BEFORE and AFTER : AT LEAST 500 BABIES DIED IN GEORGIA TANN'S CARE and THEN THERE WERE THE STOLEN

The records are held at The Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in the Memphis and Shelby County room on the third floor., the space that houses the official archival collection of materials about Georgia Tann d the eventual demise of her empire,

Pages 226- 227

That faux-leather bank portfolio, the keeping pace of the disparate clues to Robert's biological history and mysterious adoption is a potent symbol, I've come to realize,  Everyone who shows up at our Saturday afternoon gatherings for adoptees and families has their own version of it,  Lillian has her tote bag full of records, Connie has her binder, Hanie has her wheelie crate, Brigette carried a notebook straining against the reams of information about the family members she has finally uncovered for her father, James.

A manila folder here, A display board there.  And old shoe box.

A plastic tone with a snap-on lid.

The attendees place these items with care of the library's stately antique wooden tables  Out reunion group is meeting in the Benjamin L Hooks Central Library, in the Memphis and Shelby County Room of materials about Georgia Tann and the eventual demise of her empire.

But these adoptees 'bibles' are smaller, more personal type of archive.  They're filled with decades old records and details of what has often been an excruciating search, bits and pieces of a poignant heritage in plastic sleeves" black and white photos of adoption day; the only picture of birth parents; a newspaper clipping about Tann's misdeeds; records from TCHS, retrieved from the state of Tennessee at a cost, original birth-certificates, court filings; sometimes letters to and from Tann herself.....

ONE OF THE CRUELTIES IS THAT SOME OF THE MOTHERS WERE TOLD, that after a Successful childbirth their babies DIED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!!!  The hospitals were implicit in this deception. They took advantage of young parents who had no money for a funeral and would say that all they had to do was sign and the hospital would take care of the body....  In this case there had not been any desire to adopt a child out and the parents have no idea that there's a child alive and out there somewhere.   Worse some children were STOLEN...  And some, estimated 500 did die in the care of her "receiving Home."

page 269 :
An Elmwood Cemetery lane winds its way past both elaborate and simple headstones.  The graveyard was founded in 1852 way out in the countryside, to give people a pastoral place where they could retreat from the hustle and bustle of city life. In more than a century, the city has crept near, but the original idea of a garden-like setting remains. Approximately 80,000 people people are  buried here in this historic nonprofit cemetery, safe under the watchful eyes of executive director Kim Bearden, who has run it for the past twenty years.

We are here to see only one grave. A resting place that  cradles many lives and represents many more.

Nineteen babies registered by Tann as having died in the care of TCHS lie here, their deaths recorded between September 17, 1923 and December 10, 1949. Only nineteen of the five hundred estimated to have died in the care of her system of unregulated boardinghouses and the notorious Receiving Home on Poplar Avenue are remembered here. The monument on the TCHS lot was erected just three years ago, after a historian discovered the communal plot in the cemetery's record books. He pointed out the  shame of the graves having gone unmarked for decades, the children, once more, forgotten. The cemetery raised donations for a proper marker.

C 2024 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

You can pull up past posts on Adoption using the search feature in Google Blogger or by clicking on the label adoptions.  I highly recommend using ADOPTION REGISTRIES as a first step.

SHOULD YOU USE A DNA TEST ? ADOPTION SEARCH FRUSTRATIONS and DNA TESTING - CENTIMORGANS

Recently I advised someone I'll call Monica, who was doing an adoption search for her elderly mother and was feeling frustrated with traditional genealogy, to do the paper-trail genealogy anyway because even if a DNA database offered some matches, she and the other party were still going to have to figure out the relationships. Taking a DNA test doesn't mean you won't need to do the genealogy.

Basically, and perhaps simplistically, because scientists are working on it but do not know for sure how all our DNA is moved along each generation and know there are mutations and changes, it goes like this: We have two parents (each giving us 50% of our genetics), four grandparents (each giving us 25% of our genetics), eight great grandparents (each giving us 12.5%...) We also share percentages with cousins, second cousins, and so on 

Monica is only 1/4th genetically related to her unknown grandparents on her mother's side who are very likely not alive to do any DNA testing.  And she says she is only getting into this because her mother doesn't want to die not knowing who her people are. Monica herself says she knows who her parents are and isn't interested in being tested.

People get really confused by their test results when it comes to how related they are to someone else. The measurement of relatedness is called a CENTIMORGAN and is defined as how much you're related, not just by percentage but by which strand of DNA you and another person share.  The higher the shared centimorgan, the closer the genetic relationship. But when it comes to a database match, you could share that 12.5 percent with a cousin who is alive and tested rather than a great grandparent who is long ago deceased.

