And here is the result: one of the first documented instances a birthmother found her adopted child on social media.

Identity Crisis: Some Finding Adoption Registry a One-way Street

Siobhan Connally

The Record

/EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first installment of a two-part series
concerning issues facing adopted children and birth parents who set out
to find one another. /

Adrienne Kerwin knows her parents, she knows their histories and knows
they were as present at her birth as they were at her graduations and
other life accomplishments, but the Menands attorney’s heart goes out
to those who can’t take such a simple understanding for granted.

For the past three years, on her own time, Kerwin has been helping
adoptees navigate the tedious work of unearthing their biological past.
She’s answered questions in online forums, searched primary records in
her community and even traveled to New York City to do research for
people she’s only met online.

“It started when my friend’s oldest daughter had medical problems and
needed a bone marrow transplant. … She became interested in her own
medical history but didn’t want to upset her parents by looking for her
biological mother. So I offered to search for her.”

As an attorney, Kerwin said her skills put her in a unique position to
know where and how to look for information, but provide her no greater
access to identifying facts.

Although Kerwin has not been able to find her friend’s biological
mother to date, she has been able to access some information vital to being
able to proceed with the search through the state’s adoption registry.

“There are tons of resources online, but everyone should start with the adoption registry,” she says, noting that while people will get more information from the adopting agency, the registry can help people who are looking for each other make that connection.

In search of history

Sherry Lilly, a 32-year-old expectant mother of three from the
Rochester area, has been searching for her biological mother since 1996. Although
she hasn’t been able to locate the woman, she was able to find her
biological sister, Kaylee, through the registry.

Ironically, the two women lived within minutes of each other their
entire lives. They even had friends in common, though they never met
one another.

“We met in a coffee shop, and she was pregnant at the time so she told me to look for the pregnant person. … I would have known her anyway.
When she walked in I recognized her right away. She had the same facial characteristics.”

Lilly had registered to find out some medical history after her infant
son suffered a seizure.

“There’s a lot I would like to know about my genetic history,” said
Lilly, who adds she feels getting a chance to meet her biological
parents would be a bonus.

“But I would also like to meet my biological parents … to see if I
looked like them. That would be great,” she said.

So far the search has only yielded minimal results: “I got some
non-identifying information like my mother’s age at the time of birth,
her nationality from the registry and I got more information from the
Catholic Family Center agency where I was adopted, such as the reason
for relinquishment. Things like my father grew up in Pennsylvania.

“It can be difficult. You don’t know if they’ve made mistakes. You can write to the family courts, but in most cases, requests are rejected.”

“I don’t think anyone gets much information,” says Margaret Graham, a
42-year-old research analyst in California, who’s been looking for her
birth parents for the past three years.

Like Lilly, health issues — her own and those of her son — compelled
Graham to seek out her family’s history.

“My son has a genetic disorder that isn’t on his father’s side,” she
said. “And last year I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of
melanoma. … I thought, considering the health issues, I might be able
to get more answers but that didn’t cut any ice.”

Graham has been able to obtain about three pages of non-identifying
information from Catholic Charities in Utica, where she was adopted in
1963, all of it anecdotal. “My parents were married and I have at least
two full siblings,” she said, adding that she also knows her mother
came from a family of nine and her father came from a family of four. Both
of them worked in manufacturing She also knows that at the time of her
birth her parents had a four-year-old and a one-year old, and had
experienced a miscarriage and a still born in between.

Although she’s signed up with the state’s adoption registry, it’s been
three years and she’s still waiting.

“It’s possible that my birth siblings don’t even know I exist. Since
they already had a stillborn child, they may have told them I died,
too.”

Another challenge is the fact that both parents’ names were listed on
the original birth certificate.

“Because both of them signed off on the adoption, they both have to
sign up on the registry. If my birth father signed up and my birth mother
was dead, they won’t connect us.”

Often adoptive children search for their family of origin in hopes the
answers give them a clearer understanding of their own lives.

Ted LeRoy, a 40-year-old from Rochester, knows little about his birth
parents other than they were college students attending RIT when they
gave him up for adoption as an infant.

“My adopted mom told me as much as she knows, but it’s not a lot. … I’m
not sure why it became so important for me (to find my birth parents)
when it did. I suppose I’m just ready.”

