The Importance of Family History & Identity as an Adoptee
As a person, I’ve always been interested, curious and wanted to know my ethnicity and family background but as an adoptee, this has been very difficult due to lack but really no family history background available.
I’ve always known I was white British but I wanted something specific instead of something rather vague and vast.
For me, yes I did spend the first part of my life, the first three years in foster care which had major consequences on my life but at that young age even having contact with family then didn’t leave an imprint on me as I was only 3 ½ years old and too young to grasp the situation so no family history, ancestry or roots was able to follow and be embedded and instilled within me. Essentially from the moment I entered foster care and later adoption I was a blank and mystery person because I was starting a new life and there was no one around who could tell me about my family history due to my biological family not cooperating and willing to provide family photos or information to me as a child growing up which at the time would have been important and necessary for my understanding, development, confidence, self-esteem etc but instead my history and where I came from was unknown and mystery even to my parents who had adopted me. I had to grow up as a mystery person for my whole life which brings on so many extra challenges when growing up is already hard for an adoptee.
I had a lovely upbringing and for the most part, I was happy but there was a large part of me that left me feeling disconnected from my past life, my culture, my heritage, my roots and also who I was as a person.
As I’ve grown up to understand things I can now say openly that all the feelings I have surrounded being separated and essentially being abandoned by my birth mother and then entering foster care which all of this manifested in trauma, grief sadness, heartache and a hole in my heart from then being adopted and the other side to the equation is the love and gratitude I have for my family. All these feelings are normal in the life of an adoptee but they can happen simultaneously.
“Grief and gratitude can happen simultaneously, hope and heartache can live in the same space, joy and sorrow can both be present“ America Kids Belong
For me, as an adoptee, my ancestry and roots have had a very high importance to me from very early on because one’s identity helps us in ourselves and to understand where we have come from.
The very first time I met my birth mother with the social worker I asked about the family ancestry background and I was told my maternal side was English, Irish, German and some unknown European country as my maternal grandmother doesn’t know her father and the other side my paternal family according to my birth mother was ½ Jewish and ½ Chinese. At the time, I was not convinced that all of this was accurate, especially about the part of my paternal grandmother being Chinese. I’ve met my paternal grandmother many of many times and she was not Chinese, I don’t know where this assumption came from.
From around 2019 was when I started to become interested again in my roots and where I’ve come from. I paused my interest due to me being angry and upset at the results of reunion from all three parties: my birth mother and her family, my three younger sisters and my birth father and his family. I needed to find and work out my true identity which I’d been trying to do since the very beginning as a very young child but with no success. It was only since I had time on my own surrounded by my family and in an environment where I felt safe and free that I was able to write and determine my own definition of identity without anyone having any influence on my idea. My identity present day are all my thoughts, ideas and feelings.
Even once I had contact terminated with my birth family I struggled to work out and understand who I was. I then decided to create my own version of my identity one which I was happy about instead of an identity full of sadness, heartache, stress and sorrow.
There are different layers to my identity and I’ll try to break them down for you in the simplest way. The way I view things is I only consider myself British as this is the place I was born, grew up, educated and now work but other than that I do not associate myself with being British as all I see are the bad things as it is triggering indeed. In a way, it’s hard for me to say I’m British because I associate my Britishness with my birth family and that’s hard because it’s a reminder of who I once was as a baby and toddler but not anymore. Basically, my identity is reversed compared to a person who was raised in the UK as a British Person. My identity is based on the culture of my international family which I’m very proud of.
For around five years I pondered on the thought of doing a DNA test for myself so I could start to understand myself better but there were lots of fears about this. What prevented me from doing a DNA test in the past was I was worried that something would appear and there would be no turning back. Another reason was it reminded me of my birth father when he kept forcing me to do a DNA test to prove I was his daughter just because I was different to my other sisters, this was no excuse and it was hard to be reminded of that time. Also, due to all the brokenness, I thought maybe some of that was in the DNA and was generational.
