New search resource: Canadian Voter's Lists, 1935-1980

It's been a long time since my last post.  Suffice it to say for now that on the reunion front all is well, but quiet, and I've made more progress in figuring out just what it all means for me than in really getting to know all these new people.  But quiet isn't silent, thankfully. I plan to write more later.

My own search may be over, but searching still interests me.  So I thought those Ontario adoptees still engaged in search might be interested to learn of an important new resource.  Ancestry.com now has an indexed archive of Canadian Voter's lists from 1935-1980.  Typically these contain a list of voters sorted by address.  Voters are people of voting age, which was 21 before 1970 and 18 afterwards.  This is probably one of the best public resources for finding names, addresses, and family relationships for Canadians around 1-2 generations ago.  I wish it were around when I was searching.

The importance of family medical history

The necessity of family medical history for adoptees has long been a unifying point, around which even people who don't otherwise support disclosure or reunion could rally. For a long time its importance was unquestioned. Yet in recent online discussions about adoption disclosure, I have encountered a new challenge to this argument.

The following are actual user comments from a couple of recent stories in Ontario newspapers about adoption disclosure and disclosure for donor-conceived adults, and illustrate the argument:

“The idea that knowing your unknown father's medical history is going to be of any significant value is incorrect. So he had high blood pressure; what are you going to do? Start taking blood pressure medicine prophylactically? All you need to know for personalized medicine is in your own genes, not your father's.”

— Dr Dr, "Parentage is about more than DNA", Globe and Mail, October 28, 2010

“These days anyone can pay $500 and get their genome decoded, which includes a summary of your genetic risk for many diseases, and in many cases match you with genetic relatives if you opt for that. Just go to 23andme.com or similar services. The medical history reason to contact birth parents doesn't hold much water any more. The answer to what you are at risk for is in your own cells just waiting to be decoded, and the breadth and depth of what genetic testing technology can tell you these days is expanding rapidly and the price is dropping. Considering 10% or more of kids aren't fathered by the person who is supposedly their father, genomic testing is a much more accurate approach.”

— Pragmatica, "Adoptees can find mom but not dad", Toronto Star, December 10, 2009

Let's be very clear here: DNA testing for medical prognostication is in its infancy. It is no substitute for authentic medical information from actual blood relatives. You would not expect people testing the safety of cars to work only from the blueprints: they need live data from road tests, crashes, etc. And that is what DNA is: a blueprint.

And my car analogy even involves a blueprint designed by humans, which a knowledgeable engineer can fully understand! No one fully understands our DNA, and we are only now discovering the genetic basis of all kinds of diseases. What if it takes another 50 years of research to establish the genetic link between a certain string of DNA and a rare disease, a disease you might never even hear of heard of if you had family medical information?

More subtle is the fact that many published statistical associations between DNA variants and actual medical outcomes are at worst just wrong and at best offer little predictive value.

As a customer of genetic testing companies (including 23andme) and someone with a science background, I don't dispute the importance of genetic testing. But it is best used as a supplement, and not a replacement, for accurate personal medical information.

The last six months

Two posts in one day! But this last is what I really wanted to get out when I was writing the other.

In some ways the last six months have been very difficult. My presence in two new extended families is starting to feel quite comfortable, and I feel I've grown close with both my father's brother and my mother's sister. But my father and siblings are... pleasant. Kind. Nice. Welcoming. But there is also no sign of growth there. Maybe we're all just scrambling for a script, and to be fair it's no small thing to have a full older brother dropped on you out of the blue.

To give my father credit, I can see that he cares but has a lot of stuff to work through. God, I sure can't blame him for that, he's had a rough time the last few years and I show up just as he's getting over the loss of his wife (my mother).

