Category: Domestic US
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Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others
by Eric Mueller
Family Resemblance is a multiyear photo project that documents and celebrates people who are genetically related and bear a strong resemblance to each other. As an adopted person, photographer Eric Mueller always wondered how it would feel to look like someone else. At age forty-five,…
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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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The How and the Why
by Cynthia Hand
Cassandra McMurtrey has the best parents a girl could ask for; they’ve given Cass a life she wouldn’t trade for the world. She has everything she needs—but she has questions, too. Like, to know who she is. Where she came from. Questions her adoptive parents…
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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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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…
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Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections
by Veronica Breaux and Shelby Kilgore
Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections is a collection of short narratives from those who have been adopted. Adoptees of various ages, backgrounds, and experiences were asked discuss the joys of adoption and the struggles of living a life of secrecy and lost…
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Looking Into Alice’s Eyes : An Adoption Journey of Loss, Self-Discovery, and Peace
by Robert L. DuBois
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…
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Permanent Home: A Memoir
by Mary Ellen Gambutti
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…
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Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)
by Mary S. Payne
An estimated six million Americans are adopted. The development of laws and regulations facilitating this process has been shrouded in mystery. “Adoption’s Hidden History” is for anyone who has ever been touched by adoption. From Myra Clark Gaines’ nineteenth century court fight for recognition as…
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Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)
by Mary S. Payne
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…
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Shadows of the Night: How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters
by D.L. Byron
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…
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Searching for Mom: A Memoir
by Sara Easterly (with Linda Easterly)
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…
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Hey, Kiddo
by Jarrett J. Krosoczka
In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka’s teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett’s family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett’s life. His father…
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A Twenty Year Journey: An Adoptee’s Search for Answers
by Cathryn B. Stanley
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…
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Who Am I: A Journal to Guide the Search for Your Birth Family
by Rebecca Crofoot
Rebecca Crofoot served as a caseworker for the Nebraska Children’s Home Society for over forty-two years. About thirty of those years were dedicated to assisting clients with search and reunion. Because people are increasingly searching without the assistance of an adoption expert, Crofoot developed this…
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Family Medical History: Unknown/Adopted
by Nancy Kacirek Feldman and Rebecca Crofoot
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…
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Goodbye, SaraJane: A Foster Child Writes Letters to Her Mother
by Sequoya Griffin
Dear Mama Katherine, This is your daughter SaraJane. I know you named me Sequoya at birth and I haven’t seen you since I was ten-years-old. I want you to know that SaraJane is the name my adoptive mother gave me. I was going to look…
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The Son with Two Moms
by Tony Hynes
Tony was taken in at the age of three by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons, after being separated from his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. After that time, he was shuffled in and out of his grandmothers home before being placed in an orphanage, where…
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Out of the Birdcage: Memoirs of an Adoptee
by JH Dunn
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…
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They Chose Me: An Adoption Story
by Denise Lynnette Defoe
Raw and informative, They Chose Me: An Adoption Story shares the gripping story of Denise Defoe who was relinquished for adoption at birth. Adopted at the age of two by a loving family, Denise still struggled intensely with feelings of grief, abandonment, lack of self…
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Fixing the Fates: An Adoptee’s Story of Truth and Lies
by Diane Dewey
The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection―but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d…
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Finding Joi: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Love
by Joi R. Fisher
We all have a right to know about our birthright. Finding Joi: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Love centers around one woman’s plight to connect the dots to find her birth parents after being adopted at two months old by a loving family…
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Forbidden Love
by Lisa Jones Gentry as told by Joe Steele
Forbidden Love is the true story of Father William Grau, a black Catholic priest, and Sister Sophie Legocki, a white Polish-American nun who, in the segregated fifties, defied the church and society with their passionate secret love affair that lasted for nearly a decade and…
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I Didn’t Know I Was Black Until You Told Me
by Thomas Kirst
An inspirational book detailing the profound changes in the life of a black child being left at a hospital after birth. Thirteen months into his life being adopted by a white couple that migrated from Europe before World War II, who would later adopt over…
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Undercover Debutante: The Search for My Birth Parents and a Bald Husband
by Charlotte Laws
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…
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Who Am I Really: An Adoptee Memoir
by Damon Davis
“Who Am I Really?” is a question many adoptees ask when they realize they have another family of genetic relation. Damon L. Davis shares his journey through life as an adoptee to becoming an adoptive parent himself. He explores his desire to find his birth…
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mami calls me gabriella
by Doriana Gabrielle Diaz
mami calls me gabriella is a collection of poetry written during Doriana’s trip to Puerto Rico from 07/07/18 – 07/14/18 to meet her birth mother and birth family for the first time. Adoptee Author: Doriana Gabrielle Diaz Publication Year: 2018 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All…