Monica's mother, in her 80's now, can submit her DNA for testing through one or more companies and approve that she wants to be informed if there are any matches. To find her parents, just using a DNA test and database, a full or half sibling, likely in Europe, must also test, and then tell her who they are. Full or half siblings may not know they have a full or half sibling in America. A question she should ask the various DNA companies is if they have a comprehensive database full of customers in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.

Other persons Monica's mother is genetically related to will have to also pick the same company and give this approval. Then they will both be told via e-mail what the relationship is via percentages of relatedness, which usually translate to sibling, cousin, etc. She and/her mom are not going to get a message that says "your mother was _________, your father was ____________," and provide a genealogy chart.  No, at that point she and the other person will need to share knowledge and research.

Since Monica is an only child, she would not get any sibling matches if she did test. She might get some cousin matches, or second or third cousin matches. However, the best case scenario for her mother is a sibling match. Though in her 80's, if her parents went back to Europe and had more children, there could be people in their 60's alive there who are her siblings.  It's worth a try.  

But let's look at the cousin thing.

From my own research, I would say that I'm likely related to a huge number of people whose ancestry comes from a certain town in Europe, people who lived there in the 1800's. Why?  While my own chart reflects the straight lines of parent to grandparents and so on, I have very many family group sheets too. Two binders worth. If I include my grandparent's parents siblings and half siblings, and their parent's siblings, I can connect genetically with dozens of surnames in the 1880's, perhaps every surname in the town. I might even share genetics in some way with thousand of people by following back and forward to a great great grandfather's siblings, ten of them, who they married, and their children, who were marrying in another town in the early 1800's. However, if I took the DNA test I would only be united with those who also took the DNA test for the same company. Even with all the charts I've made, I might have to make new charts to find the way we link.  In my case when it comes to learning about people who lived before the records available for those towns, I would have to link up with someone who is the keeper of the family archive. Rumors and stories are interesting but no archival documents means it's not genealogy. My best hope when it comes to records going back past about 1800 there would be if the family was nobility. Then the family records might be held in an actual archive.

I have concerns for Monica and her mom - who could have started this quest years ago by using Adoption Registries - even before there was DNA testing - for other reasons.

Because all that her mother was told or remembers is considered "known facts" when there is no proof, it might be that genealogy myopia is wrongly focusing the research.  There is no original birth certificate, which even then might not be 100% true, since some birth mothers lied about not knowing who the father was or gave a fake name or gave the name of an ex husband, such as in the case of Marilyn Monroe, where does this leave her?  The search is for the truth, right? Yet rarely is it "just the facts." However. as this is all she has to go on, Monica is focused on Chicago.

In looking at some adoption records available through FamilySearch for Chicago I noted that while sometimes both parents were named, often just the mother was named. Implied is that the babies were born in Chicago, I noted that marital status was not mentioned. That what is available there is not very useful.

The story goes that her mother's parents "went back" to a European country after leaving her mother for adoption in Chicago. This was between World War I and World War II and during the Great Depression. Two surnames came forth with an oral history somewhere along the line but while one may check out because it's fairly common, the other seems to not be spelled or pronounced right. It would probably be spinning the wheels to look at immigration records for the common surname just to see if there was some trend of immigration, some town or country consistently mentioned for the common name.

As for the surname that seems false, there are rare surnames but frankly with so much on the Internet, if you put in a search in Google for that name, and it is not coming up any which way and no suggestions are coming up either, well, maybe it's never been a surname. I tried some variations and maybe if we knew for sure what the ethnicity was, we might be able to find someone native in that language and see what they know. We might be able to find surname lists and see if there is any name that is close.The Soundex used on Slavic names is German and that's not a match, sorry. Wish there were a Soundex for Slavic names!

My feeling is that this would be putting the cart before the horse.

The story went that in the late 1930's this immigrant couple had this child and gave it up before returning to their home country.  It happened, but there is no proof they were married. It's not certain then that they were immigrants who were simply too impoverished or ill to make it in America... There's no proof they were immigrants.  There's no proof they went back anywhere.  

