Category: Search/Reunion
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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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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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Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled…
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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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Voices from Across the Sea: An Adoption Memoir Uniting Two Worlds
by Lora V. Keleher
A memoir sharing my journey to South Korea to meet my biological family and the feelings I experienced growing up as an interracial adoptee. It touches on pain, abandonment, alienation, racism, love, and more. Adoptee Author: Lora V. Keleher Publication Year: 2019 Critical Reviews: Adoptee…
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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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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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Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir
by Jenny Heijun Wills
Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well…
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My Name Is Why
by Lemn Sissay
How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how. At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given…
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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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Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World
by Christina Rickardsson; translated by Tara F. Chace
Christiana Mara Coelho was born into extreme poverty in Brazil. After spending the first seven years of her life with her loving mother in the forest caves outside São Paulo and then on the city streets, where they begged for food, she and her younger…
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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…
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Paper and Spit: Family Found—How DNA and Genealogy Revealed My First Parents’ Identity
by Don Anderson
Like many adoptees, Don Anderson wanted to know where he came from. But would he be setting himself up for disappointment by searching? Would he discover parents who were not alive—or worse, parents who didn’t want to know him? Would he be able to find…
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The Lies That Bind: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Rejection, Redirection, DNA, and Discovery
by Laureen Pittman
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 –…
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Adoption, Identity, and Kinship: The Debate over Sealed Birth Records
by Katarina Wegar
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…
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Through Adopted Eyes: A Collection of Memoirs From Adoptees
Edited by Elena S. Hall
Through Adopted Eyes explores the world of adoption from the viewpoint of adoptees. Russian adoptee Elena S. Hall shares her own story and thoughts on the subject of adoption in addition to interviews from other adoptees of different ages, heritages, and perspectives. Whether you are…
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Beyond Two Worlds: A Taiwanese-American Adoptee’s Memoir & Search for Identity
by Marijane Huang
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Marijane was adopted by an American military family at four months old. She grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in the deep South where hers was the only Asian face among a majority of white. Raised to believe she was Vietnamese…
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The Last Year
by Amelia Banis
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…
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An Adoptee Lexicon
by Karen Pickell
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…
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Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption
Susan Devan Harness
In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents.…