Joseph Wood: Judge abandoned in SHOEBOX as baby discovers identity of birth parents after 57 YEARS
A county judge in Arkansas, whose journey from a Chicago orphanage to his 2022 race for lieutenant governor was recently documented on Fox News, has reportedly found his birth parents.
Joseph Wood, who serves as county judge of Washington County, Arkansas, commemorated National Adoption Month in November by revealing his quest to find his biological parents. The Chicago native spent the first 10 years of his life moving from one foster home to another before he was eventually adopted. Nonetheless, he struggled throughout his youth with identity issues and always wanted to find out more about his origins. At one point, Wood discovered that his earlier record was a foundling certificate, which indicated he had been abandoned as an infant. He also learned that he was left in a shoebox in front of an apartment building on March 20, 1965, which he had always thought was his birthday, the Fox News reported.
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CeCe Moore, a renowned genealogist who specializes in cold cases, reached out to the judge on Thanksgiving after his story went viral. She told Fox News Digital that such cases are “very special because there is no way to resolve those cases through records.” She explained, “Even if you open up adoption records, it’s not going to help those people. So we call these DNA-only cases. The only way to identify the birth parents in cases like that is to have their DNA tested.”
After Wood agreed to accept Moore's help, she and a team of volunteer detectives worked day and night to build his family tree with his DNA information, hoping to find the answers before Christmas. “It’s always a race against time because you don’t know who might be passing away at any moment,” Moore said. “It’s always devastating when we find the family and somebody just died. We’re always rushing, but I will say, in this case, we were definitely rushing to get this information to him.”
Wood, who was elected as Arkansas’ first Black county judge and now serves as CEO for the county government, told Fox News that he and his family were preparing for the holidays when Moore called them on December 23 and revealed that her team had finally discovered a match. “We were trying to get our arms around what she just said,” Wood recalled.
Moore learned that Wood's mother had died in 1978 at age 36, while his father died in 2007 at age 68. Meanwhile, one of his brothers died in 2013 aged 48, and his maternal grandfather died in 2020 at 98. He reportedly has a remaining brother and sister and is trying to reach out to them. “I want to connect with my brother and sister first,” he said. “My dad was one of 10 or 11 brothers and sisters. My mother was one of six brothers and sisters, a number of whom are still alive. And so, I don’t want to start reaching out to uncles and aunts without trying to connect with my siblings first.”
Wood noted how the family tree built by Moore's firm was overwhelming. “This is a huge family tree, oh my gosh,” he remarked. “To go from zero, with not having a single person connected to you, to looking at your family tree going all the way back to like 1790, that’s just a huge, huge family."
He added, “I don’t know if I’ll ever have all the answers. Clearly, I won’t have some questions answered because my mother and father are not here to answer that. So everything I get will be through the eyes of my siblings and my uncles and aunts.”
For Wood, the most fascinating discovery of Moore's investigation was that his biological mother lived only a street away from where he was dropped off. “I’m just blown away that I got this far. I thought I would not know anything for the rest of my life,” he said.
It emerged that a Korean War veteran named Ceaser Johnson had found Wood in the shoebox in 1965. Wood was able to track him down and meet him. “I’m still wondering what could have been so horrific that I would be left in a box in the winter,” the judge wondered. He said Johnson told him his mother must have loved him a lot because she placed him where he could be easily found. That said, Wood is optimistic he will find out more about his family.