The Adoption Tree

I have had a few requests to provide more information on how and where an adoptee (particularly those in a closed public adoption) can start their search for their birth parents, and so this posting will hopefully do just that with a focus on searching using the Internet. Please keep in mind that I am not familiar with the adoption process outside of Canada; however a simple Google search with the keywords “adoptee searching” will bring up pages of websites. Keep in mind some of these websites may be free while others are paid. As well, be sure to thoroughly read a website before registering to ensure it is relevant and that you won’t be bombarded with needless solicitations and e-mails that are not relevant to your search.

In addition to searching online, for myself, the first step was to request my Adoption Order from the province of Ontario (which was the province in which my adoption took place). Once I had obtained this (it took a few months), I then requested my Non-Identifying Information. If your adoption was through a Children’s Aid Society, you have to request your non-identifying information from that particular agency (click here for a list of agencies in Ontario).

Non-Identifying Information is generally a multi-page document containing your social history including tidbits of information about your birth family such as their ages at the time of your birth, details surrounding your birth (i.e., time of birth, birth weight, etc.), your birth parents extra curricular activities, a bit about their home life and any like information they made available to the social worker at the time of your adoption. When applying for your non-identifying information it is very important to ensure you include as much of the following as you know:

• Full adoptive name
• Exact date of birth
• City or town where you were born
• Full names and address of adoptive parents when you went to live with them
• Your birth name (if known)
• Include a photocopy of your birth certificate, baptismal certificate, or driver’s license.
• Include current name, address and phone number and e-mail address

The more information you provide the quicker you will receive the non-identifying information. It took approximately nine months to receive my non-identifying information but I have heard it can take up to a few years! Just make sure that if you move that you make sure to notify the Children’s Aid Society and/or Ministry. My non-identifying information was about six single-sided pages. Unfortunately, upon finding my birth parents it was quickly pointed out that some of the information included on the non-identifying information was incorrect, however it was still pretty accurate and just knowing that much more about my birth parents made me feel that much closer to locating them.

While I waited for my non-identifying information to be received I registered with a website called the Canadian Adoptees Registry. It’s a simple and free website that lists adoptees searching as well as birth parents, siblings and family also searching. The website is run by birth parents that searched and located their birth daughter and is one of the largest adoptee search websites in Canada. All details pertaining to searching within Canada can also be found on the Canadian Adoptees Registry including links to Ministries, Agencies and check lists for successfully completing the necessary paperwork for items such as your Adoption Order.

Other ways to begin a search is to participate in online discussion groups such as those on AdoptionConnections.ca – it’s a small world out there and you never know who may read your post! There are plenty of websites dedicated to all kinds of adoptions – private, public and international. My recommendation is to start your search with a simple keyword search for “adoptee searching”. If you live in the United States over overseas try including the country in which your adoption took place and see what online resources are available for your particular country.

Just remember regardless of the online resources out there, it is very important to make sure you find out what documents you can and should request pertaining to your adoption or ask your adoptive parents what documentation they have surrounding your adoption that may be of assistance in your search.

Once you have exhausted all online resources and have all relevant documentation continue your active search by placing classified ads on free classified websites such as Craig’s List and Kijiji. Or if you know the city where your birth parents may be, try purchasing a classified ad in the local newspaper. Just make sure to include minimal information when placing classified ads and don’t include your name or phone number. I created a web-based e-mail address especially for this purpose.

I searched for and found both of my birth parents using the Internet. My birth father and I were reunited after both signing up with the Canadian Adoptees Registry and my birth mother was located after I posted an advertisement on a free local classified website. It took time to fond both of them, but I started searching when the Internet was still young. The number of online resources available to adoptees continues to grow and with it a growing online adoption community ready and willing to help you in your search. Good luck with your search.

I don’t think I fully understood open adoption until I began researching open adoption online. Through the magic of the Internet I was introduced to a remarkable woman who was not only a birth mother, but who has opened her heart and talents to other birth parents and adoptive parents in Canada through her website AdoptionConnections.ca. It is here birth and adoptive parents come together to form a unique online adoption community where birth and adoptive parents can share their stories, offer support and exchange resources.

What makes this website special is that birth parents and hopeful adoptive parents can interact with a birth mom. A woman who genuinely knows what it is like to have a child placed in an open adoption. A woman who selected her son’s adoptive parents by reading their profile and meeting them in person. A woman who has opened her heart to those interested in learning more about adoption and actively interacts in the discussion forums.