Any situation could have been the reality. The woman could have been raped. She could have had an affair. They could have had very many children already.  (I once met a man whose parents had 13 children.They kept the first ten and adopted out the last three, he being one of them.) However, if they were a young married immigrant couple and had this one child, a first child who was healthy, it's my feeling that in their culture, unless they were both without family themselves, very likely by returning to Europe with the baby, they could have had family support there. The steamship ticket back to Europe cost some money, even for steerage/3rd class and I don't think there was an extra charge for an infant. But OK, they thought giving the baby up was the only thing to do. 

Ah well, we know it is all speculation. Speculation as well as understanding what was happening in the time and place that all these things happened can sometimes get us to where we want to go with research.

Now, this is where the paper trail genealogy for the family that adopted Monica's mother is also important.  Based on Monica's testimony about where her mother was raised, where her mother went to live after both of these adoptive parents died, we did some research. 

(Note added February 16th.  Please read this carefully.  The following is about Monica's mother who is in her 80's and wants to know who her people are and what we learned about the people who adopted her...)

We learned that her mother's adoptive parents died, one after another and not long after she turned 18, something Monica did not know and had not been told. Certainly her mother knew that. Where her (adoptive) mother took Monica to live after she was alone in raising her, connected to her (adoptive) mother's side of the family. Yet Monica had never met any relatives! Whatever happened, her mother did not keep or have these connections for long enough for Monica to connect with them.  Perhaps they too heard some stories?

I discovered the adoptive family had relatives in other states but not that the adoptive parents ever lived or worked in Chicago during the census periods. Based on the adoptive father's profession on the census, I could imagine he could have gotten work there, maybe even gone to school there, and then moved home.  How is it that a woman from Pennsylvania married a man from Kansas? Knowing where the adoptive couple met and where they married, what church perhaps, would allow for some questioning and clues. It appears that the adoptive parents started out life in two different states and went to live closer to the father's side. 

The very large city of Chicago was very likely a hub for parents who wanted to surrender their new born baby for adoption though they came from elsewhere or were just passing through. It could be traveled to from many parts of the country due to outstanding train services. Couples who wanted to adopt from all over could go to Chicago to find a baby. For a mother or parents who wanted a baby to get a good home, or who wanted to not be local to the adoption, a big city might be the answer. But Chicago was certainly not the only place a baby up for adoption could be found in the 1930's. Finding an original birth certificate for Monica's mother issued in Chicago, Cook County, or in Illinois is the logical step.

The first stop for religious people to adopt a child was often an agency or organization run by the very church they were members of. That's why I want to know if the couple married in a Church, what religion. It might lead me to a care home for babies or an orphanage. This adoption through a Church run place was once considered very important. Still is to some people. So Catholics might go to a Catholic orphanage. But if you were not religious, not affiliated with any church, then you would likely go to a county or other agency. A couple could also do a private adoption in which a doctor or lawyer might find you a child, usually one of their patients or clients who presented that possibility.

By doing the paper trail genealogy, the traditional way, we were able to find some interesting truths about Monica's mother's life that she had not mentioned. Monica's mother never said that her adoptive parents both died or why or how and so soon after she turned 18. Death certificates could be compelling. Monica's mother never mentioned an early marriage not long after she turned 18. Or a divorce. She has only admitted to two marriages and two divorces. However, it appears that, after her parent's death, relatives on both her adoptive mother's side and adoptive father's side must have been concerned for her and that she might have lived with them a while before that first marriage, based on locality. Perhaps, as was the case again with Marilyn Monroe, this early marriage might have been considered the best case scenario for her, an arrangement that proved to be based on desperation.

Everyone is entitled to their privacy, their secrets. Monica's mother might have deep emotions she felt best to bury when raising Monica. However, that she kept some of these secrets does make me wonder about the information she's provided in hopes of finding her heritage.

I advised Monica that there are different DNA tests for different purposes and the one her mother took a few years ago was only for ethnicity. I urged her to continue with the other options such as putting herself and her mother on adoption registries and to continue her Chicago based research, as some new options have opened up in Illinois.

Note: In order to keep the privacy of the individuals in this genealogy case which is presented here for educational purposes, some changes have been made.

C 2023 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

You can bring up my adoption posts here at Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot by clicking on the label 'Adoption" or for the series  Adoption Strategies - AWG. 

BYPASSING GENEALOGY USING REUNION REGISTRIES: ADOPTION #2

Why is this post number two instead of further down the line? 

Well, if an adoption happens in the United States, much depends on the rules of the state and when the adoption occurred. A person's adoption can be Closed or Open.

Closed Adoption is the traditional way. Closed means that the adoptee may be entitled only to non-identifying information. That means the identity of the birth mother and father were not meant to be revealed. The birth parents were guaranteed privacy. It was thought to be a clean and permanent break that was best for everyone. 

