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Slaton, Pamela.
Reunited : an investigative genealogist unlocks some of life’s greatest
family mysteries / Pamela Slaton; with Samantha Marshall. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-61732-5 (trade pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-250-01213-5 (e-book)
1. Birthparents—United States—Identification—Case studies.
2. Adoptees—United States—Identification—Case studies. I. Title.
HV875.55.S615 2012
362.82'98—dc23
2012004630
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CHAPTER ONE
A Searcher Is Born
...
I
t was a conversation I’d been waiting to have my whole life.
For my thirtieth birthday, my husband, Mike, hired a private
investigator, and in five days this man did what I hadn’t been
able to do in fourteen years. He found my birth mother. I finally
had a name, a number, and an address for this elusive woman.
There was no doubt.
When Mike called me from work with the contact details, he
made me promise not to call until he got home. He should have
known better. “Yeah, yeah, sure, babe, don’t worry. I promise I’ll
wait,” I told him, my fingers itching to start dialing as soon as
I got him off the phone. My heart was racing. Meanwhile, my
mother-in-law was hovering. She knew what I was up to and she
had a bad feeling.
“Why don’t you look happy for me?” I asked her.
“Because I’m worried; I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“It’ll be fine. If she’s anything like me, she’ll be thrilled to
get this call.”
I picked up the phone and dialed, but the person who
answered—presumably my half brother—told me she was at the
supermarket. I tried again later and got my half sister, who told
me she was still out. I was on tenterhooks. I couldn’t get over
the fact that I had a brother and sister, and I’d just talked to them
for the first time, although they had no idea who I was.
I waited for another interminable hour. Finally, on my third
try, my birth mother answered the phone. We’ll call her Priscilla.
2 . pa m el a slaton
I was about three years old when I first thought about searching
for my birth mother. Becoming a searcher for adoptees and their
birth relatives is something I was born to do. My aunt has told
me she remembers that I said, “I am going to find that woman.”
I kept saying it over and over. She asked me, “What woman?”
Then it dawned on her who I meant.
I never discussed this with my parents. Even as a child, I in-
stinctively knew it would hurt them. My desire to find my birth
mother was in no way intended to be a slight against my mother
and father. No blood relation could ever replace the people
who loved me and raised me. I was brought into a loving
middle-class home in the suburbs. My dad was a funeral di-
rector and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I had an older
brother, who was also adopted. If anything, we were made to
4 . pa m el a slaton
THE RING
five—with dark blond hair and green eyes, and of Italian de-
scent. The agency told me my mother had considered herself a
foster child because she wasn’t raised by her own parents and
was separated from her brother and her sister, but she didn’t
know why. She was young and unable to raise a child on her
own, but she seemed reluctant to give me up. The agency sev-
ered her legal ties to me only after she failed to show up for two
appointments with one of the agency’s social workers.
This made me all the more determined to find her. It was no
longer about me. I felt sad for my birth mother and I wanted to
know that she was okay, and to let her know that I was fine and
I’d had a good life. But over the years, I kept getting stone-
walled. I’d pick up scraps of information here and there, think
the trail was getting hot, then hit a dead end. Few states have
embraced open adoptions, which were unheard of at the time I
was born. People in a position to tell me what I needed to know
were legally bound not to. All they could do was offer a few
murky clues. I finally found out that my birth name was Wade,
something my adoptive mother later told me she had known all
along, because it was on my adoption papers. (She wasn’t ex-
actly supportive of my search. I guess she was afraid I’d get hurt,
or that she’d lose me.)
Most adoptees who search go through this stop-and-start
process. You pick it up, you put it down, and then you pick it up
again. Life and the need to earn a living tend to get in the way.
The search can take an emotional toll, and it’s all too easy to
get obsessive about it, but you can’t live like that.
In the interim, I had married my childhood sweetheart,
Mike, moved to Nassau County, on Long Island, begun a career
in real estate, and started a family. It wasn’t until after my father
died and my second little guy was born that we had the break-
through on Priscilla’s name and location (and my world came
to a crashing halt).
8 . pa m el a slaton
FR OM FAN TAS Y T O R E AL I T Y
F R OM B AC K T O F R ON T
But first, I had some healing to do. What I didn’t know at the
time I found Priscilla was that you need to prepare yourself.
reunite d . 9
People join support groups, read books, and spend years re-
searching what can happen before they make that phone call.
But I’ve always had a tendency to dive in headfirst. I did every-
thing backward. I joined every adoption organization I could
find only after I’d found Priscilla. I needed to find other adop-
tees who understood what I was going through. I couldn’t stand
to be alone in this a minute longer.
I made a ton of new friends. Aside from my brother, Ronnie,
who’d had no desire to search when we were growing up, I knew
no other adoptees. Suddenly, I was relating to people on a level
I never had been able to before. This opened up a whole new
world for me. I became instant pals with some women who’d
also been searching. We started socializing and had girls’ week-
ends away in the Hamptons. I was like their social director.
They shared their stories with me, and I shared mine with them,
and although there were some other disaster stories, no one was
able to top what had happened to me.
During this time, I met a woman who threw me a lifeline—
I’ll call her Lydia. Lydia cofounded a group that ran meetings in
various homes and public places. The organization had a 1-800
number and took calls from all over the United States from
adoptees and birth parents looking for one another. I found this
group within a couple of months of my reunion fiasco and
started going to its meetings as well. A mutual friend from the
adoption groups introduced me to Lydia, and the friendship
was instant.
Lydia was older and wiser than I was in matters of adoption
searches, and she immediately took me under her wing. I called
her relentlessly to pick her brains about the process of finding
birth relatives. We spent hours on the phone. I was looking for
my own family and still honing my search skills, and Lydia was
generous in opening up her bag of tricks to me. Besides point-
ing me to useful resources for information, one of the most
valuable lessons she taught me was to trust my gut.
10 . pam e la sl ato n
T HE R OOK I E Y E AR S
Word among the other adoptees spread that I was getting good
at searching on my own behalf, and they started asking me to
help them, as well. I soon teamed up with Lydia and another
friend, Nanette. Together, we solved some of the toughest adop-
tion cases. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my career as a
searcher.