There are over 500,000 children in the foster care system. The writer is writing from a personal experience. This is a book about foster care and the many changes that a foster child faces throughout their time in the foster care system. This book is written to establish more awareness and involvement.

Kevin Conley was adopted out of Korea at the age of two. He was raised in a normal and loving family, but at the age of fifteen, Kevin took the path to drug addiction. In this story, I share our five years living with his addiction, availing ourselves of any help we could get. This is also a story about a suicide, and our fight with the city of Akron, Ohio to fence the All American Bridge (Suicide Bridge).

From the Dust Jacket: “Long before there was Baby Richard, before there was Baby Jessica, there was the case of 10 sisters....[this book] tells the tale of how their family was torn asunder and tells their experiences over the next 50 years as they worked to become a family again.... Their book is a tapestry of the many changes in the sisters’ lives and of conditions in Illinois and Arkansas following the Great Depression, through World War II and on to the ‘90s.... The book tells of young girls eating watermelon from the fields ... swimming (and bathing) in the creek outside their house. But it also recalls killing rats under that house ... and burying another sibling, who died at birth, in a box in the backyard.”

Bill Lair, Mid-Illinois Newspapers

“Memories of home will never leave me. ...I can’t imagine someone taking my kids away and it was something Mom had to face—without any money. Her hands were tied in lots of ways...”

Virginia Waggoner Rackley

“I was 9 years old when I went into The Cunningham Home and came out when I was 14. I credit the Home for teaching us to be responsible for ourselves, teaching us manners, and moral values...”

Roberta Waggoner Ariel

This book was written by the ten sisters—each responsible for her own chapter. Despite the fact that there are some common experiences, most events do not reflect a consensus, but a very personal view.

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About the Author: The ten sisters now live with their families from Alaska to Tennessee. Two award-winning articles have been written about their experience.

Virginia Ruth now lives in central Illinois with Clarence, her husband of forty-nine years. Deloris Maxine resides near the original family home in Paradise with Don, her husband of fifty-two years. Rhita Jean Brniak is widowed and lives near her children and grandchildren in Chicago. Mary Margaret has retired with her husband Richard to central Michigan. Roberta Pauline also lives near her family in central Michigan. Irma Joan is widowed and lives with two of her grandsons near Paradise. Phyllis Ann is retired and also lives, with her husband Dick, near the family home in Paradise. Vera Mae lives with her husband Bill in Anchorage, Alaska. Audrey Faye Lee lives with her husband Bob in Tennessee, and Doris Evon Jean lives with her husband Harry in central Illinois.

10,000 Hills is about the life of a husband, a father of three daughters, an attorney, a former Chief Prosecutor, and a Maryland State Delegate. C.T. Wilson shares his experiences within the foster care system, and the abuse and neglect that he was forced to endure. Yet while he has silently shouldered the weight of his childhood, he still bears the scars of a lifetime of abuse and humiliation. C.T. provides a shockingly detailed recollection of his suffering to expose the true severity and frequency of child abuse. He explains how this horrific childhood has impacted his adult life by revealing the pain and difficulties that still affect his daily existence. He also shares the path that he has taken through the misery; how he became not just a survivor but someone who strives to better himself and improve the lives of those that still suffer. This manuscript has been produced with the hope of providing insight and a vision of healing to those who have to endure the unimaginable horrors of child abuse and to others who are still haunted by the victimization that has painted their past.

From the Dust Jacket: They called it an “honor killing,” but to Elizabeth Kim, the night she watched her grandfather and uncle hang her mother from the wooden rafter in the corner of their small Korean hut, it was cold-blooded murder. Her Omma had committed the sin of lying with an American soldier, and producing not just a bastard but a honhyol—a mixed-race child, considered worth less than nothing.

Left at a Christian orphanage in postwar Seoul like garbage, bleeding and terrified, Kim unwittingly embarked on the next phase of her extraordinary life when she was adopted by a childless Fundamentalist pastor and his wife in the United States. Unfamiliar with Western customs and language, but terrified that she would be sent back to the orphanage, or even killed, Kim trained herself to be the perfect child. But just as her Western features doomed her in Korea, so her Asian features served as a constant reminder that she wasn’t good enough for her new, all-white environment. After escaping her adoptive parents’ home, only to find herself in an abusive and controlling marriage, Kim finally made a break for herself by having a daughter and running away with her to a safer haven—something Omma could not do for her.

