After my mom’s reaction to my query about my birthmother I didn’t raise the subject with her again. But I did start looking into it myself after her death in 1988. By that time I had a home computer with access to the Internet via a CompuServe account and then our national telephone company ISP. Both offered fairly rudimentary Bodleian search facilities which allowed me to start my online journey.
All I had to work with is my adopted name, my adoptive parents’ names and my date and place of birth as stated on my official birth certificate.
After weeks of frustrating research I discovered some information on a State of Indiana website that took hours of wading through. At least it gave me a phone number and I decided to take the plunge. Our time zones made phoning during their business hours difficult but I was determined. Then came the phone runaround that started with a stunned receptionist asking me where New Zealand was and why was I phoning from so far away.
Bureaucracies are always challenging for an outsider. Hell, it’s challenging for the bureaucrats. Reminds me of my late-friend John Kiewit’s favorite saying: “Life is like an artichoke. You go through so much to get so little.” Basically, I was passed from one person to another until I finally got to speak to someone who gave me an address to send a letter asking the same questions I’d been repeating to each new person I was transferred to. I felt like they were playing a game called ‘Pass the Bob’.
My letter contained every bit of information I could think of and I actually sealed it with a kiss before consigning it to the Airmail slot at the central post office. It would have made a great DNA test.
By the time I finally received a response I’d been able to discover a short list of adoption search services in the USA and either phoned them or send them emails asking for further information regarding their services and costs. The costs alone were enough to make waiting for an official reply more palatable.
Basically, the official response contained pages of legalese, excerpts from Indiana State laws and a form that allowed me to request details of my adoption and the names of my birth parents “if available.” However, under their current laws the request could only be acted upon if members of my biological family had also made the same request and were searching for me.
I dutifully completed the form and sent it away and never heard anything back. I was the Lone Stranger.
Years passed and the forms were now available online. So I registered another request and got a very pleasant reply informing me that moves were afoot to liberalize the current laws to allow adoptees to request information regardless of whether or not they were already being searched for by a member of their biological family. I would be notified if and when that happened.
Then came the notification that my records had been sealed by the court and could only be opened by a new court order. Catch-22.
In the meantime, my wonderful, much loved stepdad died in California. A few months earlier I’d been able to visit him in the care facility he was in and talk to him one last time. He’d been badly treated by a live-in caregiver at the home he shared with my mom in Sun City, California and his dementia had accelerated rapidly. He was a strong, generous and caring man who’d been the main father figure for much of my life and probably the only person I knew who could remain loving a loyal while living with my mom. He was a Saint.
Several weeks after his death I received a big envelop from my “little sister” who was the only one of us still living in California. It was she on whom the care decisions regarding my stepdad rested and the only one of us who visited my mom and him an a regular basis. This wasn’t made easy since my mom disliked my sister and the feeling was mutual.
While clearing out the Sun City home (on the 9th hole of a championship golf course in a climate where you could fry eggs on the hood of your car during the day and freeze at night) my sister and her husband had found a copy of my original adoption papers. For the first time in my life I learned my pre-adoption name: “Paul Edmond Hansen.”
Online search engines had developed a lot further by then, although being conversant in Bodleian search protocols still gave me an advantage. I spent many fruitless hours searching for any information connected to that name and, after years of failure, decided to give up for awhile and focus my energies elsewhere.
I got caught up in Facebook and was able to reconnect with old friends, new friends and friends of friends. One of those was the daughter of the former girlfriend who’d started me on this journey. We’d kept in touch via email but when her emails stopped and mine bounced it was a couple of years before I learned of her death. Her daughter and I became Facebook friends and one day she asked me if I’d be willing to take a DNA test. After her mother’s death she’d discovered that the man she’d been told was her father wasn’t related and having been told about me and our relationship by her mother she was thinking there was a good chance I could be her biological father. Putting the dates together I could also see that possibility and agreed to doing the AncestryDNA test and linking it to hers.
Sadly for both of us the answer turned out to be no. But I’d made my results “public” so that anyone linked to me by their DNA results could get in touch.
The Journey © Robert R. Feigel 2022 – All Rights Reserved
Pieces from a Puzzling Life 