Adoption: The Making of Me. An Oral History of Adoptee Stories

Magali was born in Sri Lanka in 1992 and adopted by French parents when she was 2 months old. She grew up in a small town in France, a mostly white area, and struggled to identify with both the French and Sri Lankan cultures.  She found her birth family during her first visit to Sri Lanka when she was 16 years old. She has 4 older siblings that stay in the family.  The language was a real barrier...

Jeff is an adoptee born in 1964 in Salt Lake City Utah. He is the middle of 4 children (an older sister and younger twins, a boy and a girl) who were also adopted. He grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and always knew that he was adopted. He has been able to experience living in the Middle East and working in a variety of cultures in countries throughout the Middle East as well as Mexico and the U...

Julie Ryan McGue is an American writer, a domestic adoptee, and an identical twin. In her books, essays, and blogs, she explores the topics of finding out who you are, and where you belong, and making sense of it. She is the author of two books: Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging , and Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship . Her third book, T...

Stephen Rowley, Ph. D., is a psychotherapist practicing on Bainbridge Island, Washington. He is an adoptee and the father of an adopted son. Born in 1949 to an unwed mother, he was adopted at six months and enjoyed the benefits of growing up in a loving and affluent home. At age 13 he became deeply curious about his parentage. Not until college did he have the means to begin a lifelong quest to fi...

Carolyn Hill-Bjerke is an adoptee born in 1967, during the Baby Scoop Era. She was born to 20-year-old students at the University of Connecticut. Carolyn’s biological mother was put into a maternity home. Her father moved to New York City and became a lawyer. He worked in the entertainment business. Carolyn was in foster care for the first five months of her life as her biological mother resisted...

Trishina was born in 1991 in Sevastopol, Ukraine, and was adopted at 18 months old. She was always curious about her biological family, searching on and off. Still, it wasn’t until she joined a Russian social media app called Vkontakte, that she could find some answers. Trishina is a nurse and military wife currently living in Cleveland, Ohio. Vk Link To skip ahead to the interview go to timestamp...

Season 7 Finale Gretchen Sisson, PhD is a qualitative sociologist who studies abortion and adoption in the United States, based at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Moth...

Steve Inskeep is an adoptee and adoptive parent born in 1968, the peak year for adoptions in America during the Baby Scoop Era.   He is a host of NPR's Morning Edition , as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First . Known for interviews with presidents and Congressional leaders, Steve has a passion for stories of the less famous: Pennsylvania truck drivers, Kentucky coal miners, U.S.-Mexico bor...

Christina Thanstrom is a baby Scoop-era adoptee born in Los Angeles in 1966. A loving couple adopted her in 1967 through LA County and she had a mostly idyllic childhood with a younger brother (also adopted) in the San Fernando Valley. Christina was reunited with her birth mother, Arleen, an R.N., at age 19 while in college (the same age Arleen had given birth to Christina). Christina learned that...

Mark Diebel has been married for almost 46 years and has two sons and two grandchildren. He has been serving as an Episcopal priest in parish ministry for thirty-six years. He was reunited with his birth mother, a second-generation Japanese immigrant, in 2004 when he was 49. A year later he learned that his natural father, a Cuban doctor, was killed in a bizarre accident in Matanzas Cuba in 1970....

Cary is a baby scoop-era adoptee who was born in a Florence Crittenton Home in Atlantic City NJ in 1964. Her first mother was 19 years old and was forced to relinquish her baby like many young mothers of those times. Cary had a great upbringing in a family that loved her and never made her feel othered. In her early 30s she reunited with her birth mother and then her birth father. The reunions wen...

Ellen is a baby scoop-era New York State adoptee. She was adopted by a loving Greek American couple through a closed private adoption and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with a younger adopted brother. Ellen always wanted to find her original family and searched off and on starting in the early 90s but kept hitting roadblocks. Her adoptive parents were not supportive of her search so she had...

