My mom has been telling me since I was a kid stories about how my grandparents got divorced and amazingly enough the court awarded custody to my grandfather. He was a hardworking lumberjack, and a drinker. He was also Irish Catholic. Now this happened in Massachusetts in the late 40's and my grandmother was a JW so I suppose that's why custody went that way.
Anyway, my mom was a baby. There was an older sister, and a brother. And as the story goes, in the middle of the night the local elders came and took them and my grandmother away and hid them at the Watchtower Farm in Pennsylvania. My grandmother worked there as a cook for a while. Their names were changed, papers and ID created and they moved to Florida where my mom grew up. For eighteen years until my mom was legally an adult, this was an open case. It was in the papers of which I did see old clippings. Originally, this story was told in the sense that they were rescued from the "Catholic court" that wanted to take them away from their mother and Jehovah. My mom feels now that her childhood and the right to know her father was stolen illegally by the Society. Due to her state of mind she dwells on this quite a lot. It was only after she was eighteen that she was reunited with her dad. My aunt, who is much older had found him earlier and convinced him to drop all charges and she would tell him where my mom was. So, in the end, family was brought back together, but you can never get the past back. I loved my grandfather. He always said I was his favorite- but I'm sure he said that to all of us. Who knows. He was a good man when I knew him. He had remarried and my step-grandmother was my third grandma. She made him happy, and "straightened him out". And when he died, we all went to the church for his funeral.
How could this have happened? Did this really happen with the approval of the Society? How did the authorities never find them? It amazes me.