After three years of playing amateur private investigator, I finally found the rest of my son’s birth siblings’ adoptive families. I desperately wanted more information on my son’s family medical background than I was given by our state. I wanted to know if the other families got more information on my son’s birth parents character as well. Here is the story on how we made contact. For easier reference and safety purposes, I will refer to my son’s birth siblings by their maternal birth order rather than their names.
My son is the 6th child of 8 by his birthmother. Children numbers 2 through 8 are believed to be fully biologically related. After our son was placed with us, we expressed desire to have some sort of openness with the adoptive birth family. We didn’t expect visits, but had hoped for at least email correspondence. Oregon’s Department of Human Services (DHS) looked in their records and found only one adoptive family with current or valid contact information and this was baby number 5’s family. DHS passed our information along to number 5’s family and we started email correspondence with them thereafter. Though they live out of state, we’ve met a few times in person and exchanged information from each other’s files that neither of us had prior.
After managing to track down my son’s old case worker who’d worked on his case about a year before his placement with our family, I took the opportunity to interview her regarding my son’s birthmother and father (personality traits etc…). Since she recalled the adoptive family of children 2, 3, and 4 wanting contact with future siblings’ adoptive families, she provided me with the adoptive mom’s new married last name. With this bit of information I was able to plug in her and her husband’s name to my search engine. Problem was there were many people with the same name throughout the United States. Number 5’s mother was finally able to locate an address! I wrote to the address introducing myself using my son’s prior info, but unfortunately, the letter was returned marked “undeliverable, return to sender”.
I continued on and used PeopleFinder.com. I searched by both the adoptive mother and the adoptive father’s names and made a connection by matching common cities they’d each lived in. This still didn’t provide me with an exact address; for this I’d have to pay and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.
I took the information from PeopleFinder.com and went to ZabaSearch.com plugging in the adoptive mother’s name for each state. What it did was provide me with several addresses and I just had to find what the most recent at the time was. Once again, I wrote out my letter of introduction to the family with my personal information, not sure I’d have mail again returned.
About two weeks later, I received an email from the mother who’d adopted my son’s siblings, 2, 3, and 4! Apparently, my letter arrived at her mother-in-law’s home. Since, I’ve met this mom once when she came out for a visit. Unfortunately, she lives several states away and was unable to bring her children. This family is pursuing the adoption of babies 7 and 8 who are at this time in state custody.
In finding this family I found the legal guardian of baby 1 and the maternal great-grandparents. We’ve met all of these people more recently. I was reluctant at first to open our family up to other birth family, but that’s another story.
Melissa is a Families.com Christian Blogger. Read her blogs at: http://members.families.com/mj7/blog