The process of getting a DNA test is daunting, there is a process involved and I fluctuated from wanting to know and not knowing, I kept going backwards and forwards because I felt my DNA would be full of brokenness as I was biologically related to my birth family. Finally, I had the courage to undertake an ancestry DNA test in February 2020 and this was one of the missing pieces which I’ve had within me my whole life. My ethnicity results ended up like this:
England, Wales & Northwestern Europe 80%
Ireland and Scotland 15%
European Jewish 3%
Sweden 2%
Over time the results have changed slightly depending on new data and I’ve had ethnicity estimates from other regions such as from France, Denmark, Norway and Germanic Europe which is no surprise.
“If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree” Michael Crichton
Over time I came to terms with the DNA test and I realised that my DNA is not broken and that was a huge sense of relief to me. My DNA essentially is full of family names, secrets and history that is connected through the chromosomes, nucleosomes, histone proteins, genes and nucleotide base pairs but essentially we are not connected at all, I’m separate from all of these people and ancestors. I’m an outsider walking around with history that is unknown and unfamiliar to me.
Then in 2022, I became ever more interested in my family history because that is the starting point of who I am and for me, it pretty much was a sense of urgency to have a basic grounding to my history. Just finding a new name is a huge deal for me and anything extra like knowing what their life was like, their job, where they lived, their birthday and seeing photos that’s even a bigger thing for me because then it becomes real and that these were actually people connected to me because in reality, I don’t feel I have a biological family because there is no real connection there. Maybe this will change as time goes by but for the moment this is where I stand which does hurt me a lot because I then feel a part of me has died inside of me.
Knowing one's family history and ancestry is so important especially for adoptees because without this one feels incomplete and everyone deserves and has a right to know where they have come from, it’s a human’s basic desire and one's right.
“The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” Rudy Owens
From doing my own research on my ancestry I now feel more confident in myself knowing who I am with my head hanging high as a human being due to the work I’ve done because now I have more of an understanding of where I’ve come from and who my biologically family are going through the different ages and that’s very important for me. Without this, I was unable to be me, the true me who is full of potential, talents and aspirations.
Now, as I’ve done the work I’ve done it feels good to know truly where I’ve come from because up until that moment I still felt mystery even having visited both sides of my birth family as an eighteen and nineteen year old.
For me having done this work and accumulated all the information such as birth, marriage and death certificates, census and WWI & WWII records and some photos doesn’t change the way I feel about my identity. Just because now I’ve found information about my biological side doesn’t mean I’m going to switch my identity to that of my biological family because that will never be the case as I’ve been brought up in a diverse international family and my biological identity has always been unknown. It’s there and within me through biology and DNA but that’s not me or who I associate myself with it’s just good to know where one has come from. The situation might have been different if I had a really good bond and connection with everyone in my birth family, if they treated me and my family properly and if I didn’t feel like an outsider then I might have included part of my biological identity within me but this is not the case for me.
This work is more for me to have in the distance like a book to read about for history purposes but I don’t consider that me. It’s just good to understand and know where one has come from because it then fills in another jigsaw piece and one feels more complete which is necessary in order to thrive and succeed.
My experience with ancestry and the importance of this will be very different for those who have grown up in foster care and had regular contact with their biological parents/family since entering the system thereafter even if it's minimal to once or twice a year as they get older because from then onwards these children will have known where they have come from, family members, familiar faces, ancestors and the family history while me, on the other hand, I never had this which back when I was growing up yearned for.
If one was removed from the family of origin as an older child the likelihood of knowing family history, one’s ancestry and roots are high unless one has no interest in where one has come from which can be the case in some foster youth or if the parents and family are unknown due to abandonment which in recent years I’ve heard cases about such as in my local area.
I’m sure this is something that my four sisters don’t understand why I wanted to meet my birth parents as soon as I became an adult after everything that’s happened and they’ve been through but at the same time I now understand where they are coming from and their perspective. The problem here was that they didn’t understand my experience and that I hadn’t seen my birth parents for 15 years and how this could affect a child but also how much I longed to have some form of contact with my birth parents and family something which they had access to for their entire life even if they didn’t want this all of the time.