Unflinching in her narration, Kim tells of her sorrows with a steady and riveting voice, and ultimately transcends them by laying claim to all the joys to which she is entitled.

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About the Author: Elizabeth Kim is a journalist in California.

From the Publisher: This is the story of one of the surviving victim’s of one of the largest and most notorious black-market baby-selling scandals: Georgia Tann’s Tennessee Children’s Home Society.

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About the Author: George Curtis was born at St. Joseph’s Free Clinic in Memphis, TN, on August 6, 1949. His first home was in Detroit, Michigan. In 1962 his family moved to Modesto, CA. He graduated from Davis High in 1967. He then enlisted for a tour of duty in the United States Air Force lasting four years. In 1971 he began college obtaining an A.A. degree from Santa Rosa Junior College and a B.A. degree from California State University Sonoma. Graduate studies followed at the University of the Pacific. George has a daughter, Jennifer, and a son, Andrew. Currently he is a bachelor who loves to travel. He is in the process of arranging a nationwide tour speaking on behalf of children’s rights issues. Lifetime Cable and CBS have recently contacted him about turning his life story into a movie.

From the Dust Jacket: No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey Patton had a childhood from hell. Once a foster child who found a home, she was supposed to be among the lucky. On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey, promising student at NYU, headed down a New Jersey street toward her adoptive parents’ house. She carried a gun in her pocket, and she kept repeating to herself that she would pull the trigger. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought.

This is a story of how a typical American family can be undermined by its own effort to be perfect on the surface. After all, with God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking adoptive parents, Stacey appeared to beat the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and her father, either so in love with or in fear of his wife, turned a blind eye to the abuse she heaped on their love-starved little girl.

In That Mean Old Yesterday, a little girl rises above the tyranny of an overzealous mother by channeling her intellectual energy into schoolwork. Wise beyond her years, she can see that her chances for survival are advanced through her struggle to get into an elite boarding school. She uses all she has, a brilliant mind, to link her experience to the legacy of American slavery and to successfully frame her understanding of why her good adoptive parents did terrible things to her by realizing that they had terrible things done to them.

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About the Author: Stacey Patton is currently a graduate student pursuing her PhD in history at Rutgers University. She is also a professor at Montclair State University. She has written for The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, New York Newsday, and Scholastic magazine and is the recipient of numerous journalism awards and academic honors. She resides in New York.

This is the story of Mike Turpin who later became Jim Olsen and his struggle for survival in foster homes, his eventual adoption by a loving father, and a broken and angry mother.

From the Dust Jacket: Her childhood diary was the literary sensation of 1920, an overnight best seller that, said the New York Times, “gives a picture of life as a whole seen through the eyes of a child, eyes that have been touched. ... Opal saw life imaginatively, beautifully, lovingly. It is a wonderful book.”

But within a year, Opal Whiteley’s diary was surrounded by scandal. Skeptics called it a hoax, the press joined the attack, and Opal—estranged from her family—retreated deep into a fantasy world of her own devising.

When Benjamin Hoff found a copy of, Opal’s long-out-of-print diary by accident, he knew he had stumbled upon an extraordinary document. He vowed to unravel the story behind it. Now, sixty-five years after it was removed from bookshelves in disgrace, Hoff offers proof of the diary’s authenticity and restores it to print in all its charming eccentricity. He also tells the bizarre, tragic story of Opal herself, a prodigally gifted but disturbed little girl who was destroyed when her private fantasies were exposed to public scrutiny.

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About the Author: Opal Whiteley was born in 1897 and grew up in logging settlements near the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon. At age six, she began to keep a diary in which she described her home, her elaborately named plant and animal friends, her cathedral area among the trees, and “the singing creek where the willows grow.” Upon its publication in 1920, The Story of Opal became an immediate best seller, only to be discredited by skeptics’ erroneous reports. Since 1948 Opal Whiteley has been a patient at Napsbury Hospital outside London.

