optimization firm in Rotterdam.

Jeff, a national account manager for medical device company Medtronic, moved to Glens Falls in 2010. He married Nicole in 1993 and they had three children, Adair, 19, Hunter, 17, and Lily, 14.

About three years ago, at the encouragement of a friend, he started reading the Bible. “I read it once, then read it twice.”

In December 2013, Jeff was reading the New Testament and said, “Wow, we can’t be Catholic anymore.”

“I had a tremendous change of heart,” he said.

Nicole had tried to convince him earlier that year to attend Pine Knolls Alliance Church, an evangelical church in South Glens Falls.

“But I sat there like a petulant school child pouting,” Jeff said.

Jeff and Nicole asked their children what they wanted to do — continue Catholic education classes to be confirmed, or start attending Pine Knolls.

The family made the switch and was born again.

Jeff was preparing for his baptism when he was moved to search for his birth mother last spring.

“In all the years we prayed for him,” Al said of he and Lynn, “the focus of our prayers was that he would be a man after God’s heart.”

His journey to find his biological parents is filled with coincidences or, as Jeff and his family see it, evidence of God’s plan.

“God played a role in this,” Josiah Deeb said.

He crossed his biological parents’ paths several times.

He was raised a few miles away from the Deebs’ home in Wynantskill, briefly attended the high school his parents had and often visited the Elks Club where Al and Lynn were married.

As a child, he ate at Ted’s Fish Fry, where Al worked through college.

Al said in the years he worked at Ted’s, while he was still distraught over he and Lynn giving up their son, he would look at every little boy who came through the door and wonder. “I had no reason to think it, but I’d wonder if that could be him,” he said.

Years later, in the early 1990s, when Jeff was working for Queensbury politician Jerry Solomon, he discussed “Hillary Care” with an entrepreneur who was a Deeb cousin.

A few years ago, Al inspected a home three doors down from the Purners’ house for his business; Al and Lynn’s youngest daughter, Melissa, played softball a field away from where Adair played lacrosse; a substitute teacher Adair had throughout high school is a Deeb cousin the students affectionately referred to as “Deebs.”

“There are so many ironies,” Jeff said. “I was under their noses so many times.”

Jeff’s daughter Adair thinks the families wouldn’t have been ready for a reunion sooner.

“Looking back on it, I don’t think God thought we were ready,” Adair said. “Once we were better people with God, I think in that time, God knew we were ready to take on something this big.”

Al and several of his children think a lot about Lynn missing the meeting with her oldest son.

“You could say, ‘How come this didn’t happen when his mom was alive,’ but his parents were still alive,” Al said. “I think the way it happened is exactly right. We have to look at it that way, otherwise, God would have had it another way.”

When Jeff found his biological mother’s obituary, he saw she died seven years earlier, in 2007.

“Holy cow,” he remembered thinking. “I’m kind of sad.”

But that obituary revealed more about the woman who had given him up for adoption 45 years earlier than he was able to find before.

It said she had been married and was survived by a sister, a husband and several children.

Jeff called the sister, but it went to voicemail.

He remembered his adoptive father telling him his biological father was Lebanese and lived in the Troy area.

He looked at the obituary again and saw Smith’s married name was Deeb. “That sounds like it could be Lebanese,” Jeff said.

“And that is when my whole world turned upside down,” he recalled.

Jeff logged into Facebook and searched for the names of the woman’s surviving children. A photograph of seven young men, all smiling at the camera, arrested him.

They looked like him.

“I thought, ‘They’re my brothers,’ ” Jeff said, shaking his head with disbelief.

When Nicole came home from the gym and found him sitting there, he told her what he knew and that he suspected his father was a man named Al Deeb from Wynantskill.

“What are you going to do?” she asked him.

“I’m going to find him,” Jeff said. “I’m going down there.”

Jeff drove to Al Deeb’s house and knocked on the door, but no one answered. He drove around for a little while, then parked in front of the house and tried again. Still no answer.

His nerves high, his mind and heart racing, he tried to figure out his next move.

A quick Internet search revealed that Al Deeb was part-owner of Jack’s Drive-In, which was just around the corner.

Inside, a clerk yelled to Al, but a younger man came to the counter. Albert Deeb told Jeff that Alfred Deeb was a relative.

