Man Offers $1K for information leading to his family

You are almost sixty years old, your mother is going into a nursing home, and in cleaning out her home your 26-year-old daughter finds papers that show your name was changed when you were an infant.

You are adopted. You were not "Larry Dell" when you were born.

This after four decades of adoption reform, adoption in the news, adopted people searching? And your "mother" never told you the truth of your origins? To continue the fiction that she told herself, she lived the lie and kept you in the dark. What do you do now?

If you are Larry Dell of Brooklyn you advertise wherever you can and offer $1,000 to anyone who can give you information leading to can help him locate a blood relative.

Dell was born Louis Roth on Aug. 18, 1948, at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, according to the New York State Department of Health Adoption Information Registry. (Not sure how he got that information, but good for him.) He was his family's fifth child, and both of his birth parents--a truck driver and a homemaker--were 39 at the time he was born. His adoptive aunt believes his birth family lived in Bushwick or East New York, but she's not sure, said Dell, who can be contacted at larrydell@daddyoutpost.com. (Let him know where you heard about this if you contact him, please.)

This story, Adopted Brooklyn man offers $1K for help finding his family, in the New York Daily News today (3/14/10), really pisses me off. Pisses me off that this kind of hoodwinking still goes on. That people hide the truth from the person it matters the most to. That this is even possible today.

Once, when I was writing my memoir Birthmark, I was having lunch with a business contact and somehow we got around to adoption. He was an adoptive father and I poured out my story to him for reasons unknown. He said nothing, but later, as we were saying goodbye outside the restaurant, he turned to me and told me that a few years earlier, the mother of his (now adult) daughter had contacted them and had hoped to meet the girl. Did they tell her? No, he said, they did not tell her because although she knew she was adopted, she never talked about it. Or mentioned wanting to know her mother.

I wanted to punch the bastard. 

If you are adopted and are reading this and you have never talked to your adoptive parents about your feelings about adoption and knowing the truth of your origins, do so today. If you are a first/birth mother and have buried your sorrow and never talked to your father, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts about wanting to know what happened because that part of your life is never talked about, do so today. When a searcher calls and gets your brother/sister/uncle, he is going to say: She doesn't want to know. She's never talked about it.

And the reunion you secretly long for may die right there. I hear from searchers that it's most often the males in a family who turn down an active search, and they may hold the only key to a birth/first mother's whereabouts. If not today--when? --lorraine