Are you my sister?

No need to answer that. I have a sister, and I know who she is.

However, my wife, Cece, has two half-sisters, and although she knows their names, she has never met nor communicated with them. It has been my goal for a long time to rectify that, and I began in earnest with my genealogical search begun in February, 2012.

It has been common knowledge that her half-sisters were named Alice La Rue and Phyllis, and they are the daughters from her father's first marriage to Evelyn Fields. But beyond that, little else was known. Their births in the early 1940s was assumed, but that was about all the information we knew. We had a picture of Alice La Rue as a young teen (or perhaps pre-teen). The picture was not dated.

Cece does have another sister named La Rue, which we've always thought was interesting that two daughters in the family shared a common name.

Through a number of searches and some first-person conversations with newly-discovered relatives, we managed to get a bit more information about the two half-sisters. Alice La Rue, born in 1940, was married to Donald Shelton, and had a son named Joel, born about 1975. She commonly went by the name La Rue and supposedly lived in Rising Sun, IN. Phyllis, born in 1941, married Jack Rogers, and we obtained a scan of her Student Identification Card for the Mt. Carmel High School (Illinois) 1955-1956 school year. The only other information we got was that her middle name was "Lee."

I tried a few Google searches and managed to find some references to Donald and Alice or La Rue Shelton, associated with a Joel Shelton, so it seems likely that these are the right folks. Then I stumbled across information that indicated that Donald Shelton died in 1996, and I confirmed that in SSDI. I also found an obituary for a sister, "Bobbie" Shelton Stinson, which named him as predeceasing her. I found genealogical records indicating his ancestors back several generations, but nothing that distinctly confirms a relationship with Alice La Rue. His grandfather, and another ancestor are named Joel, however.

I did find his burial location, and a headstone which include a space for La Rue, born June 9, 1940. This is some pretty convincing evidence that he is the right person. In the same cemetery are his grandparents, Joel and Myrta.

Additional searches for La Rue also hint at a surname of Brown, and an association with Paoli, Indiana, which contradicts the Rising Sun information. Yet, perhaps she is under our noses the whole time. A phone number is available, yet we are hesitant to try it, asking "Are you my sister?" We have some feelers out, and maybe someday we'll work up the nerve to make that call.

Phyllis' whereabouts are still a mystery.