Finding Family: My Search For Roots and the Secret of My DNA

Richard Hill’s autobiography reads like a thriller. He was born in 1940’s Michigan, adopted as an infant, and had to do some serious detective work to find his birth mother. His family and their friends only know a tad here and there, and since the adoptions in the old days were private, there was no record of his. A million leads later and he finds his half-brother, alive and well, who accepts him with no conditions. His birth mother is long dead, and it will be a while before he finds out who his father was.

Perhaps this book is a story about the USA in the 1940’s? Hill’s mother dropped out of school to marry at 16, had one child, then separated from her no-good husband. She got pregnant by another man, then left both her sons with a neighbor so she could party with low-life bums. But can you really blame her? This was 1944, and women had no rights. She got pregnant by a lousy guy (his sister calls him a “lousy brother and even worse husband”) and had no choice but to marry him. Unmarried mothers in those days were outcasts. It wasn’t like she could continue going to high school while pregnant, the principal would’ve just thrown her out. Birth control was hard to come by for an unmarried teenager (especially if you didn’t want to risk a beating by your parents) and abortions were dangerous. Maybe this woman had a right to want to go out and party like a 19 year old?

What amazes me the most is that Richard Hill traced his family without the help of the internet. In the 1980’s, his detective work had to be done by writing letters, patiently waiting for a response, visiting record offices, and chasing down people with no contact information. But the fact that the information was buried doesn’t surprise me at all. According to the author, adoptions were always private because of the stigma. Adopted kids were seen as second-rate, and the parents were afraid of their kids having that stigma (except for Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, and Josephine Baker.)

Fortunately, Hill’s discoveries don’t open huge cans of worms. Nowadays, adopted kids who go looking for their birth parents don’t often like what they find. Who wants to find out that their father is a serial killer serving 200 years for gory murders? Maybe the truth isn’t always the best thing.