Information such as "mother is recent immigrant and unwed who has TB" is non-identifying. "Mother is Susan Smith, a resident of County TB hospital" is identifying.

After birth, a child is usually issued a "birth certificate" (and some hospitals also gave parents one from the hospital - I have both) but rather than certifying a birth it's intended to certify the parents and who is responsible. A mother can claim a father is unknown or name someone - her husband or another man - and who knows what's true. (Actress Marilyn Monroe/ Norma Jeane Baker faced this issue. DNA testing may have the answer.) But original birth certificates are right about who the mother is, unless there were quite unusual circumstances in which a deception was pulled off. (Such as in the biblical story of Moses.)

When a legal adoption occurs, a new "birth certificate" is issued, called an AMENDED birth certificate. The adopting parents' names go on the paperwork and a new certificate with a new number is issued. If you're an adoptee this is the birth certificate, you'll get from your state of birth. 

Open Adoption means that information about the birth mother and father will be available but that doesn't mean at no charge or instantly or that the person will be alive and locatable.

I've heard of modern adoption agreements that include yearly photos and letters sent by adoptive parents to the birth mother. Some make agreements that the child may only have the information from their parents after the age of 18. This all in the last 20-30 or so years when children to adopt have become more difficult to find. Why? Because of legal abortion. Because there is less stigma about illegitimacy and more unwed mothers decide not to allow adoption and raise children as single moms. And because, oh I hate to say this but, adoptive parents still prefer babies and it's become competitive. An older child in foster care may be available but well, it's like some people only want a puppy from a private owner and won't take a shelter dog. (My dog is a shelter dog. I'm her third human mom.) Oh. I know it can be more complicated than that but having had a friend who earnestly and expensively tried to adopt and failed I think it's gotten ridiculous. 

Sometimes a parent doesn't tell the child they're adopted. I've heard of deathbed confessions. I've also heard of a parent going through a divorce suddenly telling a teenager before a custody battle. And DNA testing has revealed affairs and now plays a part in searches and reunions.

There are a few ideas about why an adoptee might want to know those who provided their genetic inheritance and why they have a right to know. One reason that seems less important these days is medical information. Getting the medical information used to be a good reason to unseal a Closed Adoption and appealing to a sympathetic judge sometimes worked. But rarely. You see, our medical knowledge has rapidly advanced and now it's understood that a good yearly physical is better information than the old idea that a person should know that a birth parent had certain medical condition.

Same goes for mental illness. What difference could it make to know mom had schizophrenia or dad was a vet with shell shock? Maybe it's genetics. Maybe not.

I'll refute that idea that medical and mental information about parents isn't a valid reason to unseal a Closed Adoption a bit in a future post.

Yes, sometimes a genealogist can run with some basic information and quicky come up with the answer of who or where a parent is. It depends on if the person was told the truth in the first place to tell the genealogist the truth. 

Because one person I did a search for relayed the truth and because of the Internet, my all time record for finding a father who was never in his daughter's life was one afternoon. It made me wonder why her mother wasn't more curious - or if mom knew where he was all along.

Working with another genealogist years ago, we together were about ninety percent certain in one afternoon that a birth mother belonged to a certain family. 

In the first case the woman could've picked up a phone. 

In this second case we thought that if we went to a certain house, we would encounter the family members who might know something. (Not that we would. The next step was being contemplated. Showing up on a doorstep demanding answers is not such a good idea.)

In either case, the adoptee was more than surprised. Unable to cope. Frozen in indecision. Due to the rapidity. 

If a person was adopted in a state where adoptions were Closed, you may have no chance of opening up the files. Which is where an adoption registry can be the answer. Many states have them.

There are possible ways around it, which I'll get into, but before I do I want to say that I think being in therapy, be you the birth parent or the adoptee, is a good idea. The not knowing really bothers some people and can create anxiety. Sometimes a person fears what they will learn. They may feel guilty for wanting to know. The adoptive parents may be uncomfortable or object. A person might not know how to integrate a found birth parent into their life or find they don't want to. A spouse may not be on board. A birth mother may have been under legal age and forced by her parents to give up a baby, married later, and never told her husband. Parents who put their children in an institution may have suffered despite this being their only option. Rape is the reason for too many conceptions and that trauma may be too much to deal with.

I can't take a poll but it's my guess that unwed motherhood was and is the number one reason children were given up, poverty being the second. 

