What are the odds we will find him – the Chester, that is, whose story is so indelibly etched in my father’s memory of November 1945?

When I first put out the call on Facebook a few weeks ago, we knew that, to my father’s eye, the boy looked to be about 10 then, give or take; his mother looked to be around 30. Also lodged in Dad’s mind for all these years was the boy’s name: Chester Park. We had a few other details to go on, too: Chester’s mother was divorced, and his maternal grandmother lived in Omaha, Nebraska, where she was supposed to pick up Chester at the airport when he arrived on the flight from San Francisco. We also know that my father was introduced to Chester’s mother by an employee of United Airlines – raising the possibility, given the circumstances, that Chester’s mother may also have worked for United.

My father has wondered forever what became of that little boy, whose mother had entrusted him to a complete stranger, with the expectation that the stranger would deliver the boy safely to his grandmother in Omaha. For my father, who had turned 21 just weeks earlier, the stress and strain of this responsibility was overwhelming. “What have I gotten myself into?” he asked himself when Chester began calling him “Daddy?”

When I promised Dad that I would try, as a gift for his 100th birthday, to find out whatever became of Chester, the odds of success seemed daunting. From a few forays into family history, I knew a little bit about apps like Ancestry, which open the door to massive repositories of searchable data – from U.S. Census records to newspapers to vital statistics about births, marriages, divorces and deaths. Since beginning this deep dive, I’ve discovered an industry of opportunities to help people learn about their past or make distant connections through online school yearbooks, voter registration records, city directories, family trees, corporate alumni associations, and many, many more stores of information.

Even with all these powerful data-dredging tools, I know there are bound to be a lot of Chester Parks out there. And Dad’s Chester, if in fact he is alive today, would be roughly 90 – a nonagenarian just like my father. Discovering what happened to him, I realize, likely means tracking down Chester’s siblings or children or grandchildren or perhaps a neighbor or co-worker for whom the story and its biographical particularities ring a bell. And then, supposing I do get a plausible hit, would they be willing to engage with me – a stranger, myself, contacting them out of the blue, like so many catfishers and scamsters up to no good on the Internet? I wouldn’t blame Chester’s descendants for giving me the silent treatment. I wouldn’t blame them a bit.

Still, I want to quantify what I’m up against. What are the odds? How many people might check all the boxes? How many boys named Chester were about 10 years old in 1945, whose mother was approximately 30 years old, was divorced, and whose own mother lived in Omaha, Nebraska?

With apologies to the statisticians, here’s my best effort to make sense of the odds of finding my father’s Chester.

The name Chester has been on a downward trend for more than 100 years. In 2023 Chester was the 1,739th most popular first name among baby boys born in the United States; only 94 boys named Chester were born that year.

But the name Chester used to be far more common. For example, more cities in the United States are named Chester than all but Franklin, Clinton, Madison and Washington. And as a first name for people, Chester ranked No. 53 in 1919. The Social Security Administration processed Social Security card applications for 1,432 males named Chester who were born in 1935, the year our Chester was born if he was 10 when he took that ride with my father.

My father guesstimated that his Chester was 10, but more realistically let’s assume Chester was born sometime between 1933 and 1937. Five years of baby Chesters born during that time span means that our search is for one of approximately 7,160 Chesters who were between the ages of 8 and 12 in 1945. To err on the conservative side, I rounded that up to 8,000 to acknowledge the fact that a lot of people never applied for a Social Security card if they were born before 1937; that was the year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security Act.

How many Chesters in our target group had mothers who, in 1945, looked to be “around 30”? For present purposes, I’ve assumed that Chester’s mother was between the ages of 25 and 35 when my father briefly encountered her. In turn, if Chester was between 8 and 12 years old at that time, his mother could have been as young as 13 and as old as 27 when he was born. If I’ve correctly interpreted data from the National Center for Health Statistics for the mid-1930s, it appears that women in that age cohort then accounted for roughly half of all births in the U.S. That would mean about 50% of the 8,000 Chesters we began with had mothers who were in the right age range. In one fell swoop our target group has been cut in two, from 8,000 Chesters to a mere 4,000 Chesters.

When it comes to applying the divorce filter, there are far more complexities than I’m qualified to sort through. Divorce rates can be notoriously difficult to measure, even among experts. The probability of being a divorced woman is obviously different than the probability of being the child of a divorced woman, and the likelihood of being the child of a divorced 25- to 35-year-old woman is different than the likelihood of being an 8- to 12-year-old child of a divorced woman who’s 25 or older but no older than 35. And so on …

I’m sure some demographer or genealogist can maneuver amongst all these nuances and come up with a precise number for our situation, but in the meantime I’m going to use a statistic published by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. In 1945, among all women who had ever been married, perhaps 5% were either separated or divorced at that time. (Over the past 80 years, the percentage has risen to over 20%.) This measure, which includes women who have children and those who do not, is not exactly on point, but it will have to do until an expert steps up with a better approach. Multiplying 5% times our 4,000 remaining possibilities yields just 200 8- to 12-year-old boys named Chester whose mothers, in 1945, were both divorced and between 25 and 35 years old.

Someone among these 200 Chesters is very possibly, and maybe even likely, my father’s Chester. Except we don’t have to stop there: At the pivotal moment in my father’s story – November 1945 – you no doubt recall that Chester’s grandmother (his mother’s mother) lived in Omaha, Nebraska; or, to be more precise, it was at the Omaha airport where she rendezvoused with my father and her grandson. Geographically and by population, Omaha (1945 population: 240,000) was not far from the center of the 48 states that then comprised the United States; it was an emerging stopover hub for the surging airline industry. Roughly speaking: If the maternal grandmothers of all 200 of these Chesters were spread out evenly across the country and across its post-war population of 133 million people – measured either by geography or by population – you would expect to find more than one of them and less than two of them in the entire state of Nebraska (1945 population: 1.2 million).

Did I say the odds of success were daunting?! By my crude calculus, the probabilities suggest that there is less than one person for whom I can expect to check all the boxes. A boy named Chester, between the ages of 8 and 12 in 1945. A divorced mother then 25 to 35 years old. A maternal grandmother living in Omaha.

And how much rarer still would this grain of sand in the desert become if we added the condition that Chester’s mother worked for United Airlines? I’m not going to go there, partly because I know the answer becomes infinitesimal, but mainly because my father’s description of the airport encounter reveals only that he was introduced to Chester’s mother by a United employee; however awkward the syntax in his letter to Sarah Liggett, he never says anything about who Chester’s mother may have worked for, or if she worked for anyone.

Still, one wonders why United was apparently willing to permit a young boy to be consigned to the care of an unrelated passenger – unless, perhaps, Chester’s mother was a fellow United employee, whose child would naturally be looked after during the flight by her United colleagues. That might explain a lot. So, please let me know if you have ideas about how to verify whether Chester’s mother was or was not employed by United Airlines. My original post is currently circulating on a private Facebook group devoted to helping United employees find “long lost friends and coworkers,” but the company’s corporate office has not responded to my inquiries.

The good news about these probabilities is that if this search comes up with someone who checks all these boxes, I, at least, will be persuaded that I’ve found my father’s Chester!

More good news is that my father and I have identified a reasonably promising prospect. There’s still a great deal more digging to do – and this lead, like others, may not pan out.