Mom was right. Indexing is actually FUN.

Last night I completed my 10th batch of names (over 300 names total) through Family Search.  I did one war volunteer card, but most of my work has been on the 1940 Census.  It has been incredible.

My father-in-law has done professional genealogy work and frequently speaks at family history events.  My mother-in-law called and told us about the Census going online weeks before it happened.  She suggested that all of the siblings' families dedicate an evening to indexing and teaching her 16 grandchildren about indexing and family history work.  She said, "It will be so much fun!"

*blink blink*

Yeah, mom...  "Fun".

I understand that indexing, records and family history are important, and that it can be quite exciting when you find something new, but indexing records FUN???  That's a bit of a stretch.  Lashi and I actually had a good chuckle over that.

So, the night before we were supposed to have this "Family Indexing Fun Night", we set up our accounts, watched the "getting started" video, and tried out a couple small items.  We learned a couple things that night:

1. Indexing is easy - There is an image from a census sheet, you look at the info (which is highlighted in blue) and type it into the little box below.  Basically, you create a digital spreadsheet from a hand-written spreadsheet.  It's just data entry.  SIMPLE!  However....
2. Some people's handwriting sucks - There really should have been some kind of qualifying handwriting exam for the census takers.  I did one sheet yesterday where the "F" for "female" looked like a "2" or perhaps a "Q" with lots of character.  That one I figured out, as there are only two options in the gender column: M for male and F for female.  For names, places, etc. that are undecipherable, they have a wonderful quick-key.  type <ctrl u> and it will mark that particular entry as "unreadable".  OR, if you see a name and can't tell if it's "Anne" or "Anna", then you can enter it as "Ann*".  That will throw a flag for the arbitrators, who will do their darndest and make a decision.  If someone's handwriting is just so absolutely terrible that you don't want to deal with trying to decipher it, you can return the batch for someone else to do and move on to someone more legible. 
3. Indexing is always fascinating - It's like snooping into someone's neighborhood.  Once we learned what all the columns meant (even the ones that do not get recorded in the indexing), we discovered we could see who lives next door to whom, who is living at their house, interesting relationships and age differences, how much they pay per month for their home or farm, how much education they have...  I was amazed at how many of the adults had only as much schooling as my own children.  4th or 5th grade.  Some have NONE at all!  I found a family the other day where the husband had only an 8th grade education, but his wife had 4 years of college.  Very unusual.  We found 17 year olds married to 38 year olds with toddlers.  
4. Fascinating quickly becomes real, genuine, actual FUN - I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this.  I download a couple batches in the evening so that I can work on them when I get a free moment.  I index while my adoption paperwork is printing.  I index while I'm sitting in the car waiting for my kids to get out of school.  I index when I've put someone cranky in their room and need a moment of peace.  It has replaced my video games, YouTube, and old episodes of "Hoarders". 

Other pieces of advice and interesting things we've found:

• If you see an "M" for married that is crossed out and it looks like there is a "7" written next to it, you're absolutely right.  Someone came up with that as a code for "married with absent spouse".  Yeah, would have been nice to know that upfront.
• If a county or city name is unreadable, use our wonderful modern internet.  I had one that said "Van@^*&#@".  Could have been any number of things.  I Googled "Counties in Indiana" and found a list of all the counties.  Among them was "Vanderburgh".  I double-checked it against what was written in the Census, and it became very clear that that's what it was.  I also had what looked like "Vew Beach" in Indian River County, Florida.  I looked at a map of Indian River County and found a "Vero Beach".  Looking back at the ambiguous handwriting, that's exactly what it had been.  The internet is a wonderful thing.
• Some things will just dumbfound you.  Yesterday's indexing included a line that said, "Here ends the negro neighborhood which is bordered on the north."  Wow.  In 2012, you just don't see things like that written our records. 
• Adoption was not what it is now.  I know that from my own family records, but I saw a case of it this week.  There was a 33 year old widowed lady living with her widowed father, listed as "adopted daughter".  Not daughter, "adopted daughter".  Of course, she's listed with her married name, but if her case was like my great-grandfather, she never took on her adoptive parents' name or really integrated as a family member.  Again, different from today.

So, more as I continue, but I challenge and welcome and encourage everyone to give it a try.  Go to www.familysearch.org, create an account, download the free program and make even a one-document contribution to this great work.  You will be surprised by how much you enjoy it.   You may even find a piece of your own history as you do so.