Simone Pajo was born in Auckland New Zealand in 1968, the baby scoop era.  She was the middle child between two bio children and was adopted after the death of the middle bio daughter.  She grew up knowing her adoption was the result of a baby's death and this greatly affected the way she saw the world and her place in it.  It has taken decades for Simone to form a coherent worldview where her rig...

Ryan Anderson is a foundling and a transnational, transracial, and late discovery adoptee (LDA). Found on the street in El Jadida, Morocco he was adopted at age 3 months and then brought to Scotland at age 6 months, in between this time he was fostered by a Moroccan family. He first found out he was adopted at age 18. Since 2020 he has been focused on personal development, to then became open to s...

Jessica is a 1970 baby scoop-era adoptee, who started discovering her roots at age 50. After more than 80 years of closed records in NYS, she was able to obtain her original birth certificate in 2020. Two DNA tests and one secret after another uncovered a history of relinquishment, trauma, and family ties nearby of where she resides in upstate New York.  At 54, Jessica is learning to live her trut...

Valerie Naiman is an adoptee, singer, story-songwriter, eco-village founder, ontologist, and author. Her #1 bestseller book, Mystic Masquerade, an Adoptee's Search for Truth, was based on five decades of a search that took her around the world as she unraveled the mystery of her stolen identity.  Valerie holds a master's degree in Art and worked as a costume designer and actress in film and theatr...

Chris Valdheims is a domestic adoptee born in the late 1970s and adopted in the early 1980s after spending years of his early childhood in foster care. Growing up, he knew very little about his birth family other than his mother and father had met while she worked as a librarian at MIT. He also knew his father was Black, and his mother had immigrated to the United States from Latvia. He spent year...

After being an only child all her life, Margaret Jane’s adoptive parents adopted four more children through the foster care system. This experience of witnessing adoption through foster care, and being the oldest sister of a group of adoptees, has given her a unique perspective and experience with adoption.  Margaret Jane is married to her high school sweetheart, who she shares 3 kiddos with. She...

Susan Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press in November 2023. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption . Her work has appeared in The Writer , Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.  Her theatrical ad...

Stacie is a Canadian born and an adoptee to same race and religion parents in 1991-1992. She is part of a mixed family of adopted and “home-made” siblings, all boys, and is the second oldest. She grew up mostly outdoors in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Traveling to Canada every summer fostered loving bonds with both of her grandmas and many cousins. Living further away from them, though, meant sh...

Ken DeStefano is a domestic adoptee born in the late 1960's and raised in a caring and loving home.  As an adoptee, he has had a largely happy life, but always wondered about the unknown.  That curiosity led to a search for his birth mother and a reunification with her.  His debut novel, " I Will See You Again...Hearts Will Sing ," tells the story of two people whose past, present, and future live...

Victoria Rich never expected to search for her biological family. Always curious about her origins, she did a photography project at the infant home where she was born but did not pursue any personal searching. Then she read The Girls Who Went Away and was struck that so many of the women interviewed said they thought about and worried about their babies all the time. She had grown up hearing the...

John Frey was born in Vietnam and brought to the United States as part of Operation Babylift when he was a year-and-a-half old.  John often struggled with his identity, having been adopted and raised by a White American family while not having any connection to his birth country or culture. I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiyo Ito. Use Discount  MAKINGOF  for 30% off. Thank you S12F for our pas...

Kristal Parke is a talented Cree filmmaker, producer, podcast host, and adoptee, whose personal journey has driven her to explore themes of identity, belonging, and family in her work. Born and raised on the West Coast of Canada, Kristal was adopted into a non-indigenous family as an infant. This experience profoundly shaped her perspective on life, and she has used her creative prowess to shed li...

Lorah Gerald is a same race, domestic, Baby Scoop Era, preRoe adoptee. She posts as The Adopted Chameleon on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Patreon, and Pinterest. She co-facilitates Adoptees Connect Tulsa and has a private Facebook group for adoptees and all MPEs called The Adopted Chameleons. She started her social media pages after her reunion with her biological family. She was raised a...