But in my siblings I see a wall of pleasant amiability. Just what the hell do I want? To be close somehow, I suppose. I don't demand that of them, but I do ask that they show me they care I showed up, really care, in a way that is unquestionably not public performance. That's a damned heavy thing to ask, and they've got a lot to get through too: my being there, their parents' secret, their re-evaluation of their late mother. I suppose when I think about it the total absence of any visible emotional reaction to my appearance is evidence enough that they care but are repressing. Stoicism seems to run on both sides. :)

Really, I guess I'm just sick of walls. But these aren't the vast impersonal bureaucratic fortifications that held my name in check for 31 years; they are little organic ones, built hastily in defence. With good sense and goodwill on all our parts, I have faith they will erode.

One year later

In a couple weeks it will be a year since I started this blog. Anniversaries are always times for reflection and after all that's happened, it's hard to recall the sense of anticipation leading up to June 1, 2009 and to the point where I finally got my original birth certificate in September.

I've been silent here since then, so some updates are in order. A lot happened very quickly once my information arrived. Armed with my birth mother's maiden surname, I found the first clue about her family with the first Google search I attempted. Within a few days I knew the basic outlines of the story.

I wrote that I had felt "three decades of joy and heartbreak" in one evening, and if anything I feel both emotions even more strongly, now that know more. The first thundering revelation which that September evening brought was that my birth mother had died several years ago, of natural causes. After all these years of searching for myself and others, of second-guessing and double-checking every fact and conclusion and feeling the exultation when a fact was verified, I will never forget feeling as trapped by truth as I did that night. Every detail fit, every single one. There was no escaping it: she was gone and we would never meet.

The second discovery, which took some work to verify, was that my birth parents had married a few years after my birth and had other children. No father was named on my original birth certificate (I've since learned this is near-universal for Ontario adoptees because of legal restrictions on unmarried fathers putting down their names) but the details of the husband named in her obituary matched the profile I had. I had half-expected this since they both told the social workers they would likely marry eventually, but it was a shock to find it really did happen and that I had full siblings.

In a few weeks I had my father's mailing address and then I fell into a deep well of paralyzing self-doubt and uncertainty. Googling names was one thing: if you fail, try different keywords! This was a living man and I would only get one shot at an intro: what the hell do I say? The words of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock came to mind:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse

For I have known them all already, known them all:—

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

"Decisions and revisions": plans formulated then abandoned, letters half-composed then deleted and forgotten. As I sniffed the faint online traces of the lives of my "new" relatives, I felt indeed like I was hearing muffled voices "from a farther room", and as the weeks wore on and I maintained my silence I felt increasingly like a creep, a stalker even, and had to forcibly remind myself that I had justifiable reasons for both my interest and my delay.

Finally, at work in the middle of one autumn afternoon I decided to force the issue. I had a letter in the mailbox for that afternoon's mail pickup. It was polite, friendly, a bit cool. I started by giving my adoptive name and birthday and said I was adopted. I then gave my birth name and my natural mother's name, said that I knew she had died and that she had been his wife, and finally said that I believed he was my natural father; I didn't make reference to any other recent information I had about them including the existence of children. I gave a short bio and wrote that I was interested in corresponding and eventually meeting, and gave him my mailing address, email, and phone number. Of course, for the next few weeks I obsessively checked all of them. (If I had it to do again, I would've left off the cell number as the thought that he might try calling me anytime there was the cause for a lot of unnecessary panic.)

Three weeks later, I got a reply letter. I had steeled myself so completely for any sort of negativity or rejection that I'm told I was completely emotionless while reading it. If so I was bracing for a blow that never came, as the letter was all I could ever have hoped for: friendly, inviting, warm. He proposed a meeting soon, and one week and two brief phone conversations later, we all met (him, his children, and I). We talked for many hours and shared photos. There are people who take after only one parent or neither, but I am not one: I'm very much a blend of both. Mostly of my mother, but in the right light and with the right expression I am a spitting image of him.

The first meeting was a few months ago and the road since has been a long one, with many new faces along the way. The number of in-person meetings is still quite small but we've been in touch over email, phone, and Facebook. It's early days still but I can already feel things transitioning from the short to the medium-term, where the issue is finding a comfortable position for the future. How can you be someone's brother when you've only just met? Do I treat them as something like cousins, i.e. relatives who you get together with at holidays and for the odd dinner, or as something more?