Talking to Your Child About Adoption: Perspectives from an adoptee who is becoming an adoptive mother

"How do I tell my child that s/he is adopted?"

That is a very common question in the trainings, books and articles about adoption.  To me, the question was puzzling.  Not puzzling as in, "Yeah, how would I tell my child she's adopted?"  More like, "Why the heck would someone ask a stupid question like that?"

Honestly, that was my first reaction - and not a very fair one.  Unlike most adoptive parents, I am an adoptee myself.  In fact, my brothers, sister, mother, aunts, and now a nephew, ALL adopted.

Talking about adoption has been part of my family since 1952 when my grandparents adopted my mother and scandalized their social circles by admitting it in front of the child!  Heaven forbid!  In 1952, mothers went so far as to pad maternity clothes in order to fake having given birth to the child themselves.

"Let's just hope no one tries to pat my padded belly or I'll have to kill them... hehe."

My mother had "ILLEGITIMATE" stamped in big, red letters on her birth certificate.  

My grandparents, for all their faults, were admirably forward-thinking about adoption for their day.  They never hid my mother's story from her - they told her from the beginning that she was "Mommy and Daddy's little adopted girl".  Their friends and associates were shocked.  "How could you tell a child something awful like that!"

"You're not supposed to tell her that until you're on your deathbed!!!"

From the legacy of my grandparents attitude, my mother had confidence in her own history and identity, and she and my father passed the same openness and confidence on to me and later, to my siblings.

Of course, to be fair, there really are different types of adoption and different ways to approach a child's back story.  The articles about how to talk to your child about adoption seem to take a one-size-fits-all approach that appears to be based off of standard voluntary-relinquishment domestic infant adoption.

One thing I feel is across-the-board important: make sure your child knows FROM DAY ONE that he or she is adopted.  It's part of his or her story.  No one is benefited by putting that off or pretending otherwise.  Make or buy the child a baby book or life book with their own story.  There are tons of options for pre-made or DIY books.

After that point, however, things get a little fuzzier.  What do you tell the child and when?  Well, that depends on the child, it depends on his or her story, and what the child feels about it.  I will use mostly my own family's experiences as examples, because I don't know anyone else's family's personal experiences.

My oldest little brother and I were adopted as infants in very similar circumstances.  I always knew more about my own origins than my brother did for one simple reason: I wanted to know, he did not.  He was content to know that while he was born of another woman's body, this is his family, period.  He did not ask for more and to this day is not interested in more.  Our mother was quite similar to my brother. 

I was different.  I wanted to fill in every bit of blank space in my story.  I wanted to know about my parents' fertility struggle, what my birth parents' hair was like, what they were studying in school, how long my labor was, who were my foster parents, what were Mom and Dad's first reactions to me and the entire legal process. My parents told me exactly what I asked, striking a beautiful balance of honestly answering my questions to the best of their knowledge, employing "We just don't know" at appropriate times, and not giving too much information.  Even as a little child, I knew quite a bit about my early history, but they did withhold my birth parents' names until I was an adult, and I think that was a wise decision. 

My younger brother had a very traumatic past and was adopted older - at about age 5 - when he came to our family.  He knows he was adopted, he has never had any information held back from him, but he wants nothing to do with it.  His name was changed - twice in fact (by the foster family and then by us) - because if he even heard his original name he would have severe reactions.  Giving him more information about his adoption or life previous to it does him no good, and likely would do him hurt.  Is that true of all abused children?  No way, but it is for this particular child.

My sister also had a traumatic past and was likewise adopted at almost age 5.  As a child, she did ask more questions than my brother did, but on the other hand, she requested to have her name changed.  For several years during her teens, she didn't ask any more questions about her past but instead focused on rebuilding her life and identity in her current surroundings: attachment, security, cognitive development, etc.  She is now nearing adulthood.  I anticipate that in the coming years she will be more curious about her past than our younger brother, that she will want some of her blanks filled in.

Our adoption will be different yet again.  Mei-Mei will have a different story, different circumstances, but she will need the same things: security, attachment, a sense both of who she is and who she was.

A tree needs roots in order to branch out and blossom.

We haven't even been matched with a particular child yet, but we are already planning how to make her adoption and her pre-adoption life part of her story in our family.

