Adoption Day is today.  My adoption, that is, which became official 76 years ago today.

We – society, I mean – have a rather fixed idea about families.  Some people’s ideas are more fixed than others.  Non-inclusive, you might say.  But that non-inclusiveness flies in the face of the expanding reality, and understanding, of family; who is family, who gets to be family, even whether some people are or should be allowed to be or have a family.  Not that any of that is someone else’s business.

DNA testing has played a part in expanding the extent of family, revealing previously unknown (or unacknowledged) family ties.  Family ties may not be quite the right term.  Nor would family connections be quite right either.  That is because the things and situations and people revealed don’t always bring joy or connectedness for those to whom the revelations come, bidden or not.

I say that as an adoptee, and as someone deeply interested in genealogy and family history.  These two things are not always the same, by the way.  Genealogy is, or certainly tries to be, a record of what actually happened; where, when and with whom it happened.  Family history is a story or collection of stories about what we think happened, or what we were told happened.  I’ve seen examples of this in my adoptive family, in my birth family, and in genealogical research I have done into other families.  For example:

The child the father didn’t know existed.  Father isn’t the right term here, since the man in question impregnated a woman during a short relationship, gave her money to have an abortion (when abortion was completely illegal), then soon married someone else and moved to a distant state.  By definition, of course, he was the biological (or birth) father.  And he was surprised, 47 years later, to discover that the woman had used the money for something other than an abortion.  He declined to have a relationship with his child, even though he and his wife never had children.  Nevertheless, the child was there in the world.

The woman fathered by a man who couldn’t father children.  The man in this situation had the mumps when he was a child and, as one of his aunts told the woman he had just married, they “went down on him”, rendering him incapable of biological fatherhood.  There is evidence to the contrary, though.  A woman he had dated before his marriage was pregnant, and accusing him of abandonment and alienation of affection (great alliteration, there).  The matter was settled out of court, but the supposedly sterile man was indeed the father.  Long after he had died, his then 45-year-old adopted child met the then 60-year-old birth daughter.  The former was struck by how much the latter resembled, both physically and in traits, their shared father, biological and adopted.  In addition, she had a photograph of her father, handed down from her mother, that was identical to one the adoptee had inherited.  A pity, he thought, that she never had the opportunity to meet her father.

These examples are from my family.  Families, actually, both birth and adoptive.  There are many more stories like this, in families everywhere, whether they know it yet or not. 

In the course of doing research for a woman who grew up in New Jersey, I found that the maternal grandmother, whom she had been told passed away when the woman was a child, had in fact died when my client was 30 years old. The truth had been kept from her because her grandmother had spent the last few decades of her life in a mental institution near where my client lived at the time.

Secrets are sometimes kept to avoid embarrassment, or potential shame, or guilt.  That was true fifty years ago for this woman’s family, and it’s still true today for some families. 

After both my adoptive parents had died, I began to search for my birth parents.  I found them fairly quickly, in a matter of months, but I had help from the agency in Dallas through which I was placed for adoption.  Hope Cottage was and is supportive of birth parents and birth children connecting, if both of them want that.   Texas is a closed records state, so I had to sue Hope Cottage to have access to my adoption file.  They did not object, and a judge ordered them to open the records.  There was a lot more to my searching, of course, but I found my birth father (who did not want to have a relationship with me), and then my birth mother (who did want that).

I learned that I have an older half-brother on the maternal side, and quite a large family on the paternal side, some of whom are in Ireland.  Like most stories about adoptees finding their birth parents, this story has both the bitter and the sweet. 

My father shared some genealogical information with me, while neither denying nor acknowledging his paternity.  After that, he had no more communication with me.  

My mother was very happy to meet the son she had given up for adoption in 1947.  She explained that, because my brother’s father (to whom she was not married) was killed in World War Two, she felt that being a single mother in that time and place – Allentown, Pennsylvania – she couldn’t give me a proper upbringing.  (I did not, as it happened, have a warm and loving upbringing in my adoptive family, in which I was an only child with an unhappy, inflexible mother, but that wasn’t my birth mother’s fault.)  Things ended up not going well between me and my birth mother, but as I wrote, there is both bitter and sweet in life and families. 

My half-brother was polite, but wasn’t interested in a relationship.  I think he was not pleasantly surprised to find out, at that point in his life, that he had a sibling, of sorts.  When our mother died, he didn’t let me know.  I found out when a Mother’s Day card I sent her was returned, with the word DECEASED stamped in bold lettering on the front of the envelope.  He later self-published a book that was ostensibly about finding out about his father, but was mostly critical of his mother.  Our mother.  He cast me in a fairly negative light in the book, but he was telling a story, not writing a genealogy. 

Such are the people and relationships that can come into your life as the result of searching for your past, whether by research or an in-home DNA test.  For me, both through research and DNA testing, many kind, lovely, accepting people – relatives now –  have come into my life, people whom I feel blessed to have found. 

One of them, a first cousin, was the first in my father’s family to acknowledge and accept me.  He died on St. Patrick’s Day in 2013, leaving behind his dear wife, Monica Jennings. I am so glad I had the chance to know you, Matt, if only for a too short time.  Thank you for helping to open the door to my family.

Another, also in my father’s family, was my first cousin once removed, Mary Nolan McGowan, who came from Belfast, in the North of Ireland, to York, Pennsylvania, and helped raise the family of one of my aunts who, like Matt, passed away much too soon.  Mary welcomed me into the family unreservedly, and warmly.  I owe much to her kindness.  The last time I spoke with her was on St. Patrick’s Day in 2016, a few months before she died.

Now, on this St. Patrick’s Day, I am cherishing the memories of you both, and the blessings you both brought into my life. 

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh.