67-year-old family’s search for missing loved one ends with news from Norfolk

CITY OF NORFOLK, New York (WWNY) – A West Virginia family’s decades-long search for missing husband, father and grandparents ends with news from Norfolk in St. Lawrence County .

Wilford Morton was finally found in a Norfolk town cemetery after 67 years of searching by his family. It was an article on the missing persons broadcast on August 21 on the YouTube channel “Mysterious WV” that solved the case.

“The great-granddaughter told me on Saturday night that they were already in tears and I was, quite frankly, in seventh heaven,” said

Sean McCracken, producer of “Mysterious WV”.

Morton died in 1954 at the age of 27. His wife, Opal, and his four children have always wondered if he was alive.

Immediately after the YouTube broadcast, someone by the name of “Edward” texted McCracken telling him when, where, and how Morton died. Then they found a newspaper article from 1956 that described the car crash on Route 56 in Norfolk that killed him.

“There was a part of me that always thought he would be 95 today, that if we found out at this point he would probably be dead. But finding out that he died so young was very difficult, ”said Anna Mae Nichols, daughter of Wilford Morton.

Morton had apparently come to upstate New York to work on the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He often traveled for his work. He was working for a trucking company in Indiana when he disappeared.

There you have it, the mystery is solved. But there are a lot of little mysteries surrounding Morton’s death. Why was her family never informed? Why doesn’t Social Security have a record of it? His family is studying all of this.

The only thing his family knows for sure is that they always kept looking.

“I always knew, even though he lived today, that he would know where we were and did not contact us. So when we came to that realization, we didn’t look any more and then let go for a long time. But then we would start looking again, ”Nichols said.

On Tuesday, 7 News located cemetery records which confirm Morton was buried at Pine Grove Cemetery in the town of Norfolk. A foot search failed to find a gravestone.

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