So only Sarah remained, the youngest, the sole survivor. Sarah Dalhart, though that wasn’t her birth name—if she ever had one—lived longer than anyone would have believed. In 2016, she was just over fifty, though she looked decades younger. She had spent most of her adult life in nursing homes, group homes, and halfway houses in Virginia and West Virginia. Sometimes she worked—dishwasher, janitor, night clerk at a store—always in jobs where she didn’t have to talk or interact much with people. Social workers described her as quiet, functional, and profoundly lonely. She had no friends, no romantic relationships, no ties to anyone. She lived on the fringes of society, present enough not to raise suspicion, absent enough to go unnoticed. For nearly 40 years, she never spoke of her origins or her family, until in 2016 a journalist named Eric Halloway found her.
Halloway was researching a book about forgotten Appalachian communities when he stumbled upon a reference to the Dalhart children in a declassified court document. Most of the details had been redacted, but there was enough information to follow the trail. He tracked down former employees of Riverside Manor, obtained partial medical records through Freedom of Information Act requests, and eventually found Sarah through a social services database. He wrote to her for six months before she agreed to meet with him. They met at a restaurant in Charleston, West Virginia, on a cold November afternoon. Halloway recorded the conversation. This recording, which lasted more than three hours, was never made public, but excerpts were transcribed and published in a limited-edition article in a little-known history journal in 2017.
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