Benjamin Hoff grew up in a rural area a few miles from Portland, Oregon—not far from where Opal Whiteley began writing her diary. As a child he, like Opal, preferred to spend his time outdoors, observing animals, insects, and plants. From an early age he, too, loved to write. The author of the recent best seller The Tao of Pooh, Mr. Hoff holds an A.B. degree in Asian art and has worked as a professional tree pruner. He lives in Portland.

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Compiler’s Note: The diary of Opal Whiteley was previously republished ten years earlier in an “adaptation” by Jane Boulton as Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart (1976, Macmillan; 1984, Tioga Publishing Co.).

From the Dust Jacket: They Cage the Animals at Night is the deeply moving true story of an abandoned child’s triumphant search for love and survival. Jennings Michael Burch’s painful odyssey began one rainy October day in 1949 when his mother, who loved him, but was too sick to care for him, left him at a Catholic orphanage in Brooklyn. Only eight years old, he was totally unprepared for the loneliness and the heartbreak he would confront at The Home of the Angels—and in the numerous other institutions and foster homes in which he would live for the next three years.

Despite his attempts to hold on to a mother wracked by illness and guilt, and five brothers each trying desperately in his own way to cope with disaster, Jennings was repeatedly placed in the care of hostile nuns, negligent foster parents, and indifferent social workers. From other children he learned the cardinal rule: don’t get close to anyone, because attachments lead only to separation and hurt. His best friend, “Doggie,” was a tattered brown-and-white stuffed animal that time and again was his sole source of warmth and friendship in a frightening world.

Yet throughout his ordeal—a series of unhappy stays in strange, unwelcoming homes, punctuated by episodes of running away, living on the streets, hiding out—Jennings was learning to survive. He became self-reliant, fought his fears, and, finally, met people who cared about him. Sal, a city bus driver, himself an orphan, became a friend in whom Jennings could confide. Martha, the cook at one of the foster homes, was the first person ever to tell Jennings she loved him.

And his brother Jerome, who encouraged him to ask questions, to figure things out for himself, showed him what it meant not only to have a brother—but to be one.

Jennings Michael Burch has written a beautiful, stirring story. They Cage the Animals at Night will make you glow with a renewed sense of the vibrancy of the human spirit and the power of human caring to save and heal.

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About the Author: Jennings Michael Burch has worked as a New York City policeman, a chauffeur, a theater manager, a magazine pressman, and a short-order cook. He holds a BA in forensic psychology from John Jay College. This is his first book.

Jimmy Morrison, born in 1928, lived a life spanning 8 decades of adventure, spiritual enlightenment and cosmic travels. These are his memoirs as dictated to Cindy Weiss during his last days on the planet.

They Called Me Brent: A True Story of Adoption, Reunion, and a Stand-Up Comedian is the story of comedian Steve Brewer’s experience as an adoptee found by his birth mother 25 years after he was given up for adoption and his reluctant choice to agree to a reunion. Not one to shy away from the truth, even when it’s ugly, Steve tells the incredible story of how his birth mother became pregnant with him, came to the conclusion that adoption was the right thing to do, and finally her quest to find him in all of its beautifully flawed glory. Recounting his experience with humor and vulnerability, Steve brings this story to life in a way that everyone can relate to, adopted or not. Filled with heartwarming, sad, and funny stories of an adoptee trying to understand how he came to be, They Called Me Brent is a wonderful story of adoption, love, and dysfunction.

Marjorie Peterson survived a lifetime of seemingly insurmountable challenges, including being indentured by a family who took her off the orphan train in November 1906. Marjorie’s indomitable spirit allowed her to make significant personal contributions to the world that tested her so hard as a child and as an adult. Ann Zemke, her granddaughter, tells Marjorie’s heartwarming story through this narrative and the very special quilt she made in her grandmother’s memory.

There are so many people in the world who feel unloved, unwanted, and alone. Often we feel orphaned by the people who are supposed to love us the most. This is not the way it was meant to be. Here is a true story about adoption, acceptance, and unconditional love. This book is for anyone who struggles with feelings of insecurity and insignificance. This is a story that confronts the lie that things were better before you came. About the Author: Doug Walker is the founding pastor of Fellowship of the Parks in Keller, Grapevine, and Haslet, TX. He is a graduate of Carson Newman College and Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth.