• When we get matched to our daughter, we will build and send her a book with pictures of her new life. We will also begin building her life book with pictures we are provided from the orphanage/foster family, etc.  We will include any information, medical records, notes from the nannies that we are able to get.  
• We will honestly and openly answer her questions about her past with what we know, what we think, and what we believe.  "We know you were found in a park.  We think that you enjoyed watching the leaves and listening to the river until you were found. We believe that your birth parents loved you very much and wanted someone to find you and take good care of you." 
• We will include Chinese holidays in our family traditions, Chinese art and literature, Chinese dance, and as she becomes Irish, Danish, and German, we will all become Chinese.  Sound silly?  My family is all adopted, and each of us is from a different ethnic origin, but we were all given Irish names (like my father) to symbolize our family unity.  

This is just preliminary ideas we have to make sure our daughter feels fully part of our family AND fully in ownership of her past and her adoption.  On the whole, I think it will be easier for us than for most adoptive parents simply because adoption already has such a precedent in our family.

In the documentary "China's Lost Girls", one adoptee who was interviewed said that one hard thing about being adopted is that "everyone else was born from their mom" and she wasn't.  Well, in our family you can be home-baked like Daddy (and brothers, sister, and some grandparents and cousins) or adopted like Mommy (and grandma, great-aunts, and a cousin).  I am grateful for the place that adoption has had in our lives this far, and I can't wait until our Mei-Mei comes home and gets to take her place in this special family. 

Bringing Mei-Mei Home: Three Generations of Miracles

(This was my first post on our China adoption blog)

One reason this very, very fertile family is adopting is, simply stated:

TRADITION

To be short, my children are the ONLY blood-relatives I have in my entire family.

My maternal grandparents could not have children the traditional way (grandpa became sterile after having the mumps) so they adopted my mother and her two sisters in 1952, 1960 and 1964 respectively.  Grandma and Grandpa were quite unusual and forward-thinking for 50s parents of adopted children: they actually TOLD their daughters that they were adopted!  My grandparents took a lot of flak for that.  Back in those days, adoption was not nearly as well-accepted as it is today - it was nearly a scandal to admit that a child was not your flesh-and-blood - and most adopted children found out the "family secret" by accident or on their parents' deathbeds.  My mother, on the other hand, always knew where she came from and that her family was her family no matter how she came to be in it. 

20 years later...  My parents married in 1974 assuming, as most people do, that they would not have any barriers to childbearing.  They came to find out, though, that Mom had reproductive problems serious enough to prevent any chance of becoming pregnant.  Today, she probably would have been diagnosed with PCOS and a couple other things, and may have been able to overcome those and bear children herself with the help of a few modern medical miracles.  However, medicine being what it was in the 70s and 80s, these advances had yet to come to pass, so my parents could not have children the home-made way either.

Not to be deterred from their dream of having four children, they adopted me through LDS Social Services (now LDS Family Services) as a 13-day old infant in 1980.  My adoption was contested by my birth father and after a court battle it was finalized in 1981 when I was more than a year old.  Two years later, I became a big sister when we adopted my first brother - also an infant - through LDS Social Services.  I had the privilege of being the first person to enter the conference room with the little crib where my new baby brother was waiting for us to meet him.  He was the most beautiful, fat little thing I’d ever seen, and he was ALL MINE!  My parents had special baby books for my brother and I that were designed for LDS adopted children.  Instead of having pages for “labor and delivery” or “coming home from the hospital”, there were pages for “my first home”, “at the agency” and “my day at court”, as well as several pages for writing about the adoption process. 

I enjoyed being adopted.  Not that I had anything to compare it to, but it was something special about me, something different about my family.  To me, it was an important part of my identity. It was also fun.  I could claim not to be related to my brother when he did something embarrassing.  We joked with my Daddy, telling him that we were all “chosen”, but his parents had to take him!  Dad, as the only home-baked person in the family, was the “different one”.  At school, I had mixed experiences.  Other children were curious about my being adopted.  They would ask me things like, “How did you find out?”, “Were you in an orphanage?” and “Do you know who your real parents are?”  Nothing riled me like that last question.  Of course I knew my real parents!  They were raising me!  It doesn’t get more real than sitting up with a sick, puking child, driving hours every week for piano, softball and karate, as well as teaching, disciplining, sacrificing in every way that a parent does!  I was quite defensive of my family, and militant about people using “correct” terminology when discussing my origins.  “Birth mother” and “biological mother” were allowable terms for the woman who bore me, “real mom” was fiercely forbidden. 

