to know more about my biological family.
My two sons, ages 9 and 19, are interested in their heritage. The
three of us and my wife would be grateful to you for any
background information that you feel comfortable sharing. For me,
questions come to mind about my birth parents regarding their lives
in their younger years until now. What interests and personalities
do you all have?
In that we are all growing older, my hopes are to meet them
soon. Our arrangements can be in mutual agreement. Please know
that I feel most respectful of the degree of privacy that they wish to
maintain. I have had a wonderful adoptive family and appreciate
my biological parents’ decision in their youth. My interest is
genuine and receptive to any boundaries they feel are necessary.
Your consideration in this matter is deeply appreciated.
Most sincerely yours,
Your older BrotherA few weeks later I received a letter from the Children’s Home
Society. It was from my birth sister.
“Yes, we would love to meet you,” she wrote. North Carolina state law
forbade her from revealing any identifying information to me, but
working around those parameters, she gave me my first real set of clues
about the biological family I had never met.
When she reported that my birth father had been a naval aviator in
Vietnam, it just blew me away: no wonder I had always loved to jump out
of airplanes and fly sailplanes. My birth dad was also, I was further
stunned to learn, an astronaut trainee with NASA during the Apollo
missions in the mid-1960s (I myself had considered training as a mission
specialist on the space shuttle in 1983). My birth dad later worked as an
airline pilot for Pan Am and Delta.
In October 2007, I finally met my biological parents, Ann and Richard,
and my biological siblings, Kathy and David. Ann told me the full story
of how, in 1953, she spent three months at the Florence Crittenden Home