The owner of AdoptionConnections.ca is one of the hardest working people I know. She works hard to not only ensure people are aware of the website’s existence, keep her website up-to-date and stay on top of current adoption events and happenings, but she also offers assistance with profile writing (something adoptive parents can agonize over for hours - I know!) from both a professional (she has a degree in social work) and personal perspective (remember, she’s a birth mom who read through many profiles).

I am not one to plug products or websites unless I truly believe in them and I truly believe AdoptionConnections.ca should be one website bookmarked by Canadians looking to connect with information on adoption - whether you are a birth parent, hopeful adoptive parent or adoptee.

The following came in as a comment to another posting, but I thought I would give it it’s own posting in hopes that maybe someone will be able to help this person. If the Internet is good for one thing, it is a good resource for people who are searching for a lost loved one.

————-

My name is Amanda Lee Countryman from Sullivan County NY. I was born on July 7, 1987 in Kingston, NY. I’m looking for my 1/2 (same dad) birth sister who I believe was named Jennifer Lyn Countryman (at Birth & until toddler age). I’m a broke and cannot afford to do searches so I’m hoping this will work.

I’m pretty sure she was born August 31, 1981 in Kingston, NY at Benedictine Hospital. Her birth parents were Gary W. Countryman and a woman I only know as “Barb”. They lived together in the Kerhonkson/Accord, New York area until “Barb” broke up with Gary & left with Jennifer, then moved to Parlin, NJ.

I think Barb got married while living in the Parlin, NJ area and Gary signed Jennifer over to the new hubby and Barb had another son. Later in years, a boy was born to Deanna Schoonmaker from the same area and I heard that he is our 1/2 brother too. I heard that the boy lives in Florida with Deanna & tried to visit his dad, but it didn’t work out and he returned to Florida. Gary died September 12, 2006, but I don’t know the details.

I don’t think Gary was a part of any of their lives past the toddler stages because he suffered from alcoholism and it ruined relationships.

I am looking for Jennifer Lyn (birth name Countryman) born August 31, 1981 in Kingston, NY. Thank you for any help locating her. Please email me Amanda L. Countryman or my mom, Kristy Barnes with any info. at Monetsgardenofeden@yahoo.com or Monetsgarden@frontiernet.net

Occasionally I take a look at online waiting parent registries for no other reason than because I am curious. Recently I came across a posting in which an adoptive mother offers to breast feed their adopted baby. Apparently hormone pills can be administered that assist in the production of breast milk. This particular adoptive mother breast fed their first adopted child and hopes to do the same with their second adopted child. This appears to be the couple’s “selling point” as this detail is outlined in their introduction

The thought of an adoptive mother breast feeding an adopted baby disturbs me.

As an adoptee I would have been “weirded” out if I found out my adoptive mother pumped herself full of hormone pills in order to breast feed me. It just doesn’t seem natural – it isn’t natural. I know there are a lot of studies that state breast milk is full of vital nutrients and is overall more beneficial to an infant when compared to formula, but I wasn’t breast fed and I am just fine. I was a happy and health infant, child and adult. My husband and his brother were also not breast fed (they are not adopted). They too were healthy babies, children and adults, and are two of the smartest individuals I know.

There are some circumstances in which a mother simply cannot breast feed their infant and for me adoption falls under one of these circumstances. An infant does not need to be breast fed in order for them to know they are loved. And while I realize this is obviously a personal choice for this particular adoptive couple, I can’t help but feel perhaps the adoptive mother has yet to come to terms with her infertility and if I were a birth mother this would concern me.

I may be attacked for my point of view concerning this issue, but beyond the fact that I am “weirded” out by the entire concept and have never considered breast feeding an adopted child, how beneficial is breast milk that is, in essence, artificially produced? How much of the synthetic hormones are being transferred through the breast milk in to the infant? I am not a doctor and obviously I am not well-versed on hormones that produce breast milk, but overall I think the idea of an adopted mother breast feeding an adopted child is wrong.

