Book Excerpt: Surrogate Court Judge Sealed My Records Needlessly
The following is an excerpt from my book, Forbidden Family:
Here is my mother’s death notice:
Not only was this public record available for anyone, including me via microfilm years into my reunion, but my adoptive family were distantly related to my deceased mother’s family. Openness should have prevailed. But my adoptive parents and extended adoptive family intentionally kept me from knowing anything about my natural family for the first 18 years of my life — because of the social myth that adoptees must never know the truth of their origins. For a variety of reasons, my adoption was grossly mishandled. I would go so far as to say my adoption should never have happened at all and certainly not with the craziness of many older relatives actively preventing me from finding out the identities of my natural blood kin. From the blunders of relatives to the official blunders of Surrogate Court and the Registrar of Vital Statistics in Buffalo, New York, my birth and adoption were ill treated all along. There was no respect for me as a child, nor as an adult. My dignity and worth as a human being was negated by adoption.
Another point: while I went to great lengths to change names in my book (real names of dead people can be used), the fact that real names published in death notices and obituaries are public record negates the trouble I went through to change names in the book to protect identities and past street addresses of living people.
~ ~ ~ Joan M Wheeler, BA, BSW, author of Forbidden Family: A Half Orphan’s Account of Her Adoption, Reunion and Social Activism, Trafford Publishing, Nov 2009.
