I have a
name! Uh, now what?
Part 4 of:
Shea's Search Series: The Definitive Guide to
Self-Empowered Adoptee Search
Reprinted by permission
Eventually, the forces of luck, hard work,
and patience will have combined in your search
efforts to bring you to the point where you
have a name to work with. You might have just
a first name, a first initial and a last name,
your birth name, or one of your birthparents
last names or full names. Or you might have
a name and have no idea how it ties in to your
birth and adoption at all. At this point, your
search will take a very different turn. Heretofore,
you have been engaged in a search like no other.
Scrounging around for clues hidden within sealed
records is a difficult procedure, made harder
by the emotions and taboos that surround the
whole exercise. Tracing names, however, is something
that groups and individuals from genealogists
to bill collectors engage in, resulting in 'how
to' books, archives, and assorted other resources
that far outnumber the few items available to
adoption searchers to this point. Further, when
you are researching a name, 'genealogy' is a
good cover story, one that is, technically,
even accurate. On the down side, many searchers
often find themselves, up to the discovery of
a name, coasting merrily along. It has been
relatively easy to forget temporarily about
a search, or to put a hold on search efforts
in the midst of a work or family crisis. Once
you have found a name, however, you may find
yourself feeling like you're out of a control
on a speeding train. It becomes very difficult
to think about anything else, and many searchers
find themselves obsessed. At this point, it
sometimes becomes more affordable and more practical
to turn the search over to a private investigator.
On the other hand, once you are armed with a
name, many searches become much more simple,
and the end looms ahead, but many searchers
find that 'just around the corner' is a phrase
they'll use many times over several more months
or even years. Each search and each situation
is different As difficult as it is, try to treat
the discovery of a name as you have every other
bit of information, a piece of the puzzle (albeit
a very large one) to be looked at along with
all the other pieces.
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City directories
City directories were discussed in an earlier
post, and they will likely be something that
you have become very familiar with in the course
of your search. At this point, they can be your
best friend. City Directories are a lot like
phone books. They contain listings of businesses
and individuals, their addresses, and their
phone numbers, and are bound by city,or groups
of towns, or regions. These books are usually
hardbound and can be found in university and
public libraries for surrounding areas, usually
from about 1930 forward, but often much earlier.
City directory listings contain more than phone
books do, however, such as occupations, places
of employment, and the names of others living
in the same household, such as spouse or adult
children. The first thing you should do with
your newly acquired name, assuming that you
have a last name to work with, is go to the
library and check out city directories for the
period of time shortly before when you were
born and/or adopted. You might not know exactly,
or even vaguely, where your birthparent(s) were
from, but the city directories can help you.
Start with the city or town where your adoption
agency was located or the city or town where
the court finalized your adoption. If you only
have a last name, make copies of the pages that
contain all entries with that last name. Next,
move to the city directories for suburbs or
small towns nearby. Buy a map and draw a red
cricle with about a 150 mile radius around the
city or town where your adoption was handled.
Check the city directories or old phone books
for every community in that area. Then, sit
down with all of the copied pages, (abbrieviations
in the city directories for occupations are
usually explained at the beginning of each volume,
so make sure you have made a copy of that page
as well, for reference) and your search journal,
and try to match up some information. For example,
if your birthmother was a teen and likely living
at home, then try to see if any of the listings
match what you know about your grandparents,
such as retired miltary or that your grandmother
was a seamstress. .If you might have your birthfathers
or birthmothers name, and they were college
students, look for all male and femals listed
with that name who were students. Remember,
if you have a first name, that it could be a
nickname, or a middle name. Eliminate the listings
that you can, but keep them somewhere in the
back of your search journal just in case. As
with any other piece of information that requires
you to search in the area of your birth and/or
adoption, if you do not live in the are or cannot
get to the library or institution of research,
call the library that houses the information
and ask about hiring a research librarian to
do the research for you. Usually the will do
so at a nominal fee, such as the cost of copying
the documents, or a small hourly charge. Another
option is to find a volunteer who will do 'legwork'
for you in the area you were adopted. You can
find a search buddy on a mailing list, post
a note on alt.adoption and soc.adoption.adoptees,
or check out the Volunteer
Search Network.