1. I often wonder how different I would have turned out had I been raised by my birth parents
2. I often think my birth parents are still hiding some information regarding my birth from me
3. My adoptive parents are my parents and it bothers me when they are referred to as adoptive parents
4. I consider my birth families friends of the family more so than I consider them family
5. I really like my birth sister on my birth-mother’s side and think she would have made an awesome sister growing up
6. I wish my brother would search for his birth parents so we could hopefully find out more about his developmental delays
7. People often comment how much my mom and I look alike (I mean my adoptive mom for those who are confused) and that makes me happy
8. One of the worst things about being adopted through a closed adoption was not having access to medical information – how is that fair?
9. When I was in elementary school my best friend didn’t believe I was adopted and called my mom to ask her if it was true.
10. I used to use adoption as an excuse not to do family tree assignments in elementary school – I can’t believe some teachers fell for it.

1. I am worried my husband and I will never be chosen to privately adopt
2. Just when I think I know everything there is to know about adoption I find out I don’t
3. The first time we heard about open adoption it scared the wits out of my husband and I
4. After much research and after talking with many birth mothers and adoptive parents, I believe open adoption is a wonderful thing.
5. I am really starting to resent people who ask me how the adoption process is going because as many times as I explain to them that private adoption can take anywhere from a matter of months to years to never, they don’t seem to understand and always think we will be parents the next week
6. I love explaining what open adoption means to people who have no idea. Their faces go from confusion to complete understanding and I would like to think I have made the world a better place by educating people on something I believe is so important
7. When someone doesn’t understand what private adoption is I make reference to Monica and Chandler on Friends and their adoption of twins. I see the light bulb go off every time.
8. We chose our adoption lawyer because she is eccentric and not what you would expect a lawyer to be.
9. There are times when I want to scream “Congratulations you can reproduce, now shove it!” to my very fertile friends who give me the sympathetic, “Someday” look and I wish I didn’t feel this way.
10. As much as I may wish we could conceive our own child, I feel my husband and I are better people because of the invaluable knowledge we have obtained, the wonderful people we have met and the life experiences that will never be forgotten through adoption.

My first face-to-face meeting with my half-birth-sister on my birth-father’s side was when she was fifteen years old. She was full of attitude and spunk and my initial impression upon seeing her was that she is very pretty, has nice long legs (must be from her mother’s side) and that she looked like a nice young girl. This impression was quickly trampled on when the first words out of her mouth were, “I heard you like to read? I hate reading.” She said this in the midst of another conversation I was having with her mother. I turned and replied, “Yes, I do like to read” all the while continuing my conversation with her mother. She then said, “The only thing I read is magazines. I’m too busy to read.” These statements hurt my feelings and while I should have known better than to take the words of a teenager seriously, I did. For me these words was her way making sure I knew we were different and that even though we may share blood we will never be alike. That was quite a few years ago, yet I have never forgotten and still feel hurt by her hast to point out our differences.

Then there’s the blame. When I located my birth father I was in university, and as I have previously stated I was consumed by my own little university-centric world – books, boys and booze. Finding my birth father was quite overwhelming and while I was anxious to discover more about my birth father I wasn’t so interested in his family. My birth-sister was young when I reunited with my birth father. She was told by her parents that I was her sister. As I think I have also previously mentioned, at that time being called her sister made me want to be ill. I was so confused. So much information was coming at me so quickly. My birth sister had known about my existence all her life. I had only known of hers for five-minutes and I was her sister? Thank goodness for the university pub.

Because of this confusion any phone conversation I had with her was brief and generic. We would chat through MSN or via email but only once and awhile. I felt I was too busy for her. I was selfish. So, after our first meeting and hearing how much she wasn’t like me (the reading thing is just one example) I couldn’t help but feel like I should have tried to be more of a sister to her growing up. Did I mention she has another sister? She has an older sister from her mom’s first marriage – a very nice girl. I suppose knowing she was in her life made me think I didn’t need to be a sister. I was already a sister and being a sister to a developmentally challenged brother had its own challenges. But now I can’t help think that perhaps if I had been more compassionate/active/”there” for my little birth-sister we would be more alike. Or is this just me wishing I saw myself in my birth families again? And so the confusion and guilt remains…

I have a friend who was adopted at birth through a closed private adoption. She has always known she was adopted and recently when she asked her adoptive mother about how soon her mom felt a bond between them her adoptive mother answered immediately. My friend was touched, however it was what her adoptive mother said afterward that continues to bother her. Her adoptive mom said that as soon as my friend was placed in her arms she knew it was meant to be and that she was her daughter. When my friend questioned, “what about my birth mom?” her adoptive mom replied by saying that as far as she was concerned the baby in her arms was hers.