This is the author’s autobiographical account of his life growing up, then finding out at the age of thirty-two that he was adopted, and how such a fact has shaped him to be who he is today—a true inspiration. The author’s story is uplifting and inspiring. And though the author touches on some negative things that occurred in his life, he does not dwell on them in the story, which goes to show that this reflects the way he looks at life.

This Is Mine: My Story, My Life shares life stories of those who have experienced foster care. Each contributor has their own unique way of telling their story. Philly shares through imagery, using Pandora’s Box as a metaphor for her complicated relationship with her biological family. ShirleyAlexis pours out her story, the painful horrifying truth of it, in a torrent of words that capture you and hold you breathless... Leroy talks about himself in the third person ... as if looking down on his life from another place. Helen finds her voice again, after years of silent trauma, living in fear of the “Unknown” Monster. The chapters “in between” their stories are places where they share what family means to them, give advice to foster parents, and share their childhood dreams (if they had any). They ask questions of the judicial system, talk about aging out and adoption, pay tribute to their heroes, and talk about what they attribute their resiliency from.

The author, who was born in Brazil and adopted at the age of two, recollects her adopted life.

Adopted by an Oregon family as an infant, Robert Mulkey was eighteen years old when he first learned the details of his birth family—including the brother he always dreamed of having. This is My Lemonade chronicles the amazing story of his thirty-four-year quest to know his birth family, learn of his roots, and find his identity, traveling first to British Columbia and eventually to the ancestral family home near Ascoli Piceno in central Italy. It is a journey filled with transcendent moments and agonizing heartbreak, leading finally to acceptance, understanding, and the genuine love of family.

From the Dust Jacket: One day in the spring of 1993, author Harold Brodkey checked into a Manhattan emergency room unable to move and scarcely able to breathe. When he was later diagnosed with AIDS virus, Brodkey greeted the devastating—and completely unexpected—news with an odd lightheartedness, a perverse fascination with his passage from the ranks of the living to the fraternity of the dying. As a novelist, he refused the fate that had been assigned to him: his acute editorial sensibility told him that he had been badly miscast as a condemned man.

In This Wild Darkness, Brodkey, who died on January 26, 1996, examines his predicament with the same irony and lucidity he brought to his acclaimed fiction. Part journal, part memoir, part essay, this book offers a frank and profound exploration of Brodkey’s sexuality, his relationships, and the slow, withering advance of his disease. A stirring self-portrait from one of our greatest men of letters, This Wild Darkness lends a fresh and heroic perspective to the subject of AIDS, death, and love.

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About the Author: Until his death in January 1996, Harold Brodkey was one of America’s preeminent writers. The author of four books, including The Runaway Soul, a novel, and two volumes of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, Brodkey lived in New York City with his wife, the novelist Ellen Schwamm.

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By the Same Author: Women and Angels (1985, Jewish Publication Society); Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988, Random House); and The Runaway Soul (1991, FSG), among others.

Thread of Life: An Adoption Story is the true story of an adopted child’s journey to find his birth parents. The adoption process can often leave many unanswered questions for the adoptee, the adopted parents, and even the eventual offspring of an adopted child. It has been said that adoption is more like a marriage than a birth, with two or more individuals, each with their own unique mix of needs, patterns, and genetic history, coming together with love, hope, and commitment for a future together. You become a family not because you share the same genes but because you share love for each other. Mike Doiron’s original intent was to try to fill in some of the gaps—genealogically, medically, and perhaps even mentally—as he began his adult life following university. The endeavor took him down a path of self-discovery and adventure. When he began to chronicle what he had learned, he decided that he wanted to share his findings with others. For him, Thread of Life is not meant to be a guidebook for families of adoption, but rather a documented true story sharing personal insights from his own journey to answer the questions many adopted children ponder as they become adults.

360 Square is Carol Lillieqvist Welsh’s story of spirited resilience in the face of unrelenting adversity. Adopted at the age of six months by what seemed like model parents, her childhood became harsher and more cruel with each passing year. Thrown out of her house at 16, her life became a roller coaster of temporary homes, fleeting relationships, and an unwanted pregnancy. Yet she never gives up on herself or her desire to understand her fiery passion for life. In her search to trace her roots she finds the true meaning of family and identity. Please visit www.360square.net for more details.

