The Legacy of Bobby Dunbar

A friend of mine shared that part of his family's history was going to be featured on This American Life - the story of Bobby Dunbar. It's an interesting story of the Dunbar family, whose four-year-old son was lost in a Louisiana swamp on a camping trip in 1912. Several months later a boy was found who, after a trial, was determined to be Bobby Dunbar.

The trial was held because the man who had custody of the found boy, William Walters, claimed he was Bruce Anderson, the son of a woman who'd been temporarily unable to care for him. Both Julia Anderson and Lessie Dunbar were allowed to meet with the young boy and neither were immediately able to positively identify him.

TAL tells the story from the point of view of one of Bobby Dunbar's descendants. She was given a scrapbook of information relating to the kidnapping (as it was called by her family) and did extensive research of her own. Ultimately a DNA test was done on two different lines of the Dunbar family (that of Bobby Dunbar and that of one of his brothers) and it was proven that, in fact, they shared no male ancestor. The found boy grew up as Bobby Dunbar, but had not been born him.

The story reveals a lot about the nature of truth and history. The truth of the matter is extremely different for the three families involved (the Dunbars, the Andersons, and that of William Walters). What really happened - what motivated each person to do what he or she did, the fate of the four-year-old Bobby Dunbar lost in the swamp - cannot be definitively known. That so much uncertainty surrounds one episode in the lives of these few families just underscores the absurdity of accepting any historical fact at face value. Everything we know has been filtered so many times - by the prejudices of the people who wrote the history, by meteorological and geological chance - yet we make decisions every day based on that history. There is so much room for doubt yet so many of us are willing to believe what others say is true.

The Dunbar story also reveals a lot about the nature of family. Most of the members of the affected families don't seem to bear any ill will to anyone with the notable exceptions of the siblings of Bobby Dunbar who resented the outcome of their niece's research. It's easy to speculate as to why they were angry, but impossible to know what I'd feel in the same situation.

When you think of how many of these kinds of situations must've happened throughout history, it seems that much less important whose blood runs where; what truly matters is the time you spend and the affection you share. Rather than drawing divisive boundaries based on blood or history, why not just embrace everyone?