Hello Robert,
Thanks for the invitation to come and chat. by way of introducing myself...whew! Where to start...
Like many other children of unmarried teenagers, especially during the early 1960's, I had been adopted as an infant. My adopted mother had, over the years, told me stories about my birth family and my circumstances. Some "facts" were indeed true and others had been invented. As a child, I felt something was missing. I didn't know what it was but something wasn't right. I had always been fascinated by families and wanted a pedigree but my adopted parents were incredibly reticent about sharing their history. Perhaps they just didn't know it. This fueled the creative side of my brain. I imagined that I was descended from someone in every period of history that we studied in school and was quite inventive with the details. In fact, in elementary school I was quite sure that I had been born a princess but a band of gypsies had stolen me from my cradle and sold me to an adoption agency. Hmmmm...now that I think about it, I suppose I wasn't ALL that far away from the actual story.
When I turned 18, my adopted mother showed me a "photostat" copy of my birth certificate following up with the question "You don't want to look for her, do you?" Not being a fool, I knew what the correct answer to that one was!. It wasn't until my genealogy quest began eleven years later that I realized just how odd it was that she was in possession of such a document considering the year of my adoption. After all, "closed adoption" in the 1960's meant you had no right to look at any legal documents that "created" your family. In fact, you had to convince a judge that there was a compelling legal medical or societal interest compelling you to ask him to issue an order allowing you to learn anything about yourself and origins.
Circa 1992, while working in the early days of IT, I subscribed to Prodigy. The service had bulletin boards on all sorts of topics. I gravitated toward Genealogy. A sub-topic of Adoption held my attention for a few months while I read posts from all three sides of the adoption triad until finally another poster, a birth mother who had read something I posted, reached out to assure me that if I were to find my birth mother she would definitely want to hear from me. Thus bolstered, I ran the name of my birth mother through the Prodigy membership list. Wham!!! I got a hit. Same first name, surname appearing as a middle name + "Smith". I sent her an email saying I found her on the genealogy board and was a family member trying to contact a relative with the same name who lived in (my birth certificate's city and state) in or around (date of my birth), was this she? It was. :-)
We spent three hours on the phone that first conversation. Then, we hung up so I could take calls in turn from my father and brother. Yes, they had gotten married the year after my birth and had two more children. I invited her to come visit me at my home. A few days later, she arrived with a box containing photographs and a ton of paper. It seems Ma was also fascinated by family history and had spent the last decade doing genealogical research on her ancestors via snail mail. The rest is history. Eight years later, my folks were able to hire an attorney to take their case and adopt me back. As an adult, I was able to give my own consent for adoption and wonder of wonders, the state didn't require a social worker to do a "home study" to see if we adults were capable of making the decision to legally be the family we had always been. :-/
Today, I am the proud owner of a Gedcom file compiled by a distant cousin who did painstaking and nearly completely accurate research over a 50 year period of time. Unfortunately, the file arrived in the mail on a CD without a shred of documentation. My brother, before his death, took up the assignment of contacting as many living relatives as we were able to find. Bill was so much more outgoing than I. My self assigned task was to stay in the background digging around for evidence to support the tree we were given and either confirming or correcting its assertions.
I was diagnosed with MS in 1999 which caused me to leave the world of the gainfully employed a decade later. WikiTree is one great big playground for history nerds like myself. So, it is not unusual to find me awake in the wee hours, reclining bed and surfing the internet with my cell phone...which is, incidentally, the reason my paw prints are date stamped on merges all over the tree at the most unusual hours.
Currently, I am allowing my ADD brain to run wild. I have to continue documenting my ancestors and trying to tell their stories if such can be found, to indulge myself in reading about times and places in history that weren't the focus of my formal education, to reaching out to newly discovered cousins and in-laws, and to adding whatever contributions possible to creating our global tree.
And for we baby-boomers...isn't WikiTree in some small way the realization of long hours, sitting in a circle, communing about brotherhood and love?
MC