Category: Search/Reunion
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You Don’t Look Adopted
by Anne Heffron
Adoption can be wonderful and tricky. There is love of the parents, love of the child, but there can also be problems. The adopted child often wonders Who am I? Who was I? Why was I given up? When you don’t have a sense of…
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Thank God I Was Adopted ‘Cause DNA Is No Joke!
by Pekitta Tynes with Janice Young
Abandoned in a shot house and left without a birth certificate, I was an UNKNOWN. I lived in foster care and later adopted into a wonderful family. After 35-years of searching, I found my biological family through DNA testing. This book is an inspirational journey…
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The Truth So Far: A Detective’s Journey To Reunite with Her Birth Family
by Jennifer Dyan Ghoston
How do you use a document like the amended birth certificate given to an adoptee as a legal representation of the entire truth? In this memoir, Jennifer Dyan Ghoston examines that question based on her role in law enforcement for over two decades. She shares…
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The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy
by Blaine T. Bettinger
Discover the answers to your family history mysteries using the most-cutting edge tool available to genealogists. This plain-English guide, newly revised and expanded, is a one-stop resource on genetic genealogy for family historians. Inside, you’ll learn what DNA tests are available, with up-to-date pros and…
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Heartlines: The Year I Met My Other Mother
by Susannah McFarlane and Robin Leuba
In 1965, Robin, unmarried and pregnant, comes to Melbourne to give birth and give her baby up for adoption, then returns to Perth to resume her life having never seen her baby. After 10 days alone, the baby is taken home, named Susannah, and made…
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A Girl Named Connie
by Carol Perkins with Connie Wilson
In 1946, being adopted was a social curse and a lifelong sentence. I was born that year, but not to prosperous business owners, Bill and Cloteel Wilson as I had thought. When I was six weeks old, they brought me to their rural Kentucky town,…
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My Secret
by Joanne E. Sayre
What if you found out that you were adopted and everything you thought you knew about your family, your security, was shattered? My Secret is about my 40 year quest for truth about who I am. But, more than that, this story is about overcoming…
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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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An Australian Son
by Gordon Matthews
Autobiography of Gordon Matthews. Adopted at birth, he grew up in the 1950s in middle class Kew. Through a series of circumstances Matthews came to believe he was of Aboriginal descent. Passionately, he formally embraced this identity and acquired a profile in the diplomatic service.…
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Adopted Out: A Memoir of Closed Adoption and Blackness
by S.M. Ezeff
While searching for her birth family, S.M. Ezeff discovered there was a shortage of African American adoptees speaking out and came to realize that agency-based adoption is still taboo within the African American community. Constantly being asked if her adoptive parents were Black, she learned…
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The Mysteries of Eva Miller Revealed
by Eva D. Miller
Former American Idol contestant Eva Miller takes you on an inspiring journey of both tragedy and triumph. Through her courage and faith Eva set out on a mission to unravel the mysteries that shrouded her life, she never knew what could possibly await her. Join…
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An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love
by Caitríona Palmer
Caitríona Palmer had a happy childhood in Dublin, raised by loving adoptive parents. But when she was in her late twenties, she realized that she had a strong need to know the woman who had given birth to her. She was able to locate her…
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The Mistress’s Daughter
by A. M. Homes
The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the…
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Journeys After Adoption: Understanding Lifelong Issues
by Jayne E. Schooler and Betsie L. Norris
What can we learn about the experience of adoption from those who have taken that journey? How can those touched by adoption navigate successfully through the issues of search, reunion, and aftermath? Will those answers have a positive impact on adoption today? Drawing upon the…
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Billie’s Kid: A True Story About Adoption
by Steve Tucker
Jazz musician Steve Tucker has always known he was adopted and has spent nearly fifty years tormented by thoughts of who he is, where he came from, and whom he looks like. Like many adoptees, he embarks on a journey of discovery when he goes…
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Restored: Pursuing Wholeness When a Relationship Is Broken
by Deanna Doss Shrodes
Have your hopes been dashed into pieces when you tried to make a relationship work and the other person didn’t respond as you wished? Have you asked someone to forgive you, but he or she didn’t respond as you desired? Have you prayed for healing…
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The Mouse Room
by Susan Ito
Susan Ito is a struggling college student, a young adult on the cusp of parental independence, when she meets her birth mother for the first time. Instead of launching into adulthood, she finds herself entangled in longing for this new kind of mother love where…
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A Family Apart: Sleuthing the Mysteries of Abandonment, Adoption and DNA
by Craig A. Steffen
A Family Apart: Sleuthing the Mysteries of Abandonment, Adoption and DNA is a fascinating ride into the methodical quest of an orphan to uncover the truth about his origins. Even more, this book delves into the questions that come from being uncertain about the realities…
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Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
by Jillian Lauren
At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The “casting director” told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties.…
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I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother
by Peggy Barnes
Peggy Barnes’ recently unsealed birth certificate arrived just after she buried the woman who raised her. She discovered her entire life had been a lie. She was born at The Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers to a young woman from the back hills of…
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Surviving Secrets
by Margaret Watson
A true story that reveals the strength and resilience of the human spirit in the face of betrayal, grief and loss. At age forty, Margaret Watson learned she was adopted. This shocking and confronting truth was previously unknown to her and turned her whole world…
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How to Greet the Mother Who Bore You (A Short Story)
by Matthew Salesses
Before Teddy and his parents moved to Korea, the adopted nine-year-old knew almost nothing about his birth mother. But once they arrive in Seoul, the boy begins to scan the face of every passing woman, wondering if she might be the one who gave him…
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Lucky Girl
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. In 1974,…
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Red Dust Road
by Jackie Kay
From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red…
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You Belong to Us
by Molly McCaffrey
On April 5, 1970, Molly McCaffrey was born in a Catholic hospital and given up for adoption when she was six weeks old. Nearly thirty years later, she met her birth mother who had spent the time since McCaffrey’s birth working at that same hospital,…
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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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My Fathers’ Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging
by Hannah Pool
What do you wear to meet your father for the first time? In 2004, Hannah Pool knew more about next season’s lipstick colors than she did about Africa: a beauty editor for The Guardian newspaper, she juggled lattes and cocktails, handbags and hangouts through her…
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Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel
by Susan Fedorko
Susie always knew she was adopted out at the early age of eleven months. She discovers at the age of forty who her biological family is. Susie discovers her birth mother is the first Native American supermodel “Cathee Dahmen.” This is her story. Adoptee Author: Susan…
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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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The Search for Anna Fisher
by Florence Fisher
The document lay in the bottom of the bureau drawer. Written in longhand was a name: Anna Fisher. “Who is Anna Fisher?” seven-year-old Florence asked her mother. The woman yanked the paper out of her hands and told her never again to mention that name.…