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Woman seeks 1979 Mesa foster family
Tara Welch is looking for the Mesa foster family who gave her a cherished teddy bear in 1979. FOX 10's Nicole Krasean reports.
MESA, Ariz. - A stuffed teddy bear is sending a California woman on a mission to connect with an Arizona family she says helped change her life for the better nearly 50 years ago.
Tara Welch is searching for the Mesa foster family that gave her a stuffed bear named Beary in 1979 after she was brought from Ohio to Arizona.
The backstory:
"I didn't have the worst of childhoods, but it wasn't easy at all and Beary was there for me," said Tara Welch, who has been searching for a Mesa foster family from 1979.
"My dad took us for six months, so he basically kidnapped us in '78. There were three of us. I'm the middle child, and we went across the country from Ohio to Arizona," Welch said.
Welch says police eventually got involved, and her father was arrested, but cross-country travel was not as easy then as it is now, so her mother was not immediately able to come get the three siblings.
"They put us, unfortunately, in different foster homes and the foster home that I went to, the mother and father had a very nice little girl and I remember they took excellent care of me," Welch said.
Tara Welch is searching for the Mesa foster family that gave her a stuffed bear named Beary in 1979 after she was brought from Ohio to Arizona.
Tara meets Beary:
Welch says she only spent a few days with the family, but when she left their care, they gave her a gift: a stuffed bear.
"Hence why and how I got Beary. Beary has remained with me through my entire childhood, through my entire adulthood, through life's ups and downs," Welch said.
Now, Welch is on a mission to find this family, who lived in the Royal Palms Village in Mesa in the spring of 1979.
She says her and her brother went to a school owned by Virginia Mohler, who is a retired teacher and now a children's author.
Dig deeper:
As for her own story, she says looking at Beary brings up a lot of emotions and symbolism from her life.
"I see a lot of pain, but I also see a lot of perseverance and strength that has come from that," Welch said.
Also coming from that gesture is a lifelong lesson that one act of kindness can stay with a person forever.
"Especially in today's world, you have no idea what one small little impact, you might consider small, could be huge and monumental to someone else," Welch said.
The Source: Information in this report was gathered from Tara Welch, a woman searching for a Mesa foster family from 1979; and law enforcement involvement mentioned in the transcript.