Finding Your Roots
My mother had no idea who her biological mother was. Then at age 66, she went looking
A personal journey to discover a birth mother’s story
GLIMPSING DOROTHY DUNCAN is like watching a crude and silent home movie whose snippets tend to cloud rather than clarify. The only people still living to remember her alive are in their late 70s and 80s, and the images they supply are fleeting: an athletic young schoolteacher in her 20s skiing across the countryside to local one-room schoolhouses; a comfortable companion picking wild raspberries on sunny summer afternoons near the family farm in Perth, Ont. She liked to dance. She was a meticulous housekeeper. She liked children.
But the reel contains darker flashes as well: after losing her mother in her early 20s, Dorothy succumbed to depression and was hospitalized several times. In 1941, at the age of 31, she gave up her first child for adoption, an action she would repeat three and then 10 years later. Most of her family never knew about those children, each fathered by different men, and it seems likely that Dorothy never imagined those children would want to know about her. One of those children is my mother.
But if she had assumed her children would have been indifferent to their origins, Dorothy would have been wrong. Although it was only after retirement that my mother, Sandra, took steps to solve the mystery of her background, she had always been curious about her birth family. The fact that she had become estranged from her adoptive parents in her late teens and the faint memories of be- ing moved around between multiple foster homes until age four had always made her wonder about the idea of an alternative family.
In May 2008, the province passed the Access to Adoption Records Act. The loosening of restrictions followed similar efforts in other Canadian provinces, including Alberta in 2005, Newfoundland and Labrador in 2003, and British Columbia in 1996. In 2010, my mother joined the more than 75,000 Ontarians who have contacted the government for their birth records since 1979.
Under the new Ontario rules, adopted adults and birth parents can reach out and obtain both identifying information such as the names of the birth and adoptive parents, and non-identifying information such as the date of the adoption, name of the adop- tion agency, and the birth family’s social or medical history. For adults who have spent their lifetimes telling family doctors that they have no idea about their genetic predisposition, an interest in their medical history is often one of the motivations.
AdoptOntario, a program of the Adoption Council of Ontario (ACO) is a government-supported photo-listing website established in 2003 to connect children with prospective adoptive families. Although the service mainly co-ordinates current adoptions, social worker Noelle Burke, clinical manager with AdoptOntario from 2008 to June of this year, says she received many calls from adopted adults looking for advice in finding their birth families.
While having children of their own often prompts middle-aged adoptees to reach out, Burke estimates 30 to 40 per cent of callers are over 60 and grew up in an era when adoption was not discussed. Often they are fiercely protective of a loving adoptive family and concerned about insulting them and wait until their adoptive parents have passed away. She reassures them that the search is more about obtaining a clearer picture of themselves. “In order to be a healthy human being, living with truth around us is important,” says Burke. “Traditional adoption counteracted that by saying that you don’t need to know and what’s done is done. But whether you had a good childhood shouldn’t matter so much – truth is truth.”
My mother is one of those typical adoptees, reaching out in her mid-60s when the time freed by retiring from a busy teaching career coincided with the latest opening of the Ontario adoption registry. She had been curious earlier but when she made brief inquiries as a young adult, she was told she would need to be examined by a psychiatrist before any information was released. In those days, the stigma of psychiatric evaluation was almost equal to that of adoption, so she’d decided to drop the pursuit.
And yet, the interest remained. I can’t remember not knowing that she was adopted, so it wasn’t a big secret. My father, Bill, had always encouraged her to find out as much as she wanted to know about her past. When she finally picked up the search again it was a little late: her birth mother had already passed away. And nothing much was known about her birth father other than his occupation as a military instructor, and his age, 22 to her mother’s 34. Fortunately, someone else interested in learning more had already reached out. At the last opening of the registry 10 years earlier, this man’s files indicated he would not be opposed to further family contact. Sandra had a brother.
And her brother lived less than a 90-minute drive from her Eastern Ontario home. On a September afternoon in 2010, my mother drove her blue Toyota to a restaurant at a halfway point along the highway near Ottawa, pulling up beside the big white truck she’d been told to look out for. A man hopped out. “Sandra?” He held out a single rose. She nodded, eyes welling up. “Let’s go for a coffee.” Struggling to speak, Sandra said, “I’m not usually this blubbery.”
In fact, the tears were fairly typical for her, but that’s the sort of detail a brother would only know if he weren’t meeting his sister for the first time. Sitting in the restaurant for two hours, they caught up on the details of their lives. Adopted from Kingston, Dave Bowman had grown up outside of Brockville and moved to Ottawa as a young man, where he had spent 37 years as an information technology specialist with Statistics Canada. He had two children, had divorced and remarried and, after his retirement in 1999, was still an active curler and stained glass hobbyist. My mother took him through the highlights as well, describing her trajectory from her birth in Toronto, her marriage and move to Montreal, where she’d had her own two children, and her life in rural Ontario where she had now lived for almost 20 years. When they decided to commemorate the visit with a reunion photo, the restaurant manager they called on to take their picture revealed that she had just adopted two boys herself.
