Finding His People: An Adoptee’s Search For Identity
It is fitting, if not ironic, that my husband met for the first time the most immediate members of his paternal birth family during the month of November: National Adoption Month. Once we connected with his aunt and cousins, who reside in Las Vegas, we proposed we visit, since phone calls lack the intimacy of in-person encounters. It was September 2018, and we needed to find dates that worked with both our children’s school calendar and my husband’s vacation schedule. We proposed November 2018 or February or March of 2019. Initially, they said February, but then quickly changed it to November, explaining they couldn’t wait until February to see my husband.
As it turns out, it is uncanny how strongly my husband favors his birth father. It is in fact how his second cousin, who found him on ancestry.com, figured out how they were connected. She asked for a photo and, as we learned later, sent it to several other cousins for confirmation that there was no doubt who his daddy was. One of his Las Vegas cousins shared with me that she hoped they were not making him uncomfortable by staring at him so frequently, but she could not help it, “he looks so much like Uncle Mike.” The family gene is strong, because he also looks a lot like his aunt and her two children. As I observed this reunion, I could only think how wonderful it must be to finally have a sense of your ancestral line and to know what most people, to some degree, spend their entire lives knowing.
The journey was long. It seems it goes one way or the other with adoptees—either they want to know who their birth family is or they do not. My husband, who was adopted by a white couple in 1973, wanted to know, but Ohio law made it nearly impossible until House Bill 61 was passed in 2015. Beginning in late 2011, though, my husband found a promotion on theroot.com for free 23andMe DNA test kits. He ordered one for him and another for me. We both grew up in Columbus, Ohio, but my parents’ paths arriving there made a biological relationship between my husband and I unlikely; the kits confirmed as much. The results, however, were a dead end for my husband, who could find no relations closer than 4th-6th cousin along with what seems to be an unusually high percentage of those relatives using the industry for the same purpose of finding birth family.
Eventually, a distant cousin encouraged him to also get an ancestry.com account and to upload his results into GEDMatch. Over the years, there were a few false hopes, when some distant cousin who didn’t understand how genomes work insisted his birth father must have been one of her uncles or some close male kinfolk. That all changed this summer, when my husband said someone wanted to call him. I initially rolled my eyes, because just weeks earlier I had explained to him why some other “cousin” was far too distant to be able to make any connections. But when I saw it was a second cousin, my attitude changed. And sure enough, the connection was made.
We learned that my husband’s birth father and his family did not know my husband existed. He was conceived in 1972 and born just before Roe v. Wade in 1973. His birth mother is a white woman with Appalachian roots. His birth father was a black man. The South Side of Columbus was racially segregated—Honkyville and Niggerland, as one cousin described it—leaving no space eager to embrace interracial couples or biracial babies, although of course they existed [in small numbers]. As best we can weave together the story, his birth parents attended the same high school and openly dated, resulting in the birth mother’s family disowning her, as the story goes, and many family members remembering her being at cookouts and hanging around the neighborhood with his birth father. She became pregnant shortly before what should have been her senior year in high school. We do not know what happened after that. The adoption agency’s records remain sealed, because the new law only pertained to original birth certificates. I was able to determine that the agency had no record of anyone by the birth mother’s name residing at the “home” they ran during that period. A few years after my husband’s birth father graduated from high school, he moved to Las Vegas, which is where he lived until he passed relatively young (62 years old) in 2015 just a few months after my husband got his original birth certificate.
The birth certificate did not list a father’s name. Just the mother’s name. The address listed was and still is the maternal birth grandmother’s home. It might seem that made that part easy, but as we suspected, she was not willing to talk (hung up as soon as she heard “adoption”). The birth mother has had a couple of name changes due to marriages, but just about anything and anyone can be found through the internet; I found her too. She listened as I explained about the new law and how I was helping my husband. She must not have really understood the purpose of my call until I said she was his mother. At that point there was a brief silence and then she said she was not the woman whose maiden name I used. I make my living as a researcher; I have ample documents that prove she is the birth mother, but nothing would have come from arguing with her. That left the conundrum of how to find the birth father without a name. Fortunately, technology rather than sleuthing did that work.
During the same period that the black second cousin reached out, a gang of white second and even first cousins showed up on ancestry.com—all with my husband’s last name at birth and the maternal grandmother’s maiden name. None have reached out to him, and it would seem he is not comfortable reaching out to them. The concept of six degrees of separation, however, is true. When I researched the birth mother, I discovered that unbeknownst to us at the time, our mortgage broker was my husband’s first cousin. His birth mother worked for the downtown public library that he frequented as a child and, even closer to home, during the late 1990s both my husband and his mother lived on the same street. In the meantime, and on the other side of the country, we learned that his birth father was actively involved in the lives of his niece and nephew, attending all of their sport and school events and assisting their busy parents with raising them. Everyone has said he would have been thrilled to know he had a child.
Perhaps the birth mother will have a change of heart one day. Neither she nor the birth father had any other children. Perhaps my call caught her off guard. Or perhaps that side of his family is not meant to be known. What I do know for certain is seeing my husband glow when his aunt hugged him for the first time and said how much she loved him was priceless, particularly given I know as a child and as an adult, hugs and declarations of “I love you” were denied him by the mother who raised him. I also know that knowing that his paternal birth family would have raised him had they known he existed gave him some solace and, I hope, changed his lifelong perspective that he was not wanted by anyone.