There are many things I regret about the course of events and while I have no wish to be burdened by them or allow them to obstruct the reunion, I think of them all the same. The regret I own is not having done all this earlier. I first contacted the provincial disclosure registry in 1996, but on learning of their colossal wait times I abandoned any hope they would help me and didn't sign up until seven years later, after she was gone. I also could have looked earlier and harder. To my fellow searchers I say, don't rush but please don't think you have all the time in the world either.

A year ago, empty of knowledge and full of anticipation, I could never have believed I would have come so far in such a short time. If I was afraid of something then, it was of learning nothing at all, i.e. getting a disclosure veto. (Now I know I was guaranteed never to get a veto for the grim reason that only my mother was entitled to file one.) I would not have been surprised at how much this has obsessed me and frankly I don't regret that obsession; thinking hard about things has led to being careful and attentive, and that was a help when events picked up their pace.

A year ago, I was prepared to be shocked and amazed, joyful and heartbroken, fearful and exuberant, and I was all of those things. Above all the welcome and all the pain, though, is the gift of Truth, of knowledge I never had before. That apple was always mine even if once it was too high for me to reach, and no matter the outcome I will never regret taking it.

The end

The letter came yesterday. So many questions answered and so many more to ask.

All my guesses were wrong, but given what I know now I don't see how I could've known how and where to look. Maybe a private investigator would have known, and that's something that will bother me.

Nothing, nothing for 31 years and now this, all at once. Three decades of joy and heartbreak in one family, all read vicariously, all at once. Every 10 minutes, another Google query and another thundering revelation. It's an overwhelming, mind-blowing trip, but wherever it takes me, this is one trip I've always wanted to go on.

If only I could have left sooner. My consolation is that it wasn't my choice.

More later.

Stats on Post-Adoption Birth Information forms

Fifteen weeks and still waiting. I was recently forwarded some new stats on Post-Adoption Birth Information requests from the Ontario Ministry of Government Services. From conversations with Service Ontario I understand that they are still, as of this moment, processing the 2007 forms so it's obviously of interest to anyone who's not gotten their information yet just how many such forms there are.

Any numbers below should be taken as corrections to anything I published earlier.

Post-Adoption Birth Information forms received by the Ontario government, Sept 2007 to present

	September 2007	Jun 1–19, 2009	Jun 20-Jul 31	Total
All	372	3071	2693	6136
Filed by birth parent	95	1166		1261
Filed by adoptee	277	4603		4875

(The ? symbols indicate a lack of information on my part.)

Thirteen weeks later

I'll admit I had been prepared for some delays and thought the 6-8 week timeline unduly optimistic but I really believed that now, thirteen weeks after June 1, I would have got something in the mail.

Anecdotal accounts tell of some 2007 applicants having gotten their info, but these are few and hard to come by. Secondhand information suggests that the Ontario government has processed the first batch of the 2007 Post-Adoption Birth Information requests, with a large pile of 2007 requests and all 2009 requests still pending.

The government's handling of this wait period is absolutely inexcusable. All the applications yet processed are from 2007; all the relevant vetoes and other forms arrived, at latest, just after June 1. By mid-July, it must have been evident how long it would take to process these documents.

Instead of presenting us with a realistic time estimate, they tossed out 12 weeks as a bone to the baying masses. I spoke to a very polite ServiceOntario rep on the phone, so I'm quite sure of what they promised: 12 weeks from receipt of the request (or from June 1 for requests from 2007). It's now obvious that, just as they couldn't deliver in 6-8 weeks from June 1, they can't deliver now.

While I appreciate that adoption disclosure is not the Ontario government's highest priority, they have a duty not to offer us misleading time estimates. It's clear that on this file, they're bad schedulers, slow workers, or awful communicators. They have to step up their game: this is a one-time event, can't it justify a little more attention?