Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Books About Birth Families

  • Reunions in Spring: Meditations for a Holiday Table–Adoption Search & Families

    Reunions in Spring: Meditations for a Holiday Table–Adoption Search & Families

    by Suzanne Gilbert

    Reunions in Spring: Meditations for a Holiday Table–Adoption Search & Families is based on civilization’s oldest adoption memoir: the book of Exodus. It enjoys a lively retelling every spring through the literary genre of the “haggadah” used exclusively to retell the stories of Moses, his…

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  • Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries

    Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries

    by Pamela Slaton (with Samantha Marshall)

    In this poignant and heartwarming narrative, renowned genealogist Pamela Slaton tells the most striking stories from her incredibly successful career of reconnecting adoptees with long-lost birth parents. After a traumatic reunion with her own birth mother, Pamela Slaton realized two things: That she wanted to…

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  • Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption

    Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption

    by L.B. Johnson

    It started with a piece of paper–a birth certificate, sent to the author’s parents long after her birth. There is much history in that piece of paper. For she was born to an unwed mother in the generation prior to Roe v. Wade, on a…

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  • She Named You Donna

    She Named You Donna

    by Julie Kerton

    It’s a January morning in 1976; Julie rips the hospital bracelet from her wrist and throws it across the room. As it lands, she doesn’t know that the sound will echo through the years. But the story doesn’t begin here. In a suburb north of…

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  • Silent Voices

    Silent Voices

    by Carlynne Hershberger

    The story of adoption is seldom told from the natural mother’s point of view. Eleven full color paintings with narrative poetry tell a story of loss, longing, power, powerlessness, surrender, grief, family and meaning. It represents the spiritual and physical connection that women have with…

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  • Somebody Else’s Daughter

    Somebody Else’s Daughter

    by Elizabeth Brundage

    In the idyllic Berkshires, at the prestigious Pioneer School, there are dark secrets that threaten to come to light. Willa Golding, a student, has been brought up by her adoptive parents in elegant prosperity, but they have fled a mysterious and shameful past. Her biological…

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  • Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    by Kelly Fern with Brad Fern

    In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean.…

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  • Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    by Catana Tully

    In this memoir, the author explores questions of race, adoption, and identity, not as the professor of cultural studies she became, but as the Black child of German settlers in Guatemala. Her journey into the mystery that shrouded her early years begins in the US…

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  • The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion, and Beyond

    The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide: Preparing Yourself for the Search, Reunion, and Beyond

    by Julie Jarrell Bailey and Lynn N. Giddens, M.A.

    This book is written by two adoption specialists, one of whom is a reunited birthmother, and draws on the real-life experiences of others to help readers prepare for the emotional turbulence of the reunion experience, examine their fantasies and emotions about it, and find a…

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  • The Adoption Triangle (reissue)

    The Adoption Triangle (reissue)

    by Arthur D. Sorosky, M.D., Annette Baran, M.S.W., and Reuben Pannor, M.S.W.

    A classic and the first to deal with how sealed and open records affect adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. Originally published in 1978,” … it is as true and open as the changes advocated … comprehensive, factual, forward looking, totally honest, readable and thoughtful…

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  • The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender

    The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption and Forced Surrender

    by Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh

    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,…

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  • The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts

    The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts

    by Catherine E. McKinley

    Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would…

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  • The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    by Kathryn Joyce

    Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. The Child…

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  • The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated

    The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated

    by Joyce Maguire Pavao

    Full of wonderful stories that give insight into a wide variety of adoption issues, now revised in light of recent developments, The Family of Adoption is a powerful argument for the right kind of openness in adoption. Joyce Maguire Pavao uses her thirty years of…

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  • The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill

    The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill

    by Rhonda Noonan

    In a family memoir that reads like a detective novel, Rhonda Noonan recounts her thirty-year quest to find the truth of her own background–and what she uncovered will surprise readers as much as it did her. Rhonda was born and adopted in Oklahoma, a state…

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  • The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

    The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

    by Ann Fessler

    In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before…

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  • The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism

    The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism

    Edited by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson

    The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and…

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  • The Presence of Absence: A Story About Busyness, Brokenness, and Being Beloved

    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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  • The Swan Garden

    The Swan Garden

    by Anne Biggs

    The Swan Garden tells the story of a young woman who survives a brutal assault and rape, gives birth in a mother baby home, and the abuse she receives in the Magdalene Laundry. After finding a way to escape, she attempts to create a life for herself, but never…

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  • To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption

    To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption

    by Arissa H. Oh

    To Save the Children of Korea is the first book about the origins and history of international adoption. Although it has become a commonplace practice in the United States, we know very little about how or why it began, or how or why it developed…

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  • Too Afraid To Cry

    Too Afraid To Cry

    by Ali Cobby Eckermann

    In Too Afraid to Cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann―who was recently awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world―describes with searing detail the devastating effects of racist policies that tore apart Indigenous Australian communities and created the Stolen Generations of adoptees,…

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  • Two Peas In A Separated Pod: A True Story of Adoption

    Two Peas In A Separated Pod: A True Story of Adoption

    by Jeannie Lachman and Carole Sanguedolce

    Take a journey with two women on the road to discoveries and realizations. Jeannie and Carole write about their lives growing up. Each is unaware of the other. Jeannie is raised in the Bronx, New York. She grows up knowing that she is adopted and…

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  • We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

    by Roxanna Asgarian

    The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children–and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the…

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  • You Remind Me of Me

    You Remind Me of Me

    by Dan Chaon

    You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager…

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