So many children are now born to single mothers - without a father in their lives - but into the 1970's there was still a stigma about unwed motherhood. In the 1960's and 1970's parents were still sending underage and unwed daughters away to other states to have babies. To this day there are homes for unwed mothers run by religious organizations and where abortion is condemned. As I hear it there is immense pressure for mothers to give up their babies for adoption in these places. 

A person doesn't know how knowing their birth information will affect them. This is why having a therapist to talk to can possibly help.

So, about those Closed Adoptions. 

My friend's husband, previously mentioned, remembers having a younger brother. Relatives told him years later that this brother was taken away from their mother in the 1960's and put into foster care. He assumes the little brother was adopted. This all happened in the state of Florida. My strong suggestion was to sign up for the Florida Adoption Reunion Registry. (FARR) Even if this brother was not adopted, his half-brother has no right to ask for his birth certificate in Florida. If he were allowed to have it, the existence of it with their mother's name on it would tell the story that he lived out his life in foster care. There wouldn't be a name change. We could find him. 

My suggestion was to sign up with FARR. 

FLORIDA ADOPTION AND REUNION REGISTRY

California also has an adoption registry. Using it, a young man who signed up as soon as legally able was reunited with a brother within a week.

I know you can research it and locate other registries.

Here is a free one that's possibly the oldest and largest!

INTERNATIONAL SOUNDEX REUNION REGISTRY

Soundex is a search method for bringing up surnames that sound alike.

C 2021

Adoption Strategies - AWG

LET'S TALK: ADOPTION #1

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

MEDICAL GENEALOGY - KEEP THOSE DEATH RECORDS IN PERSPECTIVE

A long time ago I was listening to a radio talk program by the then popular Doctor Laura.  Someone who was adopted called in and wanted to locate their birth parent.  Among the reasons why was medical information.  Doctor Laura said that medical science was so on top of things (in so many words) that this was a dumb reason to find a birth parent.  And this was before DNA and an understanding about hereditary diseases!  Needless to say I could not disagree with Doctor Laura more.

Recently I was researching for someone who has a once in a life time opportunity to tour a European country with a church group.  He and his wife plan to depart from the group and spend about a week touring through ancestor homelands.  He lost a young son to colon cancer a few years ago and then was diagnosed with it himself and is surviving.  I'm thrilled that he will be well enough to go on this trip.  So I went ahead and, beginning with his father, verified which of several candidates with a fairly common surname in a small region of a particular state was his, found his father on census records, and discovered that his grandfather, who had died before he was born, had gone through an evolution of given names, which is making finding him coming in on a steamship or naturalization records that will tell me the name of the town his grandfather left over a hundred years ago a little bit tricky. Currently I have a declaration of intent that might be his, but no completion of citizen ship documented. 

I went ahead and got the death certificate for his grandfather and from the information printed on it by the attending doctor, there was a description of lesions on the colon.  (The word cancer was not used.) Tears sprung from my eyes at the realization that there is a familial aspect to this cancer.

The reasons why someone dies...
I recently listened to an audiobook by a popular author who does some hypnosis to help people heal from trauma, including the trauma of their previous deaths and violent experiences, such as rape, loosing limbs, car accidents, death in childbirth.  Hearing a long list of reasons why, I was reminded of all the death certificates I've seen.  Some of them come with oral histories from the family, for instance a carpenter who burned up in a fire.  The doctor noted his whole body was burned.  The family says he was the victim of arson by the mob.  Reading the death certificate I would not know that, and I may check some newspaper databases to see if there is any mention of the fire - or the mob.

One adoptee I know has made medical decisions based on the fact that breast cancer is rampant in her birth mother's line, which she would not know without having found her and done the genealogy.


C 2018 Ancestry Worship Genealogy  - All Rights Reserved.

THE RELUCTANT RELATIVE - FOSTERING and ADOPTING - WHO CARES WHO THE ANCESTORS ARE?

I am deeply impressed to learn that one of my relations became the single mom of six children as she adopted five of the many foster children she was presented.  She lives in a state where adoption is inexpensive and where there is financial help for those who cannot afford to do so otherwise.  This too impresses me. 


Now a retired senior citizen, she recently told me that she's not much into genealogy.  I'd hoped that she could share memories with me that she had, because I was way too young or not even born yet when she had them.  What did she remember about certain relations who are a mystery to me?  After some sharing, she told me that her genetic daughter is not interested and the other children who she adopted don't care about their birth families or the heritage of their adopted mother.  Nobody is interested in searches or charts.  The chances are good that searches - such as adoption registries - would bring up parents who were fairly local at the time, and might still be.  She assures me that none of her children want the mess.

