Searching for identity in past records requires good research skills, compassion, a strong interest in helping others and being able to talk and work with others. "It is a tedious, all-hours enterprise made more difficult by a state law under which all adoptees' original birth certificates are forever sealed." Some private individuals do this for fun and the sheer pleasure of finding out about the past. Commercial businesses charge up to $3,000 for birth-family searches but "search angels" do it for nothing more than the satisfaction of helping adoptees answer the universal human query of where they came from.Read the article from the February, 2007, News and Observer...
News and Observer
February 4, 2007
Martha Quillan, Staff Writer
On a quest to unlock identity
APEX - On May 6, 1958, a young Buncombe County woman, maybe afraid and probably alone, gave birth to a baby girl she called Pamela. Unable or unprepared to care for a child, the woman signed some papers, handed the baby over to an adoption agency and resumed her life.
If that woman is still alive, somewhere, sometime -- it may be weeks, it could be years -- her phone is going to ring. And Martha Mills, the daughter she may have thought she never would see again, will be on the line.
Mills believes this because she has an angel on the case: Joanna Freitag, one of dozens of "search angels" in North Carolina. Their mission is to help adult adoptees track down their birth families. Read more...
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