To be fair to my friend and her family, my friend has always had a wonderful home life. She has a younger brother and another sister, who are also adopted. She has always respected her adoptive parents and is grateful for everything they have given her, but hearing such insensitivity toward her birth really upset her (and me). She said she felt like a material object someone had claimed ownership of - as if her adoption was the result of a “finders keepers, losers weepers”. I told her she should talk about these feelings with her adoptive mother before the feelings grow into permanent resentment.

On another note, surprisingly, my friend has never had a desire to search for her birth parents. She scans various internet sites regularly to see if anyone is looking for her, but she has not actively pursued a search for them. She says while she is curious, her life is quite full at the moment and feels that if they were meant to be reunited fate would intervene. Having searched and found my own birth parents I cannot understand being curious without doing something to satisfy that curiosity, but I respect her choice because she is my friend.

In any case, the point of this post was to ask anyone out there if they have ever encountered adoptive parents who feel the same way as my friend’s adoptive parents. Keep in mind my friend is well into her 30’s and semi-open and open adoption was unheard of at that time. Nonetheless, hearing such insensitivity toward the woman responsible for your daughter’s existence still shocks me and I am interested to hear what other have to say.

There are many downsides to closed adoptions, but the recent story of twins unwittingly marrying one another because they didn’t know they were siblings (read story here) is definitely a strong argument in favour of open adoption. Some people may laugh at the twins’ misfortune, but as an adoptee of a closed adoption I empathize. As a teenager I was always afraid I could be related to the person I was dating. I always looked for resemblance and probably asked more family-related questions than most girls would on a first or second date, but the world is a small place and how was I to know unless I asked?

While I am not sure of the circumstances surrounding the twins’ separation or adoption, I am wondering what information their adoptive parents were given regarding the adoption? Surely they knew their adopted child was a twin or at least had a sibling? My parents knew that and a lot more about my brother and while they did not know as much about me they definitely knew I was an only child at the time of my adoption. If either set of adoptive parents knew their adopted child had a twin they were wrong to withhold this information. Even if the parents neglected to tell them as children they definitely should have been made aware of their twin-status before they felt an “inevitable attraction” to someone who was seemingly a stranger.

The twins’ story is tragic on many levels. In-vitro fertilization aside, because that aspect of their story is quite confusing as well, I hope the twins will be able to maintain some kind of relationship, although imagine how mortified you would be to discover you had fallen in love (and goodness knows what else) with your twin brother or sister? What happened is not their fault and despite the damaging circumstances surrounding their reunion obviously it was in their destiny to be reunited, however with the right knowledge the twins’ reunion would not be a media-spectacle and could simply have been another successful adoption reunion.

I believe every child has a right to know who their biological parents are, but I also think it is imperative that an adoptive child know if they have biological siblings if for no other reason than to avoid such a tragic event for ever occurring again. After all, no one wants to go through their dating lives asking each date if they know whether or not his or her parents gave a child up for adoption.

Over the holiday season I witnessed many friends and colleagues celebrating their first Christmases with their new sons or daughters. It was a special time for them filled with many family, friends and copious posing with babies for pictures. It struck me then that I spent my first Christmas on earth alone. For reasons I am still trying to determine I was placed in foster care up until my adoption at 8 months of age. My birth mother tells me I was given up for adoption at birth, so why I was in foster care for so long continues to befuddle me. I am thinking it has something to do with my birth father not wanting to sign the papers, but that’s an entirely separate issue.

In any case, realizing that there was no “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament or a picture of me celebrating my first Christmas on earth makes me sad. No one should be alone at Christmas and while I was in the care of a foster mom, apparently when my adoptive parents were introduced to me at seven months of age I couldn’t even sit up, so what does that tell you?

This harsh new realization made me question everything my birth parents told me about knowing I was given to a good home. When did they find out I was given to a good home? Were they okay with knowing I spent my first Christmas alone probably not even aware of what a special time it was for other babies and parents? Did they visit me? No. I was told the last time either of them saw me was while my birth mother was still in the hospital.

I will never mention this fact to my birth parents because you can’t turn back time, however even though the holiday season is now over, the one thing I would have wished for and wish for in the future is that no Christian baby ever has to enter this world without feeling the love and spirit of their first Christmas. Sure a six month old baby won’t remember their first Christmas, but it is a moment that is immortalized in the memories of those who love that baby… and a baby remembers love.