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Medical Records, Birth certificates, and other
documents
Now is the time to try and obtain your hospital
records and other documents that you haven't
been able to get. Again, just because you have
a name, don't assume that the clerk will be
any more receptive to your adoption story. DON'T
MENTION ADOPTION. Write for your hospital records,
including the full fee, as 'Baby Girl' or 'Baby
Boy' (last name) if you do not have your given
first name, and include all the other information
you have, such as mother's first name. If you
are male, you will need to sign your request
with your birthname. Women can use the fact
that many will assume their names changed upon
marriage. Also, it's worth a shot to try and
write for your original birth certificate. Scribble
illegibly all of the information you don't know,
(such as first names).
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Baptismal certificates and other religious
records
If in the course of your inquiries, you are
able to determine if you were baptised shortly
after birth, or if you were placed by a private
agency with a religious bent, particularly a
Catholic agency, you might be able to obtain
a baptismal certificate that could contain information
about your birthname and birthfamily. Churches
in general keep excellent records and if there's
any indication that your birthparents were active
in a church or specific organized religion,
it pays to look into it further. Again, utilize
city directories to find what churches were
in the area of your birth and/or adoption at
the time of the adoption.
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Birth announcements
While in most cases, an adoptee born to an
unmarried woman or who was scheduled to be adopted
after birth, will not have a birth announcement
in the papers, mistakes have been known to happen,
so it pays to make check announcements for the
date of your birth in the papers for the city
or town of your birth.
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Marriage/Divorce records
Marriage and divorce records can be incredibly
useful. In most states, these records are open
to the public, and some progressive counties
have even computerized them. You will probably
not be able to send a written request unless
you know with some certainty the date of the
marriage or divorce, so you will need to go
to the courthouse in the county of your search
yourself, find a volunteer to do it for you,
or utilize a Family History Center, which will
be discussed in more detail below. In most counties,
marriage records are organized by decade and
are available on microfilm. Sometimes they will
be sitting out in a common area for anyone to
use, along with several microfilm readers. In
other counties, you will have to go to the counter
and request to look at certain decades. Given
that you, in all likelihood, will have no idea
when, where or who your birthparent(s ) married,
the search is usually suprisingly easy. The
records are usually organized alphabetically
or by soundex rather than chronilogically, and
they are indexed first by the groom's name,
with the bride's name listed beside it, and
then at the end of those entries, they reverse
them and list them first by brides name, so
you can search for either your birthfather or
birthmother using marriage records. The point
of a marriage search is twofold. First off,
if you only have a last name, you are trying
to find someone with that last name who matches
the age and other information of your birthparent,
in order to obtain their first name. Also, in
the case of a birthmother, she will likely not
have retained her maiden name, and you will
need her married name in order to locate her.
The marriage entries will have file numbers
next to them, and you should copy down all of
the ones that are relevant, then you will return
to the counter and ask for hard copies of the
marriage licenses with the file numbers that
you notated. Marriage licenses usually contain
helpful information such as birthdates or ages,
places of birth, current residence, and the
name of witnesses to the marriage.
Remember that there is a decent chance that
your birthparent(s)did not get married in the
county of your birth, but there's also a good
chance that they did. If your search proves
fruitless, however, pursue the same strategy
that you did with the city directories, by widening
your search. If you need to narrow the dates,
try locating your birthmother in a city directory
listing, then searcing marriage records for
the year when her entry falls out of the city
directory. That could just indicate a move,
but it could also indicate a marriage.
Divorce records will often yield more information
than marriage licenses, but they can be harder
to gain access to, and harder to search.
If you need to know where a local Vital Records
office or Department of Health is located, and
what you might find there, Family
TreeMaker has an excellent Webpage that
will tell you who has what records, for what
years, and gives addresses and phone numbers.
