Julie is adopted. She is also a twin. Because their adoption was closed, she and her sister lack both a health history and their adoption papers―which becomes an issue for Julie when, at forty-eight years old, she finds herself facing several serious health issues. To launch the probe into herRead More →
Growing up, Susan always felt something was missing in her life. Then, at age sixteen, her parents finally told her their Big Secret. Susan was adopted. With no information regarding her birth family, but with hope and determination, Susan ventured into the unknown to put together the pieces of her own personal puzzle. TheRead More →
“Like a jigsaw puzzle, every story is made up of pieces; big ones, smaller ones, pieces not easily found, tiny and hiding, essential to complete the picture.” At almost seventy years old, Edward Di Gangi had never given much thought to the fact he was adopted. However, a cemetery visitRead More →
During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love and became pregnant.Read More →
Paul Kimball, a biracial adoptee, explores his own abandonment issues as he searches and eventually reunites with his birth parents. After a seemingly joyous reunion, his birth mother, a Caucasian professional cellist, rejects him. This causes him to seek out his Armenian birth father who, along with his extended family,Read More →
Finding Vicki Sue is an engaging memoir full of history and insight which chronicles growing up in South Bend, Indiana as an adoptee in the 1960s and beyond. Fifty-six years after her birth, the author’s adoption file was obtained which explains the missing piece of her life story. This bookRead More →
Linda Hoye was in her early twenties when she found herself parentless for the second time. Adopted at five months of age, her heritage, medical history, and access to information about who she was or where she came from was sealed. It was as if she had never existed beforeRead More →
It is our human right to know who we are. After her adoptive parents passed away, Diane decided to take the DNA plunge to find her biological family. Learn how she found her biological family after years of wondering who she was and why she was born. With the helpRead More →
This is an adoption story of two people; a birth mother and a son who briefly meet on a turbulent afternoon in 1967 in Flint, Michigan. They spend the next half century separated by a few miles and a million regrets. Various circumstances keep them apart until a random phoneRead More →
In her charming collection, Mary Ellen offers glimpses of adopted life in an Air Force family. We travel from her South Carolina birthplace, through several states, and three years in Tokyo. A taste of permanence is found in their New Jersey home, but her quest to find a home ofRead More →
Adoptions are finalized daily across America. Like the root system of a giant oak, tentacles of its history are submerged in years of human experience. Native Americans adopted children and adults into their tribes before pilgrims settled in the New World. Early-day adoption advocates took detailed notes of tribal organizationRead More →
A gifted young man endured a tormented childhood at the hands of his mentally troubled adoptive mother. Told that his birth mother had died to give him life, he shouldered the blame yet still found the strength to attempt the impossible. With a week’s worth of clothes and a guitar,Read More →
Searching for Mom is a “disarmingly honest” mother-daughter story. Sara Easterly spent a lifetime looking for the perfect mother. As an adoptee she had difficulties attaching to her mother, struggled with her faith, lived the effects of intergenerational wounding, and felt an inherent sense of being unwanted that drove her toRead More →
Secrets, sacrifice, lies, love, abandonment, acceptance, grief, joy, regret, jubilation, and fortitude are nestled within the pages of A Twenty-Year Journey. Join me as I share the twists and turns of my pilgrimage with you. Incredibly my circle of existence is quite small, yet the cast of characters grows daily.Read More →
Knowing where you came from often determines who you are. At the age of forty-five, Nancy Feldman knew how her doctor appointment would go. They would ask her about her family’s health history, and she would hear the doctor’s familiar sigh after she answered, “I don’t know, I’m adopted.” BeingRead More →
Based on a true story of an adoptee’s search for identity and purpose. Never quite feeling like she fit in, struggling in relationships, and getting in trouble, until she learns about a group that helps adoptees and birth families search for each other. Searching for her birth family, she foundRead More →
Forthcoming August 2019. Available for preorder. Dr. Charlotte Laws, the most well-known unknown, is a TV star, best-selling author, and world-renowned advocate for women, animals, and the LGBTQ community. NBC News calls her a crusader. BuzzFeed voted her one of the 30 fiercest women in the world, and MSNBC labelsRead More →
Born in a California women’s prison in 1963, Laureen Pittman was relinquished for adoption. As a child, Laureen was conditioned to believe that being adopted didn’t matter. So, it didn’t . . . until it did. Through scraps of information, Laureen stitched together her history – one that started in theRead More →
In this thoughtful book, sociologist Katarina Wegar offers a new perspective on adoption and the search debate, placing them within a social context. She argues that Americans who are embroiled in adoption controversies have failed to understand how much the debate, adoption research, and the experience of adoption itself areRead More →
Adoptions that cross the lines of culture, race, and nation are a major consequence of conflicts around the globe, yet their histories and representations have rarely been considered. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption is the first critical study to explore narratives of transcultural adoption from contemporary Britain, Ireland, and America: fictions, films,Read More →
Being adopted is one thing. Being adopted and navigating the complexities of having unexpected relationships with both biological parents is something quite different. Having two sets of parents can be an incredible gift, but it can also be unimaginably complicated and challenging. Its often filled with mixed emotions of theRead More →
Lyrical and informative, An Adoptee Lexicon is a glossary of adoption terminology from the viewpoint of an adult adoptee. Contemplating religion, politics, science, and human rights, Karen Pickell, who was born and adopted in the late 1960s, intersperses personal commentary and snippets from her own experience with history and statistics pertaining toRead More →
Growing up with a secret is never easy. While mine seems innocuous now, it caused me a lot of pain in 1978. As an adoptee from the closed system where secrecy ruled, I felt adopted but never born. So when my birth father called me out of the blue atRead More →
Nearly 50 years after he was relinquished for adoption, Rudy Owens learned how fortunate life can be. In 2014 in San Diego, Owens met his biological half-sister for the first time. That meeting inspired Owens to tell his adoption story set against the larger adoption narrative that has impacted millionsRead More →
MAY 2014. The Irish public woke to the horrific discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of almost 800 babies in the “Angels’ Plot’ of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home. What followed would rock the last vestiges of Catholic Ireland, enrage an increasingly secularised nation, and lead to aRead More →
In this poignant and powerful memoir, David B. Bohl reveals the inner turmoil and broad spectrum of warring emotions shame, anger, triumph, shyness, pride he experienced growing up as a relinquished boy. Adopted at birth by a prosperous family, Bohl battled throughout his earlier years to keep up a good front andRead More →
An expose of unethical and coercive adoption industry practices during a short period in American history known as the Baby Scoop Era (Post WWII – 1972). By sharing the actual printed words of social caseworkers, maternity home personnel, lawyers, judges, medical and mental health practitioners, the methods used to ensureRead More →
Zara H. Phillips seemed to live a charmed life — backing singer to the stars with an incredible career here and across the Atlantic — but her smile masked a difficult childhood and the reality that she was adopted as a baby in the ’60s. Her life soon spiraled and,Read More →
As Houston’s beloved KPRC weatherman for more than 20 years, Frank Billingsley seems like a relative to many people. His optimistic presence comes into their homes and reassures that even the gloomiest of rain clouds probably has a silver lining. He has such a way with people that it isRead More →
What do you do when you are an adopted adult, trying to balance biological and adoptive families in addition to your own home life? How could being adopted have an impact on your career, your friendships and parenting decisions? What do you do when your biological family members still doRead More →