SABATTUS — Joan Brown Turgeon went to sleep many a night wishing she could be close to her father, Arnold Brown.

“I imagined him as just a wonderful man who had problems here and just tried to run away,” said Turgeon, 66.

On the other side of the country, Elaine Brown Morgan, 50, went to sleep wishing should could get away from him.

“He was a horrible man, just torturous,” she said.

When Arnold Brown divorced Joan’s mother, Rita, in 1947, he moved to California and started a new life and a new family. Joan and her brothers, Don, 71, now of Burke, Va., and Roger, 67, of Lisbon, knew their father had remarried and had two other daughters. But they’d had almost no contact and no way of finding that lost branch of their family.

Morgan and her sister, Kathleen Brown Rogers, 54, grew up in California with no knowledge of their father’s former life. It wasn’t until he died in 1989 and Kathleen discovered some doctored U.S. Army discharge papers that she even suspected his past.

It took another 24 years and the magic of Facebook to put them in touch.

“I guess the timing was right, just what it had to be,” brother Roger said. “God don’t do random.”

This weekend, for the first time , Arnold “Brownie” Brown’s children are together, under one roof. Sisters Elaine and Kathleen, now living in the metropolitan Denver area, flew in to Portland on Friday night. All five are staying at Turgeon’s Sabattus home and have planned a Brown family reunion and barbecue there Sunday — including dozens of Arnold Brown’s cousins, nieces and nephews from Leeds.

It’s on Oct. 6, which happens to be the 24th anniversary of Arnold Brown’s death.

“We didn’t plan it that way,” Joan said. “It’s just the way it worked out.”

In fact, there are many coincidences and similarities they are learning about, such as a predilection for pink appliances and the almost-matching cowgirl outfits their father had given to Kathleen and sent to Joan when they were little.

Some of it’s simply genetic, like a pigeon-toed gait. Or the hot tempers they share with each other — and apparently, with their dad.

“He was very charismatic,” Kathleen said. “If you didn’t know him, you would have loved this man. He was very handsome, very fun, nice, jovial. But he’d switch just like that, Jekyll and Hyde within seconds, if you didn’t agree with everything he said.”

She said she carried a scar on her face for years, from a time when she’d accidentally woken her father from a nap.

“He grabbed me, he actually tore off a piece of my cheek because he was so mad,” Kathleen said. “And I was the favorite.”

Elaine agreed. Kathleen was her father’s favorite and now Elaine thinks her darker hair is the reason. She looks more like her Maine half-sister, Joan, than she does Kathleen.

“I think he felt guilty,” Elaine said. “Each time he looked at me, I think he was reminded of what he’d done.”

Arnold and Rita Brown divorced in 1947. Arnold was in the Army at the time and just moved on. Rita stayed in Lisbon and raised the three children.

“She worked 13 years double-shift,” Roger said. “She’d work in the mill from 11 to 7 and then she’d go to the shoe shop to work from 7 to 4. She’d come home, cook us supper, get a couple hours of sleep and it was back to work.”

When Arnold left the Army, he settled in Van Nuys, Calif., and married Eleanor. He was successful, working as a contractor and building a life for his new family.

When Roger was about 20, he tracked down his father and was invited to visit at his California home.

Kathleen Rogers would have been about 5 at the time and might have remembered the visit, so she was shipped off to grandmother’s house. Roger said his infant sister Elaine was asleep in the crib.

“We talked until about 3 o’clock in the morning,” Roger said.

He reported the visit back to his Maine siblings and that was about it — until 1989, when Joan decided to track him down.

“I’d contacted the Veterans Administration and told them who I was and asked if they could give me his information,” Joan said. “They said they could, but they had him listed as dead.”

Joan said she got a copy of the death certificate and tried to contact his surviving family. She got as close as Eleanor’s sister, who refused to pass a message along to Elaine and Kathleen or tell Joan  anything about them. The aunt didn’t know about their Maine family and never would.

Joan even contacted television’s “Maury Povich Show” to see if they could help. Producers were interested until they learned Arnold was dead. Then they stopped calling.

Meanwhile, Kathleen in California was going through some of her father’s old papers, including old photographs he’d said were of nieces and nephews in Maine. She also found his discharge papers in an old cigar box. They’d been corrected, with bits of paper pasted over the “marital status” and “dependents” lines.

“If you held them up to the light, you could see that they’d been changed,” Kathleen said. “It said ‘married’ and the numbers were different.”

She showed them to her mother, who said it was just a bureaucratic mistake, a typo some Army clerk had made and cleaned up.

“So I forgot about it and put the cigar box away for a few years,” Kathleen said.

But Joan knew the others existed. Roger had given her their names, so she kept looking. It didn’t help that both had relocated to Colorado soon after their father had died.

“Do you know how many Kathleen or Elaine Browns there are?” Joan said. “There are thousands. Brown is a very common name.”

Joan didn’t get a break until January 2013. She was recovering from a long illness and browsing PeopleFinder.com when she stumbled upon their married names.

Switching to Facebook, she couldn’t find them directly but she did find their daughters — and pictures. She sent them all a message on Facebook that night — both sisters, their spouses and children — and waited.

Kathleen said she didn’t see the message until May, and replied, “Do I know you?”

“I saw the name, and didn’t recognize it and I thought I should just let her know she had the wrong Kathleen Rogers,” Kathleen said.

But she wasn’t wrong, and Joan convinced her. That was Mother’s Day, and they traded phone numbers and soon were talking and making plans to visit.

“Joan called me up, all excited,” Don said. “She said, ‘I found the girls! I found the girls!’ And I said, ‘What girls?'”

They were excited to come East and meet their family, even though their life with Arnold was so rotten.

“We  wondered, but not after the conversations we had,” Kathleen said. “You can’t (be afraid), not after talking to Joan. After that, we didn’t have anything to fear.”

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