I was in high school before I met someone who had been adopted. She felt different. I have no idea if she ever sought her birth parents. Since then I've met several people who have been on that path for years.
About 135,000 children are adopted a year in the United States, about 15 percent of those being from a parent or parents who give up a baby, according to adoptionnetwork.com.
26 percent of children adopted by Americans are brought in from other countries these days.
Other adoptions occur when a step-parent officially adopts their partner's child in which case there are known birth parents. Such children can do genealogy charts for their genetic and legal lines of parentage without trying to get through sealed adoptions.
Like all interesting subjects, adoption is a complicated one.
I usually don't plan my posts for this blog very far in advance but last December, months into Corona-19 plague, this history we are living through, I noticed an increase in readership, friends started working on their genealogy again. I also found myself back to working on my book.
One friend called me to say that their husband had decided he wanted to find a little brother he remembers, a brother who got adopted.
The death around us makes some of us think about our lives before the pandemic which we've been living in such a limited way. Who do we love? Who did we love? For some of my friends it's, "Why didn't I have that baby?
Why do I blog about genealogy research and family history writing beyond the fact that the subject never fails to excite me and has only become more so because of the additional knowledge due to DNA science?
My intention is to help other researchers and urge readers towards personal professional standards as well as adding some sizzle to your family history writing with research.
You know from reading ANCESTRY WORSHIP Genealogy BlogSpot that I'm also into reincarnation, which in Western culture is still Alternative Spirituality. I could've avoided mentioning that, though it surely turns some readers off, but I want to be authentic. I believe we are more than biological entities and this life we are experiencing has meaning. The idea that we incarnate within a family on assignment is interesting. So are the memories of other lives and different families reported by children. And I love the idea that our transition out of the body during death is not alone. That someone who went before us is there to greet us and that person may be an ancestor.
I'm a researcher and writer and spiritual explorer as a human being. It's understanding the human condition and being human myself that helps me connect with clients.
Genealogist and their clients used to be thought of as snobs, intending to prove connection to people to brag about, but my experience is just the opposite. People from every heritage want to know more about their ancestors, those on whose shoulders they stand.
Sometimes what we have to remember is their endurance and persistence through hardships. How are we like them? Not? Can we imagine their lives? Could they imagine ours?
(Could my GGmom born in Europe in 1888, who watched the moon landing on a black and white television, holding her head in amazement, imagine one of her descendants on a tourist trip to Mars?)
Genealogists find documents that are evidence of human life and sometimes I think we understand it better than most people. Things that individuals or families are ashamed of: we're not shocked, we've heard or seen it before - most of the time. We are also the keeper of secrets. So, when I post about research experience, I make sure to keep some details private, change names, if I use any, and most often I let some time ago by to also put that veil of privacy over them.
I hope upcoming posts about Adoption will be helpful to you. You can find previous posts on adoption in my archives or click on the label "adoption."
C 2021 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot
This post is part of a series. To pull up all the posts in the series, click on the tag
Adoption Strategies - AWG