A presentation organized around three trips to Michigan, from Philadelphia in 1955. A follow-up to her 1954 study summarized in The Adopted Break Silence.

This is the compelling tale of Luke, a Korean adoptee who comes to an American family at age one and who gradually loses his life’s way—to die from crack cocaine at age 21. It is also a story of his adoptive father, a CIA officer, who offers an unsparing and vivid account of his own efforts—wise, misguided, passionate, naïve, creative, ultimately unsuccessful—to save his son. Luke is warm, likeable, funny, quick to win friends—and a skilled deceiver, able to impress others with a seeming maturity and urbanity. But the image he works to create for himself is increasingly belied by the darker realities of his life and the black hole he creates around his family. The tale chronicles a poignant and tumultuous quest to grasp the meaning of Luke’s life—and death—against a broad international backdrop from Afghanistan to Latin America. It explores the mysteries of adoption, identity, addiction—and grace.

A look at one man’s journey through life touching on three aspects: Adoption, his own Vietnam experience and his Law Enforcement Career.

Through Eyes Like Mine is the story of a childhood told through the present-tense voice of Nori Nakada. Born to a Japanese-American father and German-Irish mother in rural Oregon, Nori’s family becomes increasingly diverse when they adopt a six-year-old boy from Korea. She struggles to find comfort within a family, a community and a world that is both simple and complex. By examining her family’s silences, she begins to understand life, death and her own identity. The joys and challenges of growing up invite the reader to recall the world through eyes like mine. Compiler’s Note: Another adoption-related volume that defies easy categorization within my arbitrary system. I have placed it in the adult adoptees section because it is a memoir of childhood, but by the natural-born sibling of an adopted child.

From the Back Cover: The True Story of One Man’s Search For His Beginnings

Adopted at birth, he longed to know and understand his own biological history, even if the facts were painful. He found more than the facts: He found an undying love.

A true life story that all adoptees and birthmothers should read.

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About the Author: Frank Law is a certified Journeyman welder and fitter, and also is a member of the plumbers and steamfitters union. He is currently working on a second book.

From the Dust Jacket: Colin Chisolm has a powerful true story to tell. After his mother dies, Colin, an adopted son of a half Yup’ik mother, herself adopted, is driven to learn more about his mother and her origins. He embarks on a moving journey of discovery, about his mother and ultimately about himself, which takes him from Squaw Valley, California, to the Eskimo village of Kotlik in Alaska’s Arctic, and finally to Yugoslavia where his own beginnings may lie.

While exploring the complexities of extended family, Colin touches on so many aspects of the human drama—the search to belong, cross-cultural marriage, racial discrimination, death, childbearing, alcoholism, family relationships, disease—with compelling insight. Most notably, Colin gives us a moving story about the reach and healing power of love—his love for his mother, father, and adopted siblings and theirs for him, and the embracing unconditional love offered to him by his Yup’ik relatives in distant Alaska.

In weaving his story, Colin provides stirring embellishments on bits of family history: the love of his Yup’ik great-grandmother for her Russian hunter-husband; his grandmother’s marriage to a Finn forty years her senior, who was later murdered by a jealous competitor; his mother’s bittersweet childhood years as an adopted daughter in a family on Vashon Island in Washington’s Puget Sound, and the shock she felt when handed her first driver’s license stamped “half-breed”; the loving but obscure relationship of his adoptive mother and father; and the European heritage to which he may biologically belong.

As he circles from past to present and into the past again, this talented storyteller serves up the profound dimensions of life and love we all yearn to understand, and does so with surprising grace. You will keep thinking about this poignant story long after you have read it.

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About the Author: Born in 1967, Colin Chisholm grew up in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. He received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana, has published stories and essays in numerous magazines and journals, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 1995. Through Yup’ik Eyes is his first book. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

The Ties That Bind is an emotionally riveting debut novel about the power of a mother’s love and the bonds among family that, though severed, can never be fully broken. On opposite sides of the world, two lives are changed forever. One by the smallest bruise. The other by a devastating bushfire. And both by a shocking secret ... Miami art curator Courtney Hamilton and her husband David live the perfect life until their ten-year-old son Matthew is diagnosed with leukemia. He needs a bone-marrow transplant but, with Courtney being adopted, the chances of finding a match within his family are slim. Desperate to find a donor, Courtney tracks the scattered details of her birth 15,000 kilometres away, to the remote town of Somerset in the Victorian bush. Meanwhile Jade Taylor wakes up in hospital in Somerset having survived the deadly bushfire that destroyed the family home and their beloved olive groves. Gone too are the landmarks that remind her of her mother, Asha, a woman whose repeated absences scarred her childhood. As Jade rallies her fractured family to rebuild their lives, Courtney arrives in the burnt countryside to search for her lost parents—but discovers far more...

