Category: Search/Reunion
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NoBODY Looks Like Me: An Adoptee Experience
by Lora K. Joy; illustrated by Laura Foote
NoBODY Looks Like Me represents what it is like for an adoptee to grow up in a family where they are not genetically related to anyone. There is a longing to know where your eyes, nose and hands come from. When an adoptee decides to…
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Finding My Way Home
by Kirsten Weatherford
Finding My Way Home is a journey. It is a journey across the ocean, across the country, and out of the adoptee fog. The roadmap that was hidden away by a 1970s closed adoption is unearthed, and the trail begins to clear. It leads not…
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Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story
by Mary Cardaras
“With searing detail and lean, crisp prose, in Ripped at the Root Mary Cardaras tells the story of Dena Polites, a woman born to a young unwed Greek couple who was adopted by married Greek Americans in Ohio. Polites’s tale serves as a focal point…
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Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go
by Laurie James
Laurie James spent most of her life wondering what it means to belong; loneliness dictated the choices she made. She rarely shared this secret with others, however; it was always hidden behind a carefree and can-do attitude. When she’s in her mid-forties, Laurie’s mother has…
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Home is Where the Heart is: An Adoption and Biological Reunion Story
by Jenni Alpert
Years after being taken away from her birth parents as a baby by the state and then being adopted out of the foster care system at age four, singer-songwriter Jenni Alpert decided to search for her birth father with the help of a private investigator,…
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American Bastard
by Jan Beatty
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents–and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups–and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This…
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Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home
by Jane Blasio
From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these…
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Tree of Strangers
by Barbara Sumner
“‘I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here, and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road.’ I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983.…
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Living in the Know: The Adoptee’s Quick-Start Guide to Finding Family with DNA Testing
by Geraldine Berger
Part memoir, part quick-start guide, Geraldine Berger, “The Genetic Genealogy Coach,” shares her own journey to living in the know. The search for her birth parents spanned a cumulative thirty-four years, due to sealed records, aliases and other erroneous information. Berger tells you which DNA tests…
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Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir
by Kevin Barhydt
Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after…
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All Morning the Crows
by Meg Kearney
Kearney draws on her acute powers of observation, a lively curiosity, and her gift for gorgeous imagery to take us on a journey of personal exploration, discovery, and reconciliation. Surprising poems bring together the parallel but discreet worlds of humans and birds, which speak to…
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Life In-Between: A Story of Adoption, Recovery and Connection
by Julia F. Richardson
Born in 1958 and given up for adoption Julia’s story is an exploration of a search for love, belonging and identity. It is a story of relinquishment and reunion, of trauma and hope. It is a tale of overcoming addiction and learning to live with…
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Together At Last: Stories of Adoption and Reunion in the Age of DNA
Edited by Paul Lee Cannon, Nancy Lee Blackman, Cerrissa Kim, Katherine Kim, and Linda Papi Rounds
Together At Last is a collection of first-person stories that explores the intersection of multiple histories: the Korean War, military camptowns, immigration, and transnational adoption. Taken together, they challenge us to rethink the legacies of the un-ended Korean War and re-evaluate the foundational role that…
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Memoirs of an Adoptee: One Person’s DNA Discoveries, Reflections and Insights
by Craig Harris
A middle-aged man’s search for his biological family. Having lived his whole life thinking about where he came from, while yearning to understand the missing answers to his self-actualization, DNA matches opened the door for him to get answers from genealogical research. With each discovery,…
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The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book
by Megan Culhane Galbraith
Shortly before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, adoptee Megan Culhane Galbraith was born in a Catholic charity hospital in New York City to a teenaged resident of the Guild of the Infant Saviour, a home for unwed mothers. Decades later, on the eve of becoming a mother…
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Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging
by Julie Ryan McGue
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…
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The Lonely Child: The Journey of Search to Find My Biological Family
by Susan Moyer
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…
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Searching For Me: An Adoptee’s Journey of Faith, Family, and Belonging
by Scott Sullivan
Being given away for adoption just days after being born left a mystery around Scott Sullivan’s life that tugged at his analytical mind, fueling a sense of self-doubt throughout his introverted life that affected his friendships, his faith, and amplified his insecurities. Hoping to uncover…
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The Gift Best Given: A Memoir
by Edward Di Gangi
“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…
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Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness
by Andrea Ross; foreword by Miriam Peskowitz
Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she…
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Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir
by Rebecca Carroll
Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation…
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American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
by Gabrielle Glaser
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…
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We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders
by Paul Kimball
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,…
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Finding Vicki Sue
by Barbara Saunders Brownell
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…
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The DNA Guide for Adoptees: How to Use Genealogy and Genetics to Uncover Your Roots, Connect with Your Biological Family, and Better Understand Your Medical History
by Brianne Kirkpatrick and Shannon Combs-Bennett
This book is for you if you have hope that DNA testing might open up the search for information about yourself, your origins, and your future. We’ve worked hard to compile the resources in this book and explain in plain English how DNA and genealogical…
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Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised Somewhere Else): A ’60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home
by Colleen Cardinal
During the Sixties Scoop, over 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their biological families, lands, and culture and trafficked across provinces, borders, and overseas to be raised in non-Indigenous households. Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh delves into the personal and provocative narrative of Colleen Cardinal’s journey growing…
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The Presence of Absence: A Story About Busyness, Brokenness, and Being Beloved
by Linda Hoye
We wear busyness as a badge of accomplishment and personal success. But when we use it to fill a void, being busy can become an addiction. Busyness helps us feel better—or feel nothing—but the benefit doesn’t come without cost. Adoptee Linda Hoye used it to…
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Two Hearts: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Grief to Gratitude
by Linda Hoye
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…
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I Met Myself in October: A Memoir of Belonging
by Jacob Taylor-Mosquera
I Met Myself in October: A Memoir of Belonging is a thought-provoking true adventure discussing international/transracial adoption and what it means to belong to two countries and two families. Taylor-Mosquera weaves together the intricacies of struggling to belong to the Black and Latinx communities in…
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Faith, Hope & Perseverance: An Adoptee’s Journey To Finding Biological Family
by Diane Gray
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…