Making Contact: Finding My Child's Adopted Siblings

by Melissa J | More from this Blogger

17 Dec 2006 03:01 AM

After three years of playing amateur private investigator, I finally found the rest of my son's birth siblings' adoptive families. I desperately wanted more information on my son's family medical background than I was given by our state. I wanted to know if the other families got more information on my son's birth parents character as well. Here is the story on how we made contact. For easier reference and safety purposes, I will refer to my son's birth siblings by their maternal birth order rather than their names.

My son is the 6th child of 8 by his birthmother. Children numbers 2 through 8 are believed to be fully biologically related. After our son was placed with us, we expressed desire to have some sort of openness with the adoptive birth family. We didn't expect visits, but had hoped for at least email correspondence. Oregon's Department of Human Services (DHS) looked in their records and found only one adoptive family with current or valid contact information and this was baby number 5's family. DHS passed our information along to number 5's family and we started email correspondence with them thereafter. Though they live out of state, we've met a few times in person and exchanged information from each other's files that neither of us had prior.

After managing to track down my son's old case worker who'd worked on his case about a year before his placement with our family, I took the opportunity to interview her regarding my son's birthmother and father (personality traits etc...). Since she recalled the adoptive family of children 2, 3, and 4 wanting contact with future siblings' adoptive families, she provided me with the adoptive mom's new married last name. With this bit of information I was able to plug in her and her husband's name to my search engine. Problem was there were many people with the same name throughout the United States. Number 5's mother was finally able to locate an address! I wrote to the address introducing myself using my son's prior info, but unfortunately, the letter was returned marked "undeliverable, return to sender".

I continued on and used PeopleFinder.com. I searched by both the adoptive mother and the adoptive father's names and made a connection by matching common cities they'd each lived in. This still didn't provide me with an exact address; for this I'd have to pay and I wasn't ready to do that yet.

I took the information from PeopleFinder.com and went to ZabaSearch.com plugging in the adoptive mother's name for each state. What it did was provide me with several addresses and I just had to find what the most recent at the time was. Once again, I wrote out my letter of introduction to the family with my personal information, not sure I'd have mail again returned.

About two weeks later, I received an email from the mother who'd adopted my son's siblings, 2, 3, and 4! Apparently, my letter arrived at her mother-in-law's home. Since, I've met this mom once when she came out for a visit. Unfortunately, she lives several states away and was unable to bring her children. This family is pursuing the adoption of babies 7 and 8 who are at this time in state custody.

In finding this family I found the legal guardian of baby 1 and the maternal great-grandparents. We've met all of these people more recently. I was reluctant at first to open our family up to other birth family, but that's another story.

Melissa is a Families.com Christian Blogger. Read her blogs at: http://members.families.com/mj7/blog

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Fatherofeight (2475) 17 Dec 2006 12:16 PM

MJ, thanks for the two blogs. As you know, it is an issue for us. You doing it and telling about it will help us decide how to procede.

QueenAngie Central Illinois, USA (60106) 17 Dec 2006 06:20 PM

MJ, thank you for sharing about being a PI trying to track down information and your child's birth family members, siblings.

I had not realized the extent and patience it required to locate this information. Those of us with no experience in adoption, niavely would guess that a medical packet of information would be available for each adopted child.

Before the net and puters, I just wonder how the average person would have been able to complete everything you have done.

Not only knowing your son's medical history, and those of his full blooded siblings is important He may be able to meet them in the future too.

Obviously, you and DH, are his parents who love and care for him and will always be there for him.

At some point, perhaps when he is an adult, he may decide to have a relationship with the birth siblings.

MJ, you are a very wonderful and loving mother to those two precious sons!

Melissa J (13710) 18 Dec 2006 01:26 AM

Thank you both for the comments. Both our boys did get medical information, but keep in mind, when the state gathers information, they get it based on information the prior worker saved in the system and off what birthparents or willing birth family are willing to share. Between my son's file and his bbrother's the extent of information in each file differed. The amom of 2,3, and 4 had met the birth parents at one time and as a result provided us with information a cw may not have thought to provide (personality traits, how a parent speaks or moves...). You'd think as future sibs come into custody, each child would aquire a bit more info, but it's not true. Unfortunately each cw has a different idea of what information is considered "relevant". If info doesn't relate somehow to our children, we might not recieve it.