I thought it was brave of her to say all this in a matter of fact way, as she referred me to another family member who is "into" the family history and genealogy.  I contacted that person more than once, but have not heard back.  Meanwhile, I gave the oral history, all that I'd heard or knew, and what was on documents, to the reluctant relation.

I am not going to push.
No I'm not.
I've run into the brick wall that is another person many times.

As much as possible, I will respect her wishes.
I will never put anything on the Internet or in a database about her family.

Will one or all the children eventually change their minds?
I think it is possible, after she has passed on especially, as this is the one and only parent all of them have ever gotten to know.

Another issue with this person, if issue is the right word, is that she doesn't understand what little stories about a person's behavior or attitudes mean to me or people like me.  Certainly one incident doesn't necessarily typify their entire life, but she found that one woman burned garlic to rid the house of evil spirits stupid, while to me it verified the woman's peasant beliefs, folk beliefs that mixed with her Catholicism.  Ethnographic details can be extremely helpful also if you're trying to figure out someone's allegiance to their ethnicity.  In some parts of the world where there were many tribes or ethnicities living near each other, at the time they certainly knew the beliefs, as well as clothing, food, language, and other differences people had.


C Ancestry Worship Genealogy  All Rights Reserved  2017

LOCATING A BIRTH PARENT ? OHIO ADOPTION REGISTRY IS JUST ONE OF MANY

There are a number of adoption or reunion sites on the Internet. 

Reuniting a birth parent and child is often a sensitive issue. 

I'm not going to pick a favorite site. I'm going to say that I've used the state of OHIO which seemed very helpful (so I'm linking above) and that I ran into a legal rut in MISSOURI when the adult person's adoptive parents refused to sign papers that would allow their son to see those papers. Every state has its own laws, and we must obey them. 

Here's the thing you should consider: DO YOU WANT INFORMATION FOR EVERYONE WHO LOOKS AT A SITE TO SEE UP ON THE NET OR NOT? 

Personally, I don't think you do want to post or read off the wide-open net. I think you want to have to register and sign in each time you look in a "members-only" site with restricted access.

What if you don't have the money for a Private Investigator or you are sensitive about invasions of privacy or don't have someone's Social Security Number (let's face it, the SS number IS a national ID) or there has been great bitterness? Can you emotionally handle researching this yourself? Genealogy research is sometimes a way around hiring a PI. Like so many other professional assignments, much depends on how much accurate information a person can give me from the start, and often adoption is surrounded by secrecy if not outright lies told to children. It also depends on where the adoption took place and the laws of that country, state, and county and the contract of adoption. 

Recently. I helped a woman who was over 70 find out the truth about her birth mother. She said she was ready. She was adopted at the age of 5 and was told by blood relatives, whom she located herself as a young adult, that her mother was a skid row bum. I found evidence of a divorce and early death, but skid row? That may have been a way that her adoptive parents and family prevented her from looking for her birth mother. Maybe the mother had a drinking problem, maybe not. I suspect this mother was probably mentally ill and not understood as such in those times. THE DEATH RECORD we sent for will tell this 70 year old woman more and allow her to visit a grave site for the first time. Sadly, it turned out this woman was actually surrounded by relatives including grandparents much of her young life, and they knew where she was, but everyone stayed away. They wanted no contact with her as an adult either. She lived her life feeling as if she was contaminated by her mother's reputation. 

So, if you have the guts and are ready yourself, try a registry or two or three. Believe it or not, I know of a reunion that occurred no more than two weeks after registration! That was in the state of California, and it was handled by phone calls from the registry and an intermediary.

C 2011  Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

HIS BIOLOGICAL FATHER IS CHARLIE MANSON

There were a lot of news articles on line to pick from but this one from THE SUN, has great photos showing the likeness that confirms that Charlie Manson, the infamous head of the Manson Family and Los Angeles DJ Matthew Roberts are father and son.

I'm posting this, not for the lurid aspect of this breaking news, but because adopted as children, many people feel it is important to find their real parents. It varies from state to state and the laws and contracts at the time of adoption, but through adoption registry sites, at the age of 18 a child can post seeking a parent.

This has to be one of the more rewarding areas of genealogical research for me, but at this point this is my advice to Matthew Roberts. Even when all paperwork and looks are persuasive, get a DNA test that confirms the match!