Could genealogy help adult adoptees search for their
birth parents? Genealogists who usually begin their search with grandparents or
great grandparents and adult adoptees who usually don’t have knowledge of their
birth parents, generally employ the same set of strategies to uncover their heritage.
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How many adoptees are there in the US? According to the website,
“In the last decade
(since the year 2000), the U.S. Census has attempted to collect national
demographics on the adoption community. The data have helped the government
estimate that there are over 7 million adult adoptees in America and 1.5 child
adoptees.”
Of the approximately 7 million adult adoptees alive today in
America, many are searching for their birth parents:
“Between two and four percent of all adoptees
searched in the year 1990.” (American Adoption Congress, 1996)
But there is another interesting statistic:
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“The psychological literature has established that the
desire of 60 to 90 percent of adoptees wanting to obtain identifying
information regarding their biological parents is
a normative aspect of being adopted.” (American AdoptionCongress, 1996)
If 60 to 90 percent have the desire to learn about their
birth roots, why are only 2 to 4 percent actively searching? What holds adoptees back from searching for their birth
parents? Many people may consider a search for many years
without taking a step because of many obstacles, such as fear of failure, not
knowing where to start, or any number of other reasons. But once a person
decides to start a search, some help from genealogical research methods might
come in handy.
Richard Hill, an adult adoptee who didn’t find out that he
was adopted until he graduated from high school, shared his story of how he
conducted his successful search for his birth parents in a book, Finding Family.
His experience can be enjoyed on one level as a riveting detective story with
ups and downs, twists and turns, lucky breaks and disappointing dead ends.
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On another level, Finding
Family is a road map of how to use many different kinds of sources that
genealogists regularly employ to find ancestors. Richard started with the step
that many genealogist gurus suggest that you begin with – interviewing family
members and family friends. Ann Fleming Carter explains more about how to
approach the person you wish to interview, how to build rapport, and what
questions to ask in Chapter 1 “Where Do I Start?” of her book The Organized Family Historian.
While Richard digested and analyzed the information he
collected from his interviews, he also began checking vital records, an often
difficult and frustrating experience for adoptees. A search for vital records
brings a researcher into contact with the keepers of such records, and these
are often courts and health departments (Fleming provides a website, http://www.vitalrec.com/ in her
book, which lists where to find vital records by state.) Richard wrote to the
Ingram County, Michigan Probate Court to
request his non-identifying
information. In Michigan, the probate court in each county holds the sealed adoption
records for that county. This initiated a long relationship with the Probate
Court that you will see described in the book.
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Photograph by
Tim Hollosy,Ingham County Courthouse in
Mason,
Michigan, USA. December, 2006,Wikimedia.
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And it’s not that the courthouse burned or that birth records weren’t required by the state at the time they are searching.
After finding out where his mother went to high school from
one of her friends whom Richard had tracked down, he consulted old high school
yearbooks for possible photos of his mother.
When he found out some places
where she had worked, he searched for former co-workers to interview and newspaper
articles about the target businesses. He employed a tactic that was new to me;
he wrote to the Social Security Administration
to request an earnings report
for his mother for his target year and received a list of places where she had
worked during a critical year of his search!
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Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, 330 Independence
Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C. A.K.A. the Social Security Administration
Building, Wikimedia.
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Richard talked about his search and mentioned some of the
problems that plague many genealogists – the difficulty of staying motivated,
the way day-to-day life gets in the way, and how some person will come along or
some event will happen that gets you right back in the game! A critical step in
Richard’s search was making contact with affinity groups in the area he was
researching.
It was through these groups that he found experts in this field.
Just as genealogists sometimes find that networking with like-minded people or working
with a professional can move their search forward, so did Richard.
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First, someone recommended the Adoption Identity Movement
(AIM) where adoptees who were searching could get together and share stories,
strategies, and contacts. A person he met in an AIM meeting led him to Adoptees Search for Knowledge (ASK),
a search group in Lansing, MI where Richard was born. It was at an ASK meeting that Richard
found a person who would be key in helping him reach his goal.
Another record source, very familiar to genealogists, that Richard
used was the newspaper. But he went beyond searching for obituaries in the
library. He put an ad in some small, local newspapers
that served communities
near where his birth mother had lived and worked. Since Richard had found out,
first in a general way from his father and then the specific details from his
other family member and his mother’s friends, that his birth mother had died in
an accident, he used this information to create the newspaper ad. And he
received responses!
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As a retired scientist, Richard knew the value of keeping
copious notes of his search process.
This helped him immensely when life put
his search on the back burner several times over the decades of his journey to
identify his birth parents:
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“…I kept careful notes of my research, phone calls and
meetings, plus copies of all correspondence.” (p. 70)
Each time Richard re-started his search after a long hiatus,
he would review his notes, which brought him up-to-date. Also, when he
uncovered people with new information, he could use his notes to see how these
new pieces would fit with his existing knowledge.
Although Richard demonstrated persistence, patience and
putting-in-the time in his search, he might have never discovered the identity
of his father without the help of DNA testing.
Richard’s story clearly
demonstrates how DNA testing works hand-in-glove with traditional research methods
to help untangle ancestry questions. That said, Richard’s experience also tells
us that we can’t rely on DNA testing alone. It was through a combination of
traditional research, the yDNA test and the autosomal DNA test that Richard successfully identified his father.
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Bibliography
- Richard Hill, Finding Family (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Privately printed, 2012).
- Ann Carter Fleming, The Organized Family Historian (Nashville, Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press, 2004).
