Category: Search/Reunion
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Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein
Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn’t until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What’s more, after being separated as infants, she…
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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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Outer Search Inner Journey
by Peter Dodds
In this riveting memoir a woman in post World War II Germany relinquishes her infant son Peter to an orphanage where he’s adopted by American parents and brought to the United States. Separated from family of origin and ancestral homeland, Peter grows up alienated in…
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The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption
by Elaine Pinkerton
Anyone who was adopted or who has adopted a child will find The Goodbye Baby a comforting and inspiring read. It takes one on a journey through the thorny issues of adoption, a search for healing, and an inspiring finale. Adoptee Author: Elaine Pinkerton Publication Year: 2012…
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Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe
by Lori Jakiela
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe is a book about mapping lives–the lives we are born with and the lives we are allowed to make for ourselves. Belief is part adoption narrative and part meditation on family, motherhood, nature vs. nurture, and what…
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Prison Baby: A Memoir
by Deborah Jiang-Stein
Even at twelve years old Deborah Jiang-Stein, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her multiracial features set her apart from her well-intentioned white parents, who evaded questions about her past. But when Deborah discovered a letter revealing…
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Island of Bones: Essays
by Joy Castro
What is “identity” when you’re a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah’s Witnesses? The answer isn’t easy. You won’t find it in books. And you certainly won’t find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy…
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The Truth Book: A Memoir
by Joy Castro
Adopted as a baby and raised by a devout Jehovah’s Witness family, Joy Castro is constantly reminded to tell the truth no matter what the consequences. Nevertheless, Castro finds this tenet to be the most violated. Here, in her very own Truth Book, Castro bears…
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Taking Down the Wall
by Christine Murphy
To find a solution, a person must first admit there is a problem. Taking Down the Wall is a chronicle of one woman’s journey to the painful and reluctant admission that there is indeed a problem, her refusal to let an old wound heal. The…
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Mum’s the Word!
by Lorna Little
What happens when you receive a piece of information that changes your life? Mum’s the Word is not just one way to react, but also a 40,000-word memoir that takes you through how the author handled such news. Suspense builds as a story of family…
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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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Waving Backwards
by V.L. Brunskill
Imagine not knowing who you are, until you find yourself in a statue 800 miles from home. Join intensely passionate and fiercely independent New York college student Lara Bonavito on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery in sigh-worthy Savannah, Georgia. Adopted into an abusive and impoverished…
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A Legitimate Life: A Forbidden Journey of Self-Discovery
by Melinda A. Warshaw
Adopted into an affluent and aristocratic family, Melinda A. Warshaw had everything a little girl could want—the best clothes, the best toys, horse riding lessons, anything else her heart desired. But what she didn’t have was answers. Why was she so different from the people…
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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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Searching for the Castle: Backtrail of an Adoption
by Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom
Like cowboys turning in the saddle to look at where they came from, Searching for the Castle documents the backtrail of author Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom’s adoption. It begins with her urgency as an eighteen-year-old woman initiating her search for her birth parents. Her recollection includes…
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Bastards: A Memoir
by Mary Anna King
In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were “great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them.” After her…
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The English American: A Novel
by Alison Larkin
When Pippa Dunn,adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that “culture clash” has layers of meaning she’d never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang…
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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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If I Should Die Before I Wake
By Eileen Munro
In her memoir As I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Eileen Munro vividly documented the abuse she experienced at the hands of her adoptive parents and, later, within the care system. The birth of her son, Craig, and her escape from the authorities’ clutches should have…
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Ghost of Sangju: A Memoir of Reconciliation
by Soojung Jo
Ghost of Sangju takes readers through Soojung’s childhood in Kentucky filled with joy, family, friendship—and the loneliness of being marked as an outsider even in her own home. Alternating between humor and heartbreak, she offers a glimpse into a life foreign to most: that of…
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Braverman (previously titled I Almost Fell Off the Top of the Empire State Building: A True Story of Trauma and Survival
by Joe Soll with Susan Hawvermale
From lying on a New Jersey highway with cars speeding by his head in both directions, to being shot in the head by a manic sniper and almost falling to his death from the top of the Empire State Building, Joe Soll’s autobiography details these…
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The Last Invisible Continent: Essays on Adoption and Identity
by Michael Allen Potter
These twelve essays span nearly twenty years of research and activism that chronicle one man’s search for his family. Together, they explore the concept of personal identity from the perspective of someone who was erased completely by adoption in The State of New York. Adoptee…
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The Tangled Red Thread
by Elle Cuardaigh
Born into the social experiment of closed adoption in the early 1960s, Noelle was taken home directly from the hospital at the age of three days. Her early life in rural Washington state seemed idyllic. With loving parents, two brothers, and her beloved pets, she…
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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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Guide to DNA Testing: How to Identify Ancestors, Confirm Relationships, and Measure Ethnic Ancestry through DNA Testing
by Richard Hill
The price of some powerful new genetic genealogy tests has dropped below $100. Genealogists and adoptees are using them and other DNA tests to identify ancestors, confirm relationships, and measure their ethnicity. Unfortunately, there are many similar sounding tests and some of them have different…
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Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA
by Richard Hill
Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA is the highly suspenseful account of an adoptee trying to reclaim the biological family denied him by sealed birth records. This fascinating quest, including the author’s landmark use of DNA testing, takes readers on an…
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The Sound of Hope: A True Story of an Adoptee’s Quest for Her Origins
by Anne Bauer
Anne Bauer, an adoptee, cannot pretend that she had another life and another family before being adopted. Much of Anne’s childhood was spent wondering about her other mother. She desperately wanted to know where she was, what she looked like and most importantly, why she…
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The Wall of Secrets: Memoir of The Almost Daughter
by Claire Hitchon (with Janice Harper)
Do you feel you belong; that you fit-in in this world? Have you experienced abuse, adoption, loss, and grief? The Wall of Secrets was how I survived those feelings of not belonging, not fitting-in; not being wanted or loved. Each drawer holds one of my…
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Called Home, Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
Edited by Patricia Busbee and Trace A. DeMeyer
From recent news about Baby Veronica to history like Operation Papoose, this book examines how Native American adoptees and their families experienced adoption and were exposed to the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects. The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both…
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Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of Adoption and Identity
by Paige Adams Strickland
In Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of Adoption and Identity, Paige tells stories from the perspective of a child and adolescent, growing up with a closely guarded secret. Through vignettes, Paige relates feelings about her adoption to forming and maintaining relationships, caring for pets,…