Donna Sowards and her two youngest children are among the growing number of Charlotte families who need jobs, homes and hope.

So while the kids are in school each day, Sowards takes her place among the hundreds of other desperate people who spend five or six hours each day at the Main Library uptown.

Jobless, homeless, newcomers, the elderly ... all of them looking for a new life or running from an old one.

It's become a second home for Sowards, who couples her search for jobs with an obsession to find something she lost at age 17: a son, given up for adoption at her mother's command.

He'd be 30 now.

"I don't even know if he's still alive," says Sowards, 47, who lives for now at Hope Haven, a program for homeless people fighting addictions. In her case, it was both drugs and alcohol.

"I held my son for exactly five minutes before they took him away as I screamed and cried, and I've been looking for him ever since."

It's not the biggest problem in her life, but like thousands of other homeless people in Charlotte, Sowards believes the climb back up the ladder starts with small steps.

It's 9:30 a.m. on a Friday, and Sowards is crammed against the front door of the Main Library, jostling against 60 other people who want her place in line.

"Once these doors open, it will be crazy," she said. "They'll run you down trying to get up the stairs."

Sure enough, when the doors are unlocked, it's like a Black Friday sale, with four dozen adults racing up the stairs to a room with less than three dozen computers.

That's why the library limits times on the computers, and why Sowards is here five hours a day, hopping on and off computers as library schedules permit.

Within minutes, she's checked Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ancestry.com and a half dozen other sites, seeing if any inquiries produced hits.

No luck. She begins typing again, pounding out more copies of the same note she's been emailing since her sobriety took hold last fall.

"Looking for my son, born 8/6/1981, Columbus, Ohio, adopted out. Mother was 17, Donna Jean Marie Hawkins. Born at St. Ann's Hospital. If you are him, can you please email me?"

It was an adoption that Sowards says was engineered by her disapproving mother, who didn't want friends knowing her underage, unwed daughter had given birth to a child.

Sowards was in the eighth grade at the time and admits having no clue who the father was.

All involved in arranging the adoption, including her mother and the doctor, are dead now, Sowards said. Even his name, John Vincent Hawkins, no longer exists, she believes.

"I don't have much to go on, but one thing: I saw some child-support paperwork years ago that had the name John Crabtree on it. I think that's his name now."

So John Crabtrees in Ohio, more than she can count, get emails from her every week.

"She's not going to give up until she finds out something," said Katrina Johnson, another Hope Haven client who occasionally joins Sowards at the library.

"She just wants him to know that she does care and that she did want him in her life. There's so much she never had a chance to say."

Joyful reunions uncommon

Half of Charlotte's homeless adults are dealing with disabilities that include drug or alcohol dependency, say experts.

And many among them have been separated from children. For some, it was by choice. For others, it was through legal action taken through entities like the county's Department of Social Services, which took kids from 255 parents or guardians in the last fiscal year. Half of those cases involved a parent or guardian who had substance-abuse issues, officials said.

Hope Haven officials say Sowards is just the latest in a string of clients who have launched searches to find lost children.

Joyful reunions aren't common, said Yvonne Oree, the agency's clinical supervisor.

Some have resigned themselves to never finding their children, she said, while others make heartbreaking discoveries.

"We just had one man who had not seen a son since he was very, very small, and he actually found his son: in prison," said Oree.

"Our counselors helped him craft that first letter to his son, in hopes he would get a response."

He did get a response, and the two reconnected, but not in the way a father dreams.

This need for reunions is all part of what happens when longtime addicts start to get sober, she said.

In Sowards case, it's a process that began when she moved to a shelter for abused women, and then entered Hope Haven's two-year program in June. The agency is giving Sowards and her two youngest children, Michael, 11, and Tiffany, 15, a home while she gets back on her feet.

She has two other adult children who are living on their own.

Sowards admits nearly killing herself with booze is what led her to seek help.

"I drank for nearly a month straight. I lived in the past, and I was angry," said Sowards, who moved to Charlotte in 1994 while in a relationship. "A lot of that has to do with giving up my son. Everybody who knew me knew the story, because I wouldn't stop talking about it when I was drunk."

Sowards was so angry over the forced adoption that she quit school and moved out of the house the day she turned 18, even though it meant living on the streets for six months, "getting stoned" all day.

It was a bad decision that launched nearly 30 years of misadventures, including some abusive relationships, various addictions, dead-end jobs and losing some of her four other children for a time to foster care.

Back at the library

Now, she's trying her best to right a long list of wrongs.

That means finding what became of the boy she got to hold for five minutes in 1981.

The search for John Crabtree went nowhere on this particular day, but it only takes one cigarette break and Sowards is back at a library computer, quietly typing one email after another.

"Looking for my son, born 8/6/1981, Columbus, Ohio, adopted out. Mother was 17, Donna Jean Marie Hawkins. Born at St. Ann's Hospital.

"If you are him, can you please email me?"

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