Nurse Taylor Walker swabs the cheek of Hixson, Tenn., resident and “Hicks baby” Paul Payne to take a DNA sample. Men and women who were sold in off-the-record adoptions by Dr. Thomas Hicks in his McCaysville, Ga., clinic in the 1950s and ’60s gathered at the inn to submit DNA samples in hopes of finding siblings or parents.
Mary Ann Guest, 75, who believes one of her daughters may be a “Hicks baby,” speaks Saturday on the porch of the Ocoee River Inn in Ducktown, Tenn., after submitting a DNA sample. Guest said she believes Dr. Thomas Hicks, who sold infants in off-the-record adoptions in his McCaysville, Ga., clinic in the 1950s and ’60s, secretly handed her daughter Debra to another family after claiming that she had died of jaundice.How to helpIf you think you might be a Hicks baby or a relative of a Hicks baby, please contact adoptee Paul Payne in Hixson at 423-637-2617 or adoptee Melinda Elkins Dawson in Ohio at 937-248-4712.
DUCKTOWN, Tenn. – They hoped she would read about it in the newspaper, and that wherever she was – tucked away in a quiet suburb with family or spending her final days in a nursing home – she would come to them.
They hoped a prick of conscience would end years of silence and mystery, that they would find familiar eyes, roots, not far from where they entered the world and left in the arms of strangers.
So around seven men and women, sold as newborns decades ago by North Georgia doctor Thomas Hicks to families desperate for children, returned Saturday to the sleepy town 70 miles east of Chattanooga in search of their biological families.
When this group of “Hicks babies” announced they would be returning to Ducktown to collect DNA from locals in hopes of tracing their blood roots and medical histories, they didn’t know what the response would be.