Preserving Your Life Story as an Adoptee

In recent years as I’ve become more proficient in doing genealogical research and documentation, I’ve thought more and more about what my own descendants will be able to unearth about my life fifty or one hundred or even two hundred years after my passing. Once we get to a certain age, most of us consider what we’ll leave to the important people in our lives, but often people overlook the value of preserving those documents that help tell their own story.

When I research an ancestor, at minimum I want to find their birth, marriage, and death records. I also look for census records, military records, school yearbooks, and any other records that can tell me about their life—things such as city directories, professional licenses, and newspaper articles. Finding a photograph of an ancestor gives me great joy. I want to build a collection of documents that together reveal the story of my ancestor’s life; the more I’m able to find, the better I feel I know them, and knowing my ancestor gives me additional insight into myself and my own life.

But how much information will my descendants be able to find about me, an adoptee from a closed adoption?

As things stand today, a genealogist searching my legal name will find that I was born to my adoptive parents. They will find that my current surname is from my husband, dig up my marriage certificate showing my legal maiden name, and trace this name back to find my previous addresses, my school yearbooks, and eventually my amended birth certificate.

Based on this information alone, there is little chance of them learning that I was ever adopted, discovering my original name at birth, or linking me to the correct family tree based on biology. If a descendant takes a DNA test without knowledge of my adoption, their results will be wildly confusing, having a mysterious mix of Scottish, French, German, and Croatian surnames.

Thankfully, my children do know the facts of my adoption and the names of their biological grandparents, but how will this information be passed along to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.? I fear that if I’m not proactive about documenting and preserving my own biological heritage, this information that I’ve worked so hard to trace and collect could become once again lost.

I’ve decided to digitize important documents related to my birth and adoption in order to create a file of these that can be backed up, stored on various mediums, and shared amongst my descendants. The documents I’ll save include:

Both my original and amended birth certificates, clearly labelled as suchCopies of my baptismal certificate (I currently have two, each showing different information)The non-identifying report I obtained from my adoption agency when I began to search for my birth parentsThe adoption decree from my adoptive parents’ fileThe notes I took when my search angel first told me my name at birth and found information on my birth motherCopies of the first letters I sent to my birth parents introducing myselfCopies of early correspondence with each of my birth parents in which we exchanged various facts about ourselves and our livesDNA test results (I have two kinds: paternity test results from two different men and match results from a commercial test I did to help trace genealogy)A copy of the birth card a nurse gave to my biological mother after I was bornA copy of the surrender document by which my birth mother transferred custody of me to the adoption agency

In addition, there are some historical documents I’ll include in my virtual file:

Information on the hospital where I was born, no longer existing, which was a maternity hospital for girls and women giving birth out of wedlockInformation on the baby home (i.e., orphanage) where I lived for the first three and a half months of my life, which also no longer exists

I’ll add photos to the file as well, including photos of my children visiting with relatives from all sides of my family, with everyone clearly labelled in the photos’ metadata.

All of this information is in addition to what I’ll save regarding my childhood with my adoptive parents and the significant events and experiences of my adult life. I’ll label all my physical photos so that future generations will know where and when they were taken as well as who is pictured, and I’ll organize all my physical photos, documents, and artifacts in appropriate storage containers to maximize their longevity. Yes, this will take many hours of my time, but I feel it’s time well spent.

Because I’ve been researching my biological genealogy for several years now, I have amassed a lot of information about my ancestry beyond my parents that I likewise don’t want to become lost over the next hundred years or more. I’m committed to documenting these connections in accordance with accepted genealogical standards, and I hope to one day create a book of my ancestry that can be passed down through generations and used as a basis of further research as the decades pass. I’ve already begun backing up all my digital genealogy files to both an external hard drive and to cloud storage. In addition, I deliberately post my confirmed research to my public online family trees in the hopes that it will be discovered there by future generations, or at least as long as those platforms exist.

I plan to leave instructions for my children on where to find all my documentation, including passwords to the many genealogical platforms I use. I’ll also leave instructions for specific information I want to be included in my obituary that will connect me to all of my families. And I’ll ask them to do one final thing for me: on my death certificate, I’d like the names of my biological parents listed as my father and mother—a vital signal to my future relatives that I hope will guide them to the full story of my life.

It’s a sad truth that as an adopted person, I can’t rely on extended family members to include me in their family history, and even if I am included, I can’t rely on their documentation to be fully accurate, whether because they simply don’t know all the details of my familial connections or because they may choose to exclude what doesn’t suit their perception of family. It’s up to me to do what I can to ensure that my descendants will know the truth of their own history.