A stroke of luck
What was once unusual is now the norm.
* = Names changed.
Today is my biological grandmother Ana’s* birthday. Mum sends a card and calls her to catch up. This is now becoming our new norm, Mum knowing who she was at birth, her birth mother and being the youngest of 2 (adopted family) and the eldest of 4 (birth family).
It is a wonderful thing to behold, Mum had always had a curiosity about her birth family and where they might be by now. As Ana’s* name was unusual, there was only one person with her name in her area and it allowed me to trace her family tree back leading Mum to have an idea of where she came from. But that wasn’t how it used to be.
Mum was lucky as not everyone has a genealogist in the family. When the Birth Info and Tracing Act came into effect in 2022, it opened a literal floodgate. Thousands of applications for birth information came into Tusla who were processing them. What the bill promised was that everything that would be sent back would be unredacted. That wasn’t the case. [click on images to enlarge]
It also promised that the information would be released to you in 30 days, but acknowledged that if that wasn’t going to happen, it would be given to you in 90 days. We never received it in either of those time frames. It took 240 days.
What people could also avail of is a tracing service, for Tusla to try and trace living relatives, which was another good thing — except, it’s struggling. A lot. Specifically the ‘not receiving any funding’ kind of struggling.
So, whenever I can guide people or even help them research their family history (I don’t find living people), it fills me with joy. I’ve been able to help five people so far and each one has had great results.
But, there’s one thing I wonder about now. If the information my mother needed to trace her family wasn’t as hard to get (with the common analogy I use being “drawing blood from a stone”.) — might things have been different? I guess we’ll never know but I’ll leave you with this why do adoptees have to fight tooth and nail to be given their information?
Daniel, I can’t speak for any given locality, but I know our own family was touched by this distortion over 70 years ago when my own mother gave up a baby to adoption. The circumstances were about as gracious might be imaginable, but times were different and mom wouldn’t talk about it out of a shame instilled by her parents. I’m deeply grateful for a series of coincidences that made it possible for my sister to reach out to connect. I agree with you, this information belongs to adult adoptees. Everywhere.