If you are searching in the UK or Ireland, check
here . You might
also want to check out RMI
services online. Some of their services,
such as SSDI lookup, can be done for free by
you and a lot of other people online, but they
also offer very reasonable prices on marriage
record searches, DMV records, SSN traces, and
tons of other stuff.
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Obituaries
Hopefully your birthparent(s) are not deceased,
however it is possible that one or both of your
grandparents will be. You can find the deaths
of everyone with the last name that you are
working with by looking in the state death index
(available at most libraries) or Social
Security Death Index , then look up the
obituary in the appropriate newspaper or obituary
index. Many obituaries will give details on
the name and location of the surviving children
of the deceased, which in this case will be
your birthparent(s). SOme newspapers have archived
their obituaries online. Genealogy Resources
on the Internet has a link to some of these
on their obituary
page.
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Military and military personnel records
If you have a name, and an indication from
your non-ID or other sources that members of
your birthfamily served in the military, there
are sources on and offline that can provide
you with other crucial bits of information.
The Freedom of Information Act allows individuals
to request certain records on both living and
decased military personnel regardless of their
relationship to the individual, or reason for
the request. Information obtainable under the
FOIA includes Name, Service Number,Rank,Dates
of Service,Awards and decorations and City/town
and state of last known address including date
of the address. If the veteran is deceased you
are entitled to Place of birth, Geographical
location of death, and Place of burial. To find
out where to write for records, visit the National
Archives and Records Administration site
dealing with military personnel records.
For those searching in Canada, The National
Archives of Canada has personnel files of
over 5,500,000 former military and civilian
employees of the Canadian Armed Forces and the
Federal Public Service. Documents in these records
contain information about the individual's employment
history with Federal Departments, the military
units with which he or she served, pension details,
and more.
Military
City offers a searchable database of active
duty, reserves, and some deceased military men
and women, and the
United States Combat Casualty Digest offers
a searchable database for Vietnam War and other
military casualties.
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Family History Centers
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,
or the Mormon church, keep the best genealogical
records in the United States, and quite possibly
in the entire world. Their main genealogical
library, or Family History Center, is located
in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is a goldmine of
information for searchers, including, but not
limited to, county histories, newspapers/periodicals
containing obituaries, vital record announcements,
etc. in microfilm collections, the Old Parochial
Register of Scotland (lists extracted entries
from the Church of Scotland baptism and marriage
registers), the Australia, New South Wales Pioneer
and Federation Index (lists birth, marriages,
and deaths available from the Australian Civil
Registration office), Obituary Index, Patriarchal
Blessing Index, LDS Ward Records, Church Census,
Utah Immigration Index, military records in
book and microfilm, birth indices, the Social
Security Death indices and further Military
records on CD-Rom, with computer workstations
set up for viewing. The best part of this wonderful
resource is that you can order pretty much any
of the FHC holdings through a local FHC and
have it sent their so you can use it. There
is a list of all the Family
History centers in the U.S and Canada here.
Now, there are several things you need to know
before you set foot in a Family History Center.
First off, the Mormon Church is one of the few
that have a formal position on closed adoption
records, and they support them. Blabbing about
your adoption search will put a quick end to
your progress in most cases. The second thing
is that even if you do not mention that your
search is adoption-related, when you ask for
a certain resource, particularly a birth index,
their suspicions will be raised. You might be
told that a given resource does not exist, or
that all adoption entries have been purged,
or you might be told to leave. FHC helpers and
attendants in general, have been trained to
vehemently maintain that their resources do
not contain any information that will help you
to find a living person. It's all a bunch of
hooey. You need to learn what the holdings of
the main FHC in Salt Lake are, how to order
them, and how to use the CD-Roms to your advantage.
If you must ask the attendants for assistance,
try to keep it basic, and if it appears that
they are not going to be helpful, as politely
as possible terminate the conversation and give
it another shot on your own. If you encounter
severe resistance, go to another local FHC.
Some are much better than others.
There are guides available that cover how to
use Family History Centers. Check at your library,
contact your local genelaogical society and
the FHC's themselves for versions of these guides.
