During my own roots journey, I bumped up against this in Virginia (I actually had a copy of my mom’s original birth certificate, her footprints, her mom’s fingerprints) when all I really wanted to know is whether she was born in a hospital or at home. Given the “prints”, probably it was a hospital but Virginia would not allow me her birth records without an attorney and judge, as they were sealed with her adoption. Same with Arizona’s records of her adoption or my dad’s records in California. Even so, I do know now what my parents never knew – who their original parents were and something of their stories.
Therefore, this story in the Huffington Post caught my attention – LINK>I Could Have Gone To Prison For What I Did To Find My Birth Parents by Jillian Barnet. The article notes – “The vast majority of the now 5 million adoptees in the United States have no right to our original birth certificates, our medical histories or to any information regarding our identities.”
She writes – “Late at night, in my childhood room, questions haunted me: Where did I come from? Why was I adopted? Who was my original family? Though my parents informed me of my adoption at a young age, beyond that the subject of adoption was taboo in our home.”
“When I gathered the courage to pose those questions, I got vague answers: In a hospital. Because we wanted you. People who couldn’t keep you. Because my parents treated the details of my adoption as secret, I desperately wanted to locate my birth family. It was an almost cellular urgency that surged when I became a mother myself.”
“In 1986, there was little information available to adoptees. Searching was something well-adjusted people didn’t do or even talk about. But on a follow-up visit to my obstetrician after the birth of my twins, I found a waiting-room magazine featuring the title of an article on the front cover that read, Adoptees Find Birth Parents With Help of ALMA.”
“I dove into reading about an adopted woman who had found her birth family with help from the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA). After my doctor’s appointment, I slipped the magazine into my purse and brought it home. ALMA would end up shepherding me through a frustrating, emotional decade of searching for my birth family until, at last, I found them.”
If you have experienced the same frustrations that I have or that Jillian did, you might want to read the rest of the linked article.
Missing Mom 