LeRoy began his search in September and knows he’s got a tough road
ahead, but he thinks the answers are worth asking the questions. “I had
been going through this book, “Keeping the Love You Find,” by Harville
Hendrick, and realizing that my fears of abandonment went much further
than my fear of relationships. I thought, ‘I have to look into this.’
Once I made the decision to do it, I just filled out the forms and
started researching how to do it.”

Siobhan Connally

The Record

/This is the second in a two-part series about adoption issues facing
adopted children and birth parents when they set out to find one
another./

The process of finding adoption information in New York state is a
daunting, arduous task that takes the skill of a detective and as much
resolve as one can muster according to Adrienne Kerwin, an attorney
whose made it a personal mission to help adoptive children gain access
to information about their family histories.

Changing times

“The more I learned, the angrier I became,” says Kerwin of the
difficulty she’s encountered trying to get information contained in
adoption records. “The laws for upstate New York are that after 75
years the records can be accessed. That’s good for genealogy but not for
adoptees.

“New York state is by far the most archaic in adoption laws. … I
understand that you have to protect the mothers’ identity to ensure
that children are put up for adoption but the kids don’t have any rights,
and that’s not fair. There should be some form of middle ground.”

“Since I started this, I’ve been talking to adoptees and am hearing the
same thing,” says Kerwin. “Adoptees know about the registry but parents
do not. They just don’t know about it or they don’t understand that
they have the right and ability to find their child. … I mean, if you’ve
been told 30 years ago or so that you can’t see this person ever again, that
there’s no way to find your child … would you look?”

Lisa Maynard, director of the Adoption Resource Network Inc., says that
laws need to be changed but the political will just isn’t there.

“The laws in New York state are antiquated and foolish and
wrong-minded,” she says. “Adoption today shows that openness is a
solid, smart way to go. There’s been some research into it, and although I
don’t know how scientific it is, it shows that 90 percent of adoptions
in the U.S. are open. Whether birth parents have monthly or
twice-a-year visits … there’s just not the secrecy there was, and what they’re
finding is that the secrecy causes more problems for everyone: Birth
parents, adopted children, it even causes trauma for adoptive parents.”

Maynard explains that historically adoptive parents were told if they
were successful parents there should be no need for their children to
seek out their biological parents.

“… And if you were the birth parents, you were told that you would ruin
everyone’s life if you tried to find your child. If you were the
adopted child you were told to be happy with what you got.”

A delicate balance

Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy, a life-long New Yorker, relinquished her
firstborn son, “Max,” in Massachusetts 18 years ago.

“I did a lot of searching and decided to go to a small agency in
Massachusetts because they said they were nurturing and that’s exactly
what I needed at the time,” said She, who acknowledges she’s not
sure whether the differences in laws in the commonwealth state actually
helped her find her son this past April.

“When you are talking about (an unplanned pregnancy) and you’re a teenager you don’t think beyond the immediate. I signed every waiver that said he can open his records when he’s 18 … but as you wait and wait you begin to think: ‘Will I search?’ You end up talking yourself out of it because (adoption) is an implied promise. This is what you agreed to do this is what you promised.”

After establishing that it was legal to search for him, She, who
had a traditional closed adoption, began scouring the Internet. She went
back to the adoption agency and asked for updated material on her son,
and received recent pictures and a five-page letter from the adoptive
parents, whom she knew to be licensed CPAs.

“Once the dam broke I had to know,” said She. “I did Google
searches of all licensed CPAs in Boston with the same last names and then
started to look city by city.

“The night that I found him — that he was alive, I knew his (new) name, and where he lived — it was an amazing feeling. I knew that I could — even if I wouldn’t — just go and see him, and that was the most amazing feeling of all.”

Soon she began seeking out more specific information on her son and
started looking into MySpace, an Internet community and message board. After fishing around, she found him and made his virtual acquaintance.

“There he was. His profile on his blog said ‘Mysterious Max,’ and he listed “Where the Wild Things Are” as a favorite book — the two things I gave him when I let him go. And he was just a message away. … This is it. This is who you are. Seventeen years of waiting, hoping, thinking, praying. … There’s no way I can not (e-mail him).

“So I e-mailed him: “You are not mysterious to me — I named you Max.”

The message that came back was: “Holy smokes, Mom?”

Since her son has not told his parents about their correspondence,
She is keeping her distance and taking an actual meeting slowly.
“I’ve learned to have patience —I don’t want to push him. I don’t want
to overload him with this heavy-duty emotional stuff. I can wait. I’m
not going anywhere. I’ve also learned that adoptees like to be found.
And it makes perfect sense, too, since they were the ones who were
lost.”