Introductions

Please allow me to introduce myself.

Before my court issued adoption papers were processed and the court order sealed name assigned to me was “Baby Hansen.” By the end of the proceedings it was changed to “Paul Edmond Hansen. Paul and Edmond remain a mystery, but Hansen was the name of my birth mother’s husband. Records show they were still married when I was conceived. However, the DNA test I took in 2020 confirms that he was not my father.

My official adoptive name is Robert Richardson Feigel. Robert appeared to have been my adoptive mother’s choice and the Richardson was both my adoptive parents’ fathers’ middle names and could be the last thing they ever agreed on.

Those are the names that appears on my official birth certificate but it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to discover that, like my official named, the date of my birth had been altered – possibly because I was born a few minutes after midnight. I’ve also discovered that I wasn’t born in Deaconess Hospital in Evansville, Indiana as I’d been told, but in the “Christian Home” which, as far as I’ve been able to find, was a privately endowed institution for unwed mothers.

Since a great deal of effort went into concealing the circumstances of my birth and I’ve since learned that my biological father was never informed of it I have come to accept that being of mixed race and fathered by someone other than the husband wasn’t something that would make me a more attractive adoption choice in 1941. Then I don’t know what part my birthmother’s relationship with her husband played in her decision to go out of her way to hide my birth. He had enlisted in the Army Air Force in April of 1942 (or just over 4 months after I was born) and had listed a boyhood friend as his next-of-kin rather than his wife. And he had enlisted in Boise, Idaho and not Point Girardeau, MO, where my birthmother lived.

It appears that I was conceived in Port Girardeau while my birthfather was investigating a suspected arson claim for his law firm. Ironically, Cape Girardeau is also where his grandfather was born: Charles W. Kal-We Bluejacket, who was the last hereditary chief of the once thriving Shawnee tribe that occupied the Ohio Valley before being dispossessed.

My birthfather was born on and buried on the Blue Jacket reservation in Craig Country, Oklahoma and of Scottish/Shawnee ancestry. He was a descendant of Jacobite Scots who escaped the highlands and landed in the “Carolina Borders” after the Battle of Culloden and was a direct lineal descendant of the last paramount war chief of the Shawnee tribe, Waweyapiersenwaw Bluejacket – two clans that had been deprived of their homelands and cultures. According to my DNA results my ethnicity breakdown makes me Métis – or mixed Anglo-European & Native American.

As none of my previous names reflect my ancestry I can’t help but wonder what name I should choose for myself should I decide to change my adopted name.