After decades of separation, an infant baby finally returns home

BY REBECCA PETTINGILL

Contributing Writer

EPHRATA — A letter led Randie Ralston-Ponozzo on a mission she never expected. Last fall, it led to a poignant reunion nearly 60 years in the making.

That’s when Randie recovered the ashes of an infant brother who died during childbirth in September 1966 and reunited him with their mother, Lois Ralston, now 85, at her Stratford-area home.

It’s an unusual journey and part family detective story, which has ranged from Ephrata to the Okanogan and back.

The story began in 2023, when an estranged family member mailed a letter to Lois which prompted confusion and alarm — that the ashes of her stillborn son were never claimed after being cremated and instead were “disposed of.”

Overwhelmed by grief at the time of their child’s death, Lois had asked her husband, Sheldon Ralston, to handle the arrangements for the cremation and final resting place for their son. Randie said her mother and other family members believed the infant’s remains were interred at the Ephrata Cemetery alongside another person — never named — who had passed away around the same time.

Sheldon Ralston died in 2010 at age 70 — long before the enigmatic letter came to Lois — so Randie said she could not ask her father for details about the circumstances.

“All these years, we thought he (the infant boy) was somewhere in the Ephrata Cemetery buried with some unknown person,” Randie, now 63, said in a recent interview.

After receiving the letter, Lois initially tried to unravel the mystery on her own but could not seem to find any answers. In 2024, pained and anxious, Lois confided in Randie, sparking her efforts to discover what happened to her baby brother’s remains. 

Randie started by contacting Nicoles Funeral Home in Ephrata. After searching through old records, the current staff produced a document which reinforced Randie’s worst fears.

It was a copy of a letter sent to her parents in 1993, stating their infant son’s ashes had not been claimed and would be disposed of unless they responded within 60 days. But the Ralstons, having long since moved, never received the letter.

But Randie continued her research and learned “disposed of” did not mean thrown away. Rather, it meant the unclaimed ashes would be interred in an unmarked vault at an area cemetery. It was not Ephrata, and Randie determined the destination was most likely in the Okanogan.

She was right, but uncertainty remained.

“They sent his ashes up north to Okanogan County,” said Randie. “(But) at that time there were three funeral homes up there. So I contacted Nicoles Funeral Home and I said ‘Do you guys have any records of which one he might have gone to?’”

No specific records, she was told. But the staff did say “they found these handwritten notes.”

One of the notes, said Randie, documented the names and dates of death of deceased persons whose remains had been transferred to various funeral homes. Included on the list was ‘infant male Ralston’ along with a birth year of 1966. The top of the list was labeled ‘Omak.’

Last September, she began calling funeral homes in the area, including River Valley Funeral and Cremation in nearby Okanogan. Staff there said they would need some time to look through old records. Randie, her daughter, and Lois decided to drive north to the Okanogan cemetery where the unclaimed remains vault is located. Afterward, they visited River Valley.

“ … We go to the funeral home and (a staff member) says, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure he’s here, but we’re still looking at handwritten documentation,’” said Randie.

She asked them to give her a call if they found some confirmation, or not. Driving away, they were a half-block from the funeral home when her phone rang.

“I had just left and he said, ‘We have found the documentation,’” said Randie.

She was able to confirm that the person who signed for the list of remains from Nicoles Funeral Home had worked at River Valley Funeral and Cremation in 1993 but had since passed away.

The discovery initiated a weeks-long process to open the vault. Inside, a lone baby urn was found and retrieved.

The ashes were transferred into a new urn, which the funeral home donated. It was Nov. 19, 2025, shortly before Thanksgiving.

“We walked in,” said Randie, “… (and) they had it placed on the table in front of the room with white pillars and lights shining down on his little tiny urn.”

It was an emotional moment, giving her baby brother’s remains to their mother, who never got to hold him after he was born.

“I told her, ‘Mom, you’re holding him now and he’s right where he was meant to be.'”

Bringing him home over a half-century later, Randie asked her mother what she would have named her son had he lived.

John Robert, she replied.

The decades-spanning reunion inspired Randie Ralston-Ponozzo to write the following poem, entitled, "John Robert Comes Home":

You were the hush before the dawn,

A name whispered into the wind.

John Robert - never cried, never cooed,

Yet your silence sings in me still.

They said you were gone,

But not where you should be.

Ashes misplaced, memory adrift,

For fifty-nine winters, you wandered.

I never held your hand,

But I held the ache of absence.

The question mark of your resting place,

The prayer that you’d be found.

And now - you are.

Not in the way we hoped,

But in the way that matters.

You are coming home.