'We found her this time'

McALLEN — A Harlingen woman helped reunite two old friends who last saw each other 50 years ago on another continent.

"She was surprised that I had finally found her" Stevenson said about her friend, Virginia Earlynn White, now Virginia Earlynn Vitasek.

As a young bride, Stevenson had gone to Germany, following her soldier husband who ended up physically abusing her.

She left him and the military police asked Vitasek to house Stevenson until she could get transportation back to the United States.

Stevenson has been grateful since.

"I did not know she thought that much of me, I kind of thought we were supporting each other, not just me supporting her," Vitasek said with a laugh over a phone interview from her native Irving, Texas.

GOOGLE SEARCH

Stevenson’s search for Vitasek was featured in a Nov. 2 story in The Monitor.

Rebecca Rentería of Harlingen decided to see if she could reunite the missing friends.

Rentería, a member of the Tip O’Texas Genealogical Society, had no luck using her normal search tools for families’ history.

"Since I thought she might have remarried because the story says she had (marital) problems of her own, I decided to Google the first two names between quotations marks, because those were not common," Renteria said .

"I found a match, they were not the exact names, but I realized that she could be now a Vitasek," Renteria said.

Renteria then went to the White Pages and looked for Vitasek children. There where not many Vitaseks in Texas. She called Stephen Vitasek and explained what she was doing. Rentenria read The Monitor’s article over the phone to the man, who gave Renteria his mother’s e-mail.

"I’m glad he remembered it (my e-mail), because my oldest son hasn’t spoken to me in the last four years," Vitasek said.

Rentería e-mailed Vitasek attaching a link to the article and let the ball roll. Soon after that Vitasek e-mail her lost friend.

"I had been looking for her too, but with no success like this time" Vitasek said Friday.

Virginia Earlynn White (Vitasek), originally from Irving, came to McAllen in 1953 with her family. She attended Lamar Middle School for seventh and eighth grades. She attended McAllen High School for one year in 1956 and worked for a while in Faulkner Drugs.

Then she left McAllen after getting married. Once back from Germany, she return to McAllen for a while to be with her family. Remarried and divorced for the third time she lives know in Irving, and will meet with her long lost friend in the following weeks in Deer Park, TX where Stevenson lives.

"We do plan on meeting soon and we’ll get caught up on some of our missed years" Stevenson wrote in an e-mail.