For Dave, the reunion was made more comfortable by the fact that he’d already been down this road before. In spite of a very positive relationship with his adoptive family, he’d always been curious about his roots and began his search in the mid-1990s. Although Dorothy had passed away in 1976 and his birth father in 1980, he met two half-sisters in the mid-1990s with whom he shared a paternal connection. In the meantime, since adoptees are only allowed to be connected when both parties consent, he would have to wait more than a decade before being notified that Sandra had reached out.
“My name is Dave Bowman. I think I may be related to you.” Not only did that initial voicemail trigger the roadside reunion, but it also pushed the search for Dorothy Duncan forward. While both siblings had learned their shared birth mother’s name, the different rules at the time of their searches meant only Dave had been able to access contact information for their mother’s extended family. He had never reached out – did Sandra want to? After a few phone calls, a visit was arranged, and in January 2011 the siblings met their cousins Bill, George and Herel and respective wives, Orita, Ruth and Clarice, on the farm at MacDonald’s Corners, the family homestead since the mid-1700s and Dorothy’s original stomping grounds.
WHEN MY MOTHER first told my younger brother and me that she was planning to look into her past, it was more to let us know than to request our help. I’ve always been very close to my mother and watched with pride as she pursued her past. While I knew the outcome was important to her, only in witnessing her obvious fascination with each new detail of her story – her glee in finding just the right goofy brother-sister greeting cards to send to Dave at holidays or her marvelling at the warmth of the welcome she received from the extended family – did I really appreciate just how fundamental these discoveries were to her sense of self and identity.
While new relationships are now being forged between my mother and her birth family – and indeed even myself, it seems that certain facts will never emerge into full view, particularly concerning the woman at the hub of these connections, my maternal grandmother.
But it’s both from the Duncans and the severely redacted Children’s Aid Society records that aspects of the elusive Dorothy begin to emerge and converge: her first three-year stint in the Kingston mental hospital, her time in the home for unwed mothers in Toronto, the court case where she pleaded to maintain custody over her second child, my mother, who had been given the birth name Christine Margaret – later
changed to Sandra Margaret by her adoptive parents – and who was being passed from foster home to foster home in part because of the stigma that Dorothy had mental illness. My mother would discover her middle name was Dorothy’s middle name as well. And happier aspects: Dorothy’s love of the farm, her marriage in her late 40s to a husband the family thought was good to her and for her. Incidentally, Dave, her first child, had been adopted straightaway.
Hearing about Dorothy’s stability later in life comes as a relief in light of the sadness that seems to have dominated her early years: a diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia, multiple hospitalizations and repeated instances of children removed from her custody. The fact that most of her cousins didn’t know about the children also hints at a certain isolation she must have felt through these times. When my mother’s cousin Bill Duncan first heard from my mother, his wife, Orita, says he almost didn’t believe it. “I had no idea that Dorothy had any children,” says Orita, “and Bill was so flabbergasted he couldn’t even talk when your mother called.”
When Bill told his brother’s wife, Ruth, about the news, however, it triggered for her a memory of once lamenting to her husband’s mother, Dorothy’s sister-in-law, that it was unfortunate Dorothy never had children since she seemed to love them so much. “Granny said she did,” recalls Ruth. “But I never got into asking more and I don’t know why I didn’t.” She also recalls receiving letters from her Aunt Dorothy that alluded to her dark moments. “She used to write, and I didn’t keep the letters and I wish I had. She’d write, ‘I really need to clean my house’ – she was always a meticulous housekeeper – but I’m just too tired and sad.’ Not any of us understood Dorothy like we should have.”
Of the cousins, Ruth may be the one who most empathizes with Dorothy’s struggles: her son, Scott, developed schizophrenia in university and has grappled with it ever since.
The news of Dorothy’s children has also prompted the cousins to reconsider her mysterious absences in new light. “Mrs. Duncan said they had a bad trip out to Kingston one time, and I’m wondering now if that’s when David was born,” muses Orita. “I don’t know that for sure and there’s nobody to ask now, but I always took it that it was her nerves. I know she was in the mental hospital out there for a while, but I didn’t know there was a baby.”
Meanwhile, in addition to meeting the cousins, my mother continued to pore over the records the Children’s Aid Society had sent her. By the time she gave birth to my mother in 1944, Dorothy had moved away from her family in Perth and was living mostly in Toronto, had lost her licence to teach due to the mental illness and was working as a housekeeper. In going over the files another time, my mother noticed an additional detail. If the code “BHB 1: 1941” referred to her “Birth Half Brother” Dave Bowman born in 1941, who was represented by this other code, “BHB 2,” born in 1951?