After a few frantic phone calls, Albert got Alfred Deeb on the phone.

The two men spoke for a minute, while Jeff waited. “I don’t know which way this could go,” he said, explaining the feeling of anticipation.

Albert handed him the phone.

“So you think you’re my son? What’s your mother’s name? What year were you born? Where?” the elder Al Deeb asked him.

Jeff answered each question.

Then, Al Deeb said, “Yes, and yesterday was your 45th birthday.”

Jeff said he couldn’t describe what he was feeling.

“I was totally overwhelmed,” he said.

Then, his father said, “I have to tell you, you have a lot of siblings.”

Al works in insurance with his son Brian. After hanging up the phone with Jeff, he walked into Brian’s office and asked if they could talk.

“I have to tell you something about your mother and my past,” Al said.

Brian joked, “I was thinking, ‘Sex, drugs and rock and roll?’ ”

Then, Al said, “Your mother and I had a child out of wedlock.”

“I was like, ‘Whoa’; I was kind of in shock,” said Brian, the oldest Deeb child.

Al told him the man was his full biological brother.

“That didn’t click that he was my full brother, it didn’t click until he said it,” Brian said. “It was surreal.” That night, all nine of Al and Lynn Deeb’s other children got on a conference call to discuss the news. They searched for Jeff online.

“Oh my, he’s just like us,” said Andrew-Paul, a medical student in Wisconsin and the sixth Deeb child.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, he is my brother,’ ” said Josiah, a North Greenbush police officer.

The next day, Jeff and Al agreed to meet at a diner.

When he saw Al, Jeff leaped from the car, leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine running.

They stood in the parking lot, hugging, Jeff recalls, choking up at the memory.

“From the beginning,” he said, “it was just so natural.”

Within days, Jeff and the Deeb children were communicating on Facebook. Jeff was driving home to Glens Falls from Binghamton, talking on the phone with Brian, when Brian asked him to stop at his house.

Jeff did. Meeting Brian was, he said, “surreal.”

They had a beer and talked. Soon, more Deeb siblings — Rachel, Melissa, Koury and Michael — came over.

“We sat and talked and keep saying, ‘We have the same mom and dad,’ ” Jeff said.

Rachel remembers how shocked she was by Jeff’s voice because it sounds like her brothers’.

“He looks like them, like us, sounds likes them — this is something that is real,” she recalled.

Later that week, Al and several of the Deeb siblings attended a lacrosse game in Albany to meet Jeff’s family.

“When my grandfather came,” recalled Adair Purner, “he was like, ‘This isn’t weird at all,’ and gave me a big hug and it was like I’d known him my entire life.”

By the weekend, Jeff and his family were going to dinner at the Deebs’ house, which has since become a weekly tradition.

The Purners dove right in, immersing themselves with the Deebs.

“If you would have walked into the room, you wouldn’t know who the new guy is,” Rachel said.

“It’s as if 45 years melted away in the blink of an eye,” Jeff said.

On a recent Sunday, as they do most weeks, a large group of Deebs and the Purners gathered at the home of Al Deeb and his wife, Roseann, whom he married in 2011.

Jokes were made, brothers wrestled, Melissa braided Lily’s hair.

When the meal was ready, the family gathered, joined hands in a large circle around the dining room and kitchen and Al — whom the grandkids call “Jiddou” — led the family in prayer, thanking God for all his blessings and for returning Jeff to them.

On the wall in the front foyer, opposite a piano that holds family photos of wedding days and a picture of Jeff and Nicole, hangs a verse from Psalms: “For the Lord is good and his love prevails forever.”

Over a Lebanese feast of kibbe, lubya, mishi, hubbis and zataar, the family chatted about work, children and health. They Facetimed Josiah, harassing him for not showing up for dinner.

After the meal, with grandkids playing and children visiting with Al’s 91-year-old mother, Lillian Deeb — “Sittou” to her grandchildren — Al tells his family’s story, marveling over how it all fell into place.

“Jeff is exactly who his mother would have wanted him to become — a man of faith, a man who loves his family,” Al said, his voice heavy with emotion. “Everything we could have wanted, we got with Jeff.”

“God has really blessed us,” he smiles.”

Man who was put up for adoption, finds biological family after his mother’s death[Post Star 4/4/15 by Rhonda Triller]

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