Carl Manger had just paid for soda pop and a newspaper in a Ricker’s gas station in Chesterfield. As Manger turned, a stranger stood in his way and asked, “Do you know any Hazelwoods?”

The stranger, Brad Scott, would later recall, “He just looked like my wife’s uncle. There was a family resemblance, around the face.”

Manger, 65, told the stranger that his name had once been Hazelwood, more than 50 years earlier, before he was adopted as a young boy from the Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s Home in Knightstown.

Manger grew up with his adopted family in Chesterfield, unaware for decades that he was within driving distance of other brothers he had all but forgotten.

Intrigued by the stranger’s question, Manger went with Brad and Cynthia Scott to their children’s Little League games.

There, Manger met two long-lost brothers, Melvin Hazelwood, living in south Anderson, and Paul Hazelwood, of Jonesboro in neighboring Grant County.

The family tree had more branches.

Manger found he was one of 15 children born to General Sherman Hazelwood. Some had been adopted; others had been sent to the children’s home as youngsters.

After five decades, Carl Manger was being reunited with siblings.

“It was just a relief in one way,” says Manger. “I’ve got a second family now. ... I thought I had a younger brother and sister down there in Knightstown with me, but I find out I had four brothers down there.”

A broken family

In the mid-1940s, Cordelia Faye Hazelwood, born in 1917, and her Union hero-named husband, General Sherman Hazelwood, nearly 39 years her elder, often spent a good part of their evenings in taverns near Austin, Ind., about 40 miles north of Louisville, Ky.

General Sherman Hazelwood had been a railroad worker who sold vegetables on a fruit route as he and his wife struggled to raise nine children.

One night in 1947, the two stopped at a bar and left their five sons in the car. Police were called. The husband and wife were taken to court, accused of neglect. They were told to clean up their lives or lose their children.