From the Dust Jacket: Ties That Bind honors the people we call family, the individuals who nourish us and give us strength. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay draws from ten years of the revolutionary oral history project’s rich archives, collecting conversations that celebrate the power of the human bond and capture the moment at which individuals become family. Between blood relations, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, in the most trying circumstances and in the unlikeliest of places, enduring connections are formed and lives are forever changed.

The stories shared in Ties That Bind reveal our need to reach out, to support, and to share life’s burdens and joys. We meet two brothers, separately cast out by their parents, who reconnect and rebuild a new family around each other. We encounter unexpected joy: a gay woman reveals to her beloved granddaughter that she grew up believing that family was a happiness she would never be able to experience. We witness life-changing friendship: An Iraq war veteran recalls his wartime bond with two local children and how his relationship with his wife helped him overcome the trauma of losing them.

Against unspeakable odds, at their most desperate moments, the individuals we meet in Ties That Bind find their way to one another, discovering hope and healing. Commemorating ten years of StoryCorps, the conversations collected in Ties That Bind are testament to the transformational power of listening.

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About the Author: David Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including six Peabody awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including three StoryCorps books: Listening Is an Act of Love (2007), Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps (2010), and All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps (2012)—all New York Times bestsellers. StoryCorps’ first-ever animated feature, Listening ls an Act of Love: A StoryCorps Special, will premiere on PBS’s award-winning series POV on Thanksgiving 2013.

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Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “Two Sides of the Same Heart”: Diane Tells His Name, 60, talks with her daughter, Bonnie Buchanan, 22 (pp. 138-143).

From the Dust Jacket: Here are the moving and dramatic stories of eleven adoptees who share one compelling need—the need to find their natural parents, the need to know their own origins.

The sealing of adoptees’ birth records has given rise to one of the most controversial issues in America today. There are more than two million adoptees in the United States alone, and at least four times as many natural parents and adoptive parents, half-sisters and half-brothers. All of these millions of people are affected by legal rulings which, since the 1920s, have made it impossible for children adopted in most of the western world to learn the facts about their origins. A growing number of adults have now begun to demand access to their own records, the confidential papers and sealed birth certificates which are so carefully guarded by lawyers and social workers.

The people that Henry Ehrlich has interviewed are of widely varying ages and backgrounds. The stories they tell reveal the great variety of reasons that lie behind their search. Some have a medical mystery they hope to solve, some hope to discover their racial origins. Still others have learned that they were abandoned as infants, or adopted on the black market; or, with no knowledge of their own families, have come close to an incestuous relationship. Whatever their reasons, these adoptees believe that theirs is a valid curiosity.

To satisfy this most natural of curiosities, adoptees are prepared to go to great lengths, some legal, some illegal. Many never succeed. Not all adoptees feel the need to know their own roots. But for those who do, the search for their natural parents can be the only method of resolving many lifelong problems.

A Time to Search adds a new and critical dimension to the literature of the adoption search. Not an adoptee himself, Henry Ehrlich has provided commentary based on a unique view of adoptees’ rights, a view which is at once detached and committed, taking into account the position of the natural and adoptive parents as well as the adoptees. In his introduction, he forcefully argues that adoptees should be supported in their demands for a right most of us take for granted—the right to know the very source of our own identities. He discusses the history of adoption law, and demonstrates that “the prohibition against finding the truth is an aberration.” But the adoptees who have told him their stories, presented here in their own words, offer perhaps their own best defense.

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About the Author: Henry Ehrlich, a freelance writer, gained first-hand knowledge of many of the problems encountered by people searching for their natural parents while working for an adoptees’ rights organization in New York City.