Also, many groups schedule yearly genealogical
trips to the main library in Salt Lake. Again,
contact your local genealogical society, and
check your library for postings and bulletins
about such trips, as well as workshops. Also,
I recommend that you visit here
for various FHC related information.
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Yearbooks
Yearbooks can be very useful, especially if
you have just a partial name, or just a first
name. Many libraries contain the complete collection
of both highschool and college yearbooks for
the cities in the area, often going several
decades back. If not, you can contact the Public
School District. Most school districts have
archives where their yearbooks are stored. Here
is an instance where your non-identifying information
will come in handy. Use the ages of your birthparent(s)
to determine the dates of their school enrollment,
use the physical descriptions to narrow down
your choices, and use the 'interests, sports,
and hobbies' to clue you in to clubs or teams
they might belong to, or the information given
about what they might be majoring in in college.
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Online Phonebooks
If you have a particularly unusual name, or
you arrive at the full name of a birthfamily
member, or you're just curious as to how many
person with the name live in Arizona, or any
other state, online there is a national telephone
directory called Switchboard. Canada also
has one that covers all provinces except Alberta
and Saskatchewan, Canada411. There's
a good index of international
phone directories that currently covers
over 40 countries, and has links to additional
international resources for locating individuals
overseas.
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General Genealogical Resources
As we have already discussed, once you have
a name, an adoption search will become much
like any other genealogical search. There are
thousands of genealogical resources available
to the intrepid. Yes, many resources will focus
on tracing ancestors several times removed,
resources hundreds of years old. But many other
resources will contain information that applies
to the way records are kept today, or the way
they were kept when you were born. By simply
using an Internet search engine, such as Alta
Vista, and plugging in the word 'genealogy',
nearly a quarter of a *million* entries pop
up, and yes, you can make great strides in your
search if you have a name to work with. Many
large cities have separate sections in their
public libraries devoted to genealogy. Many
cities and towns have genealogical societies
that meet monthly. Read the Usenet newsgroup,
soc.genealogy.*, and the FAQ's
associated with it.
Re-read the books that I have recommended in
previous posts, as you will likely have skipped
over the information that centers on searching
with a name, particularly;
"Adoption Searchbook, The: Techniques For Tracing
People" 3rd Edition. Mary Jo Rillera. 224p.
1993. Triadoption
"Search - A Handbook for Adoptees and Birthparents",
3rd Edition. Jayne Askin. 1998. Oryx
"How to Find Almost Anyone Anywhere" by
Norma Mott Tillman
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Connecting the Dots
Now that your search journal is stuffed full
of copies of city directory pages, obituaries,
yearbook entries, international genealogical
index listings, and heaven knows what else,
you might be feeling overwhelmed. It's important
to remain organized. Use all of the information
at your disposal to eliminate as many of the
entries as possible, and to highlight certain
names. Pay attention to entries or names that
keep resurfacing, then make a list in order
of priority, starting with the persons that
you think are most likely, and ending with the
least likely. If you have developed any kind
of rapport with your adoption agency, contact
them with the name(s) that you have and see
if they are willing to confirm or eliminate
some pieces of information (although take everything
they say with a grain of salt). If you have
documents that you received from the agency
or court or attorney that are whited out or
otherwise censored, see if you can determine
the length or number of spaces of the names
that are whited out, and compare them with the
information that you have. If you are unable
to determine who the name that you have belongs
to (birthfather or mother), keep in mind the
ethnicity notated on your non-ID (although,
again, take it with a grain of salt) and see
if anything there gives you a clue.
Future posts will cover making contact with
your birthparents, but even if you call up individuals
with the intention of just gaining some genealogical
information to further your search, you may
inadvertantly end up with your birthmother or
father on the other line. I know, it happened
to me. So be prepared and discreet with every
phone call that you make. If it becomes clear
that you are speaking to a relative, you might
want to wrap up your conversation and get off
the phone to compose yourself and ponder your
next step.
This post was authored by Shea
Grimm, sheag@oz.net, except where otherwise
indicated. It may be copied and distributed
freely, in whole or in part, as long as it is
not sold, and as long as this notice is kept
intact.
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