Bound for Paris, they stopped in the Loire Valley-adjacent town of Chateauroux, as Dolores went into labor. Their premature first-born daughter lived only a month, but they stayed on, and eventually bore three more daughters in Chateauroux. They faced the horrors of another war, enduring the German occupation of France, during part of which Rufino was interned in a concentration camp. Andrew ’s mother Mercedes was born in the early ‘40s, and, still in her teens, married Mike Markivich, an American of Polish descent stationed at the nearby U.S. Air Force base. Andrew arrived in 1959, his sister Linda the next year, and soon after they moved to Merced AFB in Northern California. The marriage was unhappy, however, and Mercedes returned to Chateauroux, where she soon wed another U.S. airman, David Lakey, who raised her children as his own. They were back living in the States again by the time Andrew was three. Just over a decade later, having survived two wars but perhaps not the emotional toll they’d taken, patriarch Rufino committed suicide.

Andrew hasn’t been back to Europe since early childhood, and personal memories of his French country home are fleeting and few. Now, happily married with two daughters of his

own, and on the cusp of a new phase in his creative life, Lakey is as determined to search out his family origins and living relations in Spain and France as he is to crossing new frontiers with his art. Quite remarkably, in January 2004, just as Lakey had seriously embarked on this personal quest–and on the very same day he was taping a television interview on the subject–he received a package from France, sent by a woman named Valerie. She had been doing some genealogical sleuthing of her own, and discovered that Mike Markivich was her father, and Andrew her half-brother. And, in an astonishing coincidence, Valerie – a noted choreographer – was born three years after Andrew , on the exact same birthday.

Deeply moved and motivated by the knowledge of his newly found sister–who he plans to meet soon–Lakey is redoubling his efforts towards reconnecting with his French roots, and finding, at long last, his lost family of Spain. Though much may have been lost to the passage of time and the flow of history, there is a broken line that can no doubt be made whole again through the inspired energy of Andrew Lakey.