A 12-day-old baby boy left in a basket on a Garfield doorstep in 1932, has found his long-lost Pittsburgh family.

Jim Scott wrote a “Christmas wish” to connect with his birth family in 2016. And for the past six years, he’s been putting together the pieces of what most of us take for granted: a family.

Scott, 90, of Lafayette Hill, a town 13 miles northwest of Philadelphia, was in Allegheny County on Saturday with two of his daughters to meet with some new relatives.

The story started, more or less, when Scott angled to join the Naval Air Cadets in 1953, at age 21.

“As part of the application, you had to produce your birth certificate — but I had never seen my birth certificate,” Scott told the Tribune-Review. “When I looked at it, under parents, it said ‘Unknown.’

”That’s when I learned about everything.”

The newborn was given the name James Edward Broad after the two Pittsburgh police patrolmen who drove him to the hospital, officers James Walker and Edward Hays, and the street on which he was found, Broad Street.

Scott was adopted before his memory starts — specifically, in 1934 at age 2. The only documents he has left from the period are newspaper clippings about his door-step discovery.

His father, Walter Scott, was twice-widowed before raising his only child in Crafton with the former Edna Boyard.

“I loved it,” laughed Scott, when asked about his upbringing. “I was very, very well cared for, never abused, never neglected, always cared for. It was great.”

It was years later — after graduating from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in business; after his guidance counseling career took him across the state to Norristown, Montgomery County; after Boyard, a.k.a. “Grandma Scott,” passed away — that he told his family about the adoption.

“It kind of came as a shock,” said Scott’s daughter, Merry Cassidy, of Eagleville, Montgomery County. “All of a sudden — I don’t even know what the word is — I said, ‘What about all these other people, these aunts and uncles?’”

Enter Maryland Haig, the eldest of Scott’s four children.

Haig turned to Ancestry.com and DNA tests after her father wrote his “Christmas wish,” trying to find Pittsburgh family.

It all sort of fell together. Haig found Bob Laubham, a Munhall barber who turned out to share a father with Scott, in 2016. In 2021, it was two more cousins.

Just this May, Haig found Felix Zabroski, a retired Monroeville school teacher with whom he shared a mother, Helen Thompson.

The letters and Facebook posts started darting back and forth. Calls and baby photos followed.

“I think it’s amazing,” Haig told the Tribune-Review. “My Dad has always stressed the importance of family, even though he didn’t know where he came from. Now, he finally knows he has siblings. He has this connection now with these people he never knew existed.”

Laubham, who was born nine years after Scott, jokes when asked how he felt about a stranger asking him to take a DNA test in 2016.

“I figured, that way, I’ll find out if I’m royalty,” he laughed.

Once Haig confirmed they were half-brothers, Laubham immediately called Scott.

“This is Bob,” he said, simply. “And I want to talk to my brother.”

Through the tears, the two men joked; they share a welcoming kindness and a warmth toward strangers.

“‘Are you incredibly handsome?’ I asked,” Laubham joked. “‘Hell yes,’ he said. ‘Well, then you’re my brother.’”

Laubham — the oldest of six children, “or so I thought,” he quipped — admits he was in awe about the whole thing.

“My Dad? That was something he never talked about back then,” said Laubham, who also shares a self-described “Jimmy Durante nose” with Scott. And then, there’s the shared sense of humor.

“I’m talking with you on a flip phone,” Laubham said. “I don’t know if it’s old, but I just got a bulletin: Lincoln’s been shot. Yeah, I guess it is old.”

Zabroski learned recently that he and Scott shared a mother.

“It’s exciting and it’s amazing,” said Zabroski, 86, a retired school teacher and a football coach who worked in the West Mifflin and Steel Valley school districts. “To be truthful with you, I already had seven siblings, and there’s no way in the world I thought I had another one out there.”

Zabroski threw a party at his Monroeville home this fall and invited 39 relatives to meet Scott and his family. He is thrilled by the similarities between the two men.

“He was born in April, I was born in April,” Zabroski said. “He played football at IUP. My oldest son played football at IUP — it’s just crazy.”

“I told Jim,” he added, “‘You owe me 86 birthday presents!’”

Haig admits she never thought it would turn out like this.

“If it wasn’t for Ancestry.com and being able to do the DNA tests,” she said, “I don’t think we would have found anything.”

Scott is more pensive.

“Adoptions can work,” Scott said.

“And Christmas wishes do come true.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)