Val Wiltse spent more than 15 years searching for her brother
Curtiss Short, but it wasn’t her many phone calls that led to their
reunion. It wasn’t the private investigator Wiltse hired, either,
nor the attorney she was thinking about hiring.
HOLLISTER
Val Wiltse spent more than 15 years searching for her brother Curtiss Short, but it wasn’t her many phone calls that led to their reunion. It wasn’t the private investigator Wiltse hired, either, nor the attorney she was thinking about hiring.
In the end, Google brought together a brother and sister who had been separated for 25 years.
“It was a very surreal moment for me,” Wiltse said Friday.
Short and Wiltse, a 47-year-old Hollister resident, grew up together near San Diego. When Short was 12, he was struck by a car, leaving him mentally and physically disabled. He spent the next few years in different facilities, Wiltse said, and when he turned 21, their mother decided to turn over custody to the state.
At that point, Short disappeared from Wiltse’s life. Wiltse said she was around 20 years old at the time, and tracking down her brother wasn’t a big priority. But as she got older, those priorities changed.
“In 1991, when I had my children, it became a great desire to know where he was,” Wiltse said.
The search began with Wiltse’s mother, who could provide just a location Short had already left. Wiltse tried calling different facilities and agencies hoping to learn more, but each of them cited privacy law and said they couldn’t help. She even hired a private detective, but since Short didn’t have a job or pay taxes, the detective could confirm only that Wiltse’s older brother was still alive.
“There was no chain of record on him,” Wiltse said. “All of my attempts … resulted in doors closing.”
Despite the lack of success, Wiltse kept looking, on and off, for 15 years. Recently, she started thinking about hiring an attorney to pry the information from the state.
But the solution was much easier. While Wiltse was trying to create a family tree to give her sons for Christmas, she used Google to search for her grandfather – then she suddenly thought of searching for her brother, too. Sure enough, Wiltse found a 48-year-old Curtiss Short living in Baldwin Park.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is too coincidental,'” Wiltse said.
A few calls later, Wiltse was on the phone with her brother. And a few days later, she and her family drove down to Southern California to see him. It turned out that Wiltse’s desire for a reunion was mutual, because Short had been asking about his family, too.
Best of all, Wiltse brought Short to Hollister to spend Christmas with the family.
“Oh, it was grand,” Wiltse said. “My kids are older now, but when they were young, Christmas was very special, almost magical. Having Curtiss here brought back that magic.”
Despite his injuries, Wiltse said her brother has retained his “ornery” sense of humor and quickly became “one of the guys” with her husband and three sons. Short’s memory of life before the accident remains perfectly clear, and he often reminds her of incidents from their childhood.
Now, Wiltse wants to move her brother to Hollister or somewhere close. The local community seems to be very supportive of disabled people, she said, and San Benito County would be a great home for a horse lover like Short.
“Here in Ranch Community USA, he would be very much in his element,” Wiltse said. She noted that her family owns a horse, and added, “Between feeding the horse and feeding the dog, that’s what he did for a lot of his visit.”