Throughout her adoption search, my mother has been relatively independent in her pursuit but always sharing as results came to light. Just after Christmas 2012, she was sitting across from me in her usual place at the dining room table. As I watched her pull a small photo album from a mail parcel box, I studied her nose. It’s the one feature that most people remark on after struggling to find physical commonalities between us. At first glance, we don’t look all that much alike: I inherited my father’s fair skin, blue eyes and blond hair, whereas my brother has her more medium skin tone, brown eyes and dark hair. But if our DNA is suppressed in the obvious features, the relatively straight nose with flared nostrils belies our relationship: there’s no way I could be anyone else’s daughter.
HAS THE EXPERIENCE OF LEARNING about long-lost grandparents and gaining new relatives been a roller-coaster? People seem a little disappointed when I reveal that while I’ve been fascinated in the story and caught up in the details, the impact hasn’t been life-changing. My brother feels the same way. Perhaps it’s because we never knew our grandparents on either side due to estrangement and early death that I didn’t feel a lack – you can’t really miss what you haven’t had – or even an imbalance.
Perhaps my strongest reaction has been joy at seeing my mother so fulfilled by the experience. The fact that she forged ahead independently with the search makes me think that there’s something in the journey that’s been helpful for her, and I am content to be her cheerleader on the sidelines. I’ve been impressed by her fearlessness in pursuing what could have been really traumatic – not all reunions work out as well as hers did, not everyone “finds a Dave” as my mother puts it – and the fact that she’s been undeterred by and sympa--
thetic to the darker discoveries such as her mother’s mental illness. When I spoke with Noelle Burke she talked about adoptees needing to know “their truth” regardless of the details.
For most of her life, my mother has not been able to see her face in others besides my brother and I, so to hear from Ruth that my mother’s features resembles that of “the Duncan girls” or to see similarities in photographs has been charming. But she was about to introduce me to yet another familiar face: a second brother.
While the meeting with the first brother was relatively straightforward, this second reunion, which happened this past summer, was more challenging. Dave was able to share in her joy when they met, but Ian Duncan may not have fully appreciated the enormity of the moment – he has diminished intellectual capacity and has been a ward of the state his whole life. His caregivers in southwestern Ontario sent her a scrapbook about that life, with images of the group home where he lives: a picture of him squinting in the sunshine, another where he’s surrounded by his fellow residents.
“He looks exactly like Dave!” my mother said. “The family resemblance is incredible.”
“But you look like Dave, too,” I pointed out, recalling the reunion photo then more than two years old.
“Do you think so?” Her voice is disbelieving but pleased.
Burke says the one aspect with the potential to cause hesitation around searches is the disruption of the idealized fantasy adoptees may have constructed in their minds about their birth family. I asked my mother what she had envisioned of her mother before she came to know the truth. “My thought was that she was probably a 16-year-old girl who got pregnant, gave me up and moved on with her life, so I didn’t want to disrupt her life,” she says, adding she was shocked to find out her mother gave birth to her at age 34 with a 22-yearold partner.
Barbara Gill, vice president of the national non-profit Canadian Adoptees Registry ( www.canadianadopteesregistry.org), says birth parents also have emotional issues around adoption, derived in large part from the way society used to ostracize unwed mothers. “I can’t tell you how many mothers I’ve spoken with who said they had to sneak out, hunch and run to the car and lie down in the back seat to be taken away,” she says. “Forty years later, you can still hear the pain in their voices, the shame that was put upon them.”
Gill says reunions can also be difficult for birth parents because they’ve missed so many moments of their child’s life. “We grow with our children, so milestones are not just theirs –they’re our milestones as parents,” says Gill. “If your last recollection is of a baby boy and now you’re going to be talking to a 35-year-old man, that’s pretty hard.” Still, she estimates that 90 to 95 per cent of the more than 350 reunions she arranges annually are positive. And even those that aren’t tend to at least provide a sense of closure, especially for adoptees.
Three years after their initial reunion, my mother and Dave have become fixtures in each other’s lives, talking on the phone every few weeks and making visits to the Duncan farm. In April, when my father passed away after a long illness, Dave and his wife, Diane, came to the funeral where my brother and I met them for the first time. In spite of the shock over learning about their mother’s difficult life, for my mother and her brother, finding each other has made the reunion a very positive experience and one they encourage others to pursue regardless of age. As Gill points out, it’s about adoptees and their families finally being able to glimpse a more comprehensive picture of themselves, adding that, “People have gone their whole lives with others asking about their family background, and everybody deserves their story.”