Now, I don’t want anyone to think that I had ill feelings for my birth mother.  Quite the contrary, my parents taught me from the earliest age that the irrefutable evidence of my birth mother’s love for me was the fact that allowed me to have a family with a father and mother, happily married to each other, by placing me for adoption.  My mother told me,

“The greatest act of love ever performed for you outside of the Atonement of Jesus Christ was your birth mother placing you for adoption.”

I believed that.  I still do, and my experiences and acquaintances since then have been further evidence to me that what my mother told me is true.  My birth mother is my angel; a guiding star and inspiration.  My mother, however, is my pillar; my sunlight, and my hand to hold. 

For a long time, it was just the two of us children and our parents; a cute, little Father-Mother-Sister-Brother family just like the Berenstein Bears.  Can’t ask for more than that, right?  Well, Mom and Dad had always wanted a somewhat larger family than that.  It just wasn’t panning out.  While we still lived in Oregon, there was a brief time when they thought another adoption would come to be, but that situation fell through.  We moved to New Jersey, then Pennsylvania, and got a very harsh response to inquiries in those states.  It was not to be.

We lived 12 years in the east, and it appeared that we would always be “just the four of us”.  Then, when I was 15 we moved to Colorado.  My mother became friends with a wonderful lady, Kathleen, who had adopted a daughter.  She and her husband already had 3 home-baked sons and since that time they have adopted three more children.  That friendship led to an acquaintance with local foster families, one of which happened to be fostering a 4-year old boy who became my brother.  The first time he came to our home for a day visit, we all knew that he was meant to be with us.  He was adopted through Adams County, Colorado when he was 5 and I was 16.  Going from the 14-year old being the “baby of the family” to a kindergartener was quite a transition, especially since this particular kindergartener was not yet potty trained, had the language of an 18-month old, and even lower processing skills.  His sweet disposition won us all over, and we determined to help him achieve whatever he was capable of. 

My parents still wanted to bring one more child into the family, so they set about again to adopt someone close to my little brother’s age.  Working with Adams County for my brother’s adoption had been beastly, so my parents sought out different options for the last go-round and finally found my sister through Denver County when I was 18 and a senior in High School.  She was a tiny little 4-year old Hispanic girl with bright, warm brown eyes and an enormous smile.  It was love at first sight.  Something amazing happened the first time she spent the night at our home.  After tucking the little ones into their beds, my mother came into my room.  We both had felt the same thing: the family was now complete.  A hole had been there, imperceptible until it was filled.  My sister did not have the mental challenges that my little brother did, but she had plenty of her own struggles to overcome because of her turbulent past.

While her adoption was in process, I graduated from High School (class of 1999) and met a wonderful young man that summer.  We decided (very quickly) to get married.  Prior to our wedding in December 1999 I was told by my doctor that because of my endometriosis, I was unlikely to ever have children, or at the least would have great difficulty maintaining a pregnancy.  Well, I told myself, that’s just how things work in this family.  Women in my family don’t have babies!  I resigned myself to that fate and had a lengthy discussion with my fiancé, making sure that he was really alright with the concept and reality of adoption.  I figured that was the only way we were going to have a family of our own.  After a lot of pondering, he agreed, although I don’t think he fully “got it” yet.  He hadn’t seen the miracle of our family in action yet.  That’s where God’s timing proved so perfect. 

In December, my sister’s adoption was finalized.  My beloved came with the family to court and got to witness first-hand how my family legally comes to be.  Then, just one week before our wedding, we sat together in the Denver LDS Temple as my sister was sealed to my parents and given beautiful blessings and promises just as if she had been born to them.  He felt the power of the bond that an adopted family can have.  It is something not taken for granted, because one isn’t just “born with it”, it has to be forged, actively cultivated, proven and ratified before God and the law.  He decided then that adoption was part of our future, his future, as a member of this family.  One week later, on December 17, 1999, we were married and sealed in that same room in the temple, beginning our own journey as a family unit. 

Well, fast-forward 11 years…  All of my doctor’s predictions about difficulty in childbirth have come to naught.  We have (with no difficulty) baked-and-birthed five beautiful, healthy, brilliant little people.

One thing is lacking: 

We want to pass on this legacy of adoption to the third generation.