Any midsummer weekend is usually a happening one, but none more than one Boothbay Harbor’s “Hostess with the Mostest” Laura Francis and her brother Stan Hanson had last month. They threw a weekend long family reunion bash that started July 13 for the Hanson family. Some live as close as Portland and South Berwick, others as far as South Dakota.

What makes this reunion special? Start with the banner Laura created for her guests: “Welcome Hanson’s – Our 1^st Meet, Greet, Eat & Have Fun Event!”

Until recently, Laura was in the dark about her father’s side of the family. When she was 4, her parents separated. When Laura was 5, her mother, she declined to name, made the journey from Bowling Green, Kentucky back to Bradley, Maine where she left Laura and Stan with her parents.

The children remained in their grandparents’ care while their mother went to Portland to get a job and a husband. It was close to a year before they saw her again, Laura recalled.

Laura’s mother had found a steady job and met a man with roots in the Boothbay Region. In July 1955, she picked up her children in Bradley, brought them to Boothbay Harbor and introduced them to their soon-to-be stepfather, Arthur Poore. The two married the same month.

“That's how Stan and I ended up here,” said Laura. “Boothbay Harbor became our home.”

Over the next 11 years, Stan and Laura welcomed three half-brothers – Ernie, Andy and Will.

Everything Laura and Stan knew about their father and his family came from what little their mother told them and whatever could be garnered by eavesdropping.

“I would hear bits and pieces of conversation with my mother talking with her sisters at different ages and I would sponge whatever I could hear,” Laura said. “Once I asked a question about my father and I was so reprimanded that I never asked again. I was scared to death to ask. Mom destroyed all the pictures, so we knew nothing about our father.”

She did know her father's name was Stanley Arthur Hanson and he was born in Racine, Wisconsin. She also knew Stan was given his father's name and she was given his mother’s name, Laura Dagmar Hanson. Laura was also told her father was an only child and the family were all immigrants from Sweden.

Her mother met her father most likely in 1942, but no one is sure of anything except it was in Chicago where her mother went after leaving school. In 1945, her father had a lead on a job in Vermont, so the two headed east from Chicago stopping in Southbend, Indiana to marry.

Laura's brother Stan was born in Burlington Vermont in April 1947. For whatever reason, Vermont was short-lived because by the fall of 1948 the family was in Bowling Green. In December 1948, her mother was visiting her parents for Christmas in Bradley and she gave birth to Laura prematurely in Old Town.

Even though they were very young, Laura and Stan have memories of an abusive, dysfunctional family life and that was certainly why the marriage ended, Laura said.

That is all the information Laura Francis and Stan Hanson lived with up until Memorial Day this year, a day after Laura and  husband Steve returned home from visiting their son in Alexandria, Virginia. Stan called and broke the news a man named David Hanson was linked to him through Ancestry DNA. It turns out David is Laura's and Stan’s nephew through a half-brother they had no idea existed. What’s more is David is a retired naval intelligence officer living a half hour ‘s drive outside Alexandria near Laura’s son. They just missed him.

Thus began learning some new details and unlearning some others.

“The mistruths to what we had been told were – we are not Swedish, we're Norwegian. My dad was not an only child, he had two sisters born before him in Norway. Their names were Dagmar and Amy.”

Laura – named for her grandmother, Laura, and her aunt, Dagmar – said these inaccuracies on their mother’s part were probably not intentional, but most likely what their father told her.

Laura and Stan also learned their father, Stanley Arthur Norman Hanson, was born December 20, 1895 in Racine, Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrants two years after they arrived in America. The information on Laura's birth certificate put her father at 24 years older than her mother, born in 1924. He was really 29 years older.

Stanley left school in tenth grade shortly after his parents, Sigvardt and Laura Hanson, divorced. He apprenticed under a watchmaker before working at a local textile mill in Kenosha, Wisconsin where he quickly rose to foreman. He had at least one patent to his name, a new way to make a union suit, and was an expert on a variety of machines especially dealing with textiles.

He married his first wife Louise Mielke in 1919 and had a reputation of being quite charming, but was an alcoholic. He and Louise had two sons, Robert, born in 1921 and Kenneth, born in 1923. “Robert and Kenneth are my half brothers on the Hanson side,” said Laura. “My mother hadn't even been born yet and I honestly don't think she even knew that my father had children before he married her!”

After the Great Depression, Stanley lost his job, Robert became the sole breadwinner in the house, and Stanley and Louise divorced in 1939.

“Stanley would drift in and out of our lives,” David said in an email to Stan. “My sisters and cousin Paula recall riding in a car to pick him up, perhaps at some bar which he phoned from. Linda remembers him showing up unexpectedly at our house in Kenosha and also waving to him through a window at a VA hospital in Chicago.”

David also told Laura, Louise was always in contact with Stanley throughout his marriage to Laura's mother and that, according to Laura's nieces and nephews, he came and went periodically. Laura said her father was “a bit wayward” and Louise kept a cot for him for whenever he needed a place to stay.

In March 1962, Stanley died of emphysema in a veterans hospital in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Louise brought him back to Kenosha, Wisconsin for a funeral service.

“Supposedly they weren't married,” said Laura, explaining there are no divorce records. “But she always took care of him.”

Francis said when she read through all the information, it was overwhelming at first, but she is just happy she and Stan were able to answer some decades old questions and meet some not-so-distant relatives they always knew had to be there.

“This was just so totally enlightening to all of a sudden find this new family,” said Laura. “It was just absolutely amazing – totally unbelievable … It also would never have happened if David did not have such a keen interest in history and genealogy and if Stan had not received the Ancestry DNA test kit as a Christmas gift.”

David has records that go all the way back to great-great-great-great grandparents. He made trips to Norway visiting the villages from which the Hansons came. He met extended family, and took family ashes with him to bury.

Laura’s and Stan’s  half-brother Robert died in 1999 at 78, and half-brother Kenneth in 1997 at 74. Robert and Kenneth each had three children.David is Robert’s son. Scattered around the country – Maine, Virginia, South Dakota, Michigan and Minnesota – these nieces and nephews became the excitement of the reunion for Laura and Stan. And they all chose Boothbay for it, said Laura.

Laura, a renowned caterer in the region, said planning her own event was a challenge.

“I wanted it to be perfect, complete with banners, balloons, welcome bags, name tags, drink cozies dating the event, a weekend of Boothbay's best fun events and a Friday night welcome buffet … By the time the weekend concluded I felt bonded to my ‘Hanson’ family.”

One of Laura’s and Stan’s nieces had already made several trips to the region in years past, Laura said. In addition to all the amazing food the region has to offer, the family enjoyed outings filled with boating, lobstering, golf and hiking and more as they discussed newfound histories. The reunion was also where Laura saw pictures of her father for the first time.

“It was so heartening to realize that there is a family that you belong to, a family you always hoped for and didn't realize that with today's technology and forensics, was that easy to find … This was a weekend that was tagged ‘the best weekend ever’ and will live in all of our hearts forever. Once in a while, in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.”