Using DNA To Find Your Birth Family, READ THIS FIRST

Adoptees are ruining their own reunions by recklessly handling their DNA matches. Reunions are delicate situations and should be handled as such. Just because you are excited by your results doesn’t mean you should bulldoze your way through them. You won’t do yourself any favors by contacting your matches prematurely.

When my search angel and I found my birth family, we careful chose which immediate family member to contact first. Here’s why: As an adoptee, you don’t know the answers yet. There are many different scenarios you could be walking into. Your birth mother may be the only person who knows about you, or she may have spent the last few decades trying to block out the pain of your adoption. There are endless possible scenarios. The point is that your immediate family will probably be much less excited about your arrival if you announce yourself with a bullhorn to all the extended family beforehand. Adoption and reunion are personal matters to be handled with care.

Some will argue that it’s your right to barge your way in and announce yourself to whoever will listen. That may be accurate, but as the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If you are looking for a long, meaningful relationship with your birth family, you should approach your reunion with caution and respect. You may be lucky and get an immediate family match as soon as you test, but that is often not the case.

So what do you do if your closest matches are cousin matches? First you need to educate yourself on what your matches actually tell you. Matches reflect a certain amount of centimorgans per a number of DNA segments. A half-sibling can show the same as an aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, or grandparent/grandchild. Likewise a half- aunt/uncle/niece/nephew or great-grandparent/great-grandchild may show as a first cousin. It’s important to create your own family tree of your matches so you can properly identify everyone. You can use the public trees of your matches as well as public records and social media to fill in your tree.

READ FULL ARTICLE: https://adoption.com/using-dna-to-find-your-birth-family-read-this-first

What Non-Adoptees Don't Get About Growing Up Adopted

For most of my life, the only connection I had to my birth family was a few pieces of paper my adoptive parents claimed to have never seen.

I had a relatively normal childhood. After my parents divorced at the beginning of middle school, my mom had something similar to a nervous breakdown. I was saddled with raising my toddler sister for a few years, after which I became a very rebellious teenager. On a whim my mom moved us from North Carolina to Colorado. During an argument with my mother she basically disowned me. She threw a bunch of paperwork at me. It was my amended birth certificate and such. In my anger, I snatched up the papers, put them in my bag, and stormed out of the hotel room.

I caught a Greyhound bus back to North Carolina. On the 36-hour ride back, I went through the bundle of documents I had been given. I found all these things I had never seen before. I found my adoption papers and my non-identifying information. Non-identifying info is a vague description of one’s biological family. The letter included a half-sister who is four years older than me and that there were no known illnesses at the time of my birth. I found it quite shocking that I has not been made aware of them earlier, especially since I had always expressed a strong desire to know my medical history. Months later I confronted my parents with my adoption documents. They both looked at me like I had three heads. They both denied they had ever seen any of it before.

From that moment on the bus I knew those papers were the only thing still tying me to those who shared my blood. Until I had kids, I protected them above all else. If I moved, they rode in the car with me, not in the moving truck. I knew that the answers to the questions I’d had my whole life were locked away on that dried ink. To this day I still keep them with my most valuable possessions even though they lost their mystique the day I met my birth mother.

Non-Adoptees don’t understand because they have their documents. To get new ones they don’t have to jump through hoops like adoptees, only visit a clerk. And don’t get me started on original birth certificates. People who were not adopted take for granted their right to an original legal birth document. They can just drive to the health department and pick one up. Few states allow adoptees to access theirs at all. Adoptees are fighting every day to change laws to give them that basic right.

READ FULL ARTICLE: https://adoption.com/what-non-adoptees-dont-get-about-growing-up-adopted