What Kind of

Stranger A son confronts the troubling past of a man he never knew Skip intro

Dallas Morning News multiplatform editor Frank L. Christlieb, in front of a projection of his birth father, Bob Workman, began the search for his birth family in 2005. (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

Bathed in sunlight and clothed in torn khaki trousers, green shirt, rope belt and blue canvas shoes, the bloated corpse drifted south with the Hillsborough River toward Tampa Bay. Stuffed inside his pockets were Lucky Strikes, Pall Malls and matches, along with three pennies, a pink comb and a church key for opening beers. He had cuts on his nose and above his swollen, blackened left eye. The guy had been dead over 24 hours. He’d tumbled into the river as the ultimate loser of a drunken fight he started at the Matassini fishing docks, which a strong-armed outfielder could just about hit from skid row. He might’ve floated right into the Gulf of Mexico, had it not been for a cabin cruiser that dragged the body to shore at the end of a rope. He died a broke and broken man, his life swallowed up and puked back out by obsessive vice and weakness. The old-timer he scuffled with hadn’t killed him. He had done himself in — and his family — by letting booze decide what mattered most. Bob and Betty Workman, in the early 1940s in front of their home in the Huntington, W.Va., suburb of Guyandotte, were married for 20 years. I’ve come to believe Bob Workman did love his wife, Betty, and their three children. Sometimes, when he was clearheaded, and before the drinking began its destructive crescendo, he showed it. The survivors still remember. But there was a fourth child, conceived just before Bob’s final, fateful split with the family on his way to that fistfight and that unseemly end. That child was me. He never met me and probably didn’t know I existed. The ignorance was mutual. Put up for adoption as an infant and raised by another family, I first learned about Bob just 12 years ago. My sources were newly discovered siblings, an old newspaper clipping and a photocopied police report so stark and gritty in its detail, it almost qualifies as noir. I have been trying ever since to figure out who this stranger is to me. Excerpt from police report regarding Bob Workman’s death. What kind of father would get sloshed as a routine, even bringing his young sons to bars with him while he was on the clock? What kind of father would threaten, in an alcohol-fueled rage, to take his preschool-age daughter away from her mother? What kind of father would repeatedly molest his firstborn son, leaving the boy so confused and scared, he’d often stay away from home late into the night? Then again, what kind of father would patiently help that son take apart, paint and reassemble his bike, teaching him to adjust the chain and replace the rear axle that snapped on his rugged rides? I am one of countless forgotten children of fathers like this. There’s no handbook telling you about a right place or a wrong place for your heart to wind up when you learn the truth about the person who fathered you but wasn’t your father. Bob Workman died at age 45 and was buried with other indigents in a service no one attended. When he cashed out in those dark, lonely waters on July 1, 1962, he left me nothing but questions.

Frank L. Christlieb’s search yielded a collection of photos of his birth mother, siblings and birth father, whose work life included stints with a dairy, an appliance repair shop and side gigs with a band. (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

Starting a search After graduating from Huntington High School, Bob Workman served four years in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He received a medical discharge in December 1941 after spending three months in a Navy hospital in Norfolk, Va. I was in college at Texas A&M when my adoptive mother spilled the secret during a bitter argument with my brother: “I don’t love you anyway,” she shouted. “You’re adopted!” As he replayed the scene for me, I knew I was, too. But it wasn’t a you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me moment. When you’re 6-foot-2 and fair-skinned, looking 100 percent Anglo, and your mother is a dark-skinned woman from Panama who’s 13 inches tinier, you naturally wonder about a mix-up at the hospital. I didn’t get curious enough to seek out my birth family until early 2005, when a short-lived falling-out with my adoptive father and brother made the question feel urgent. I scoured the internet, communed with a support group, made calls, sent letters. Finally, that June, a breakthrough: Contacts in my birthplace of Huntington, W.Va., had used the internet and a trove of local records to identify my birth mother. It turned out Betty Workman had been dead almost 13 years (lung cancer, I would discover). It was crushing news, the end of any hope that I’d know a mother more stable and nurturing than the alcoholic one who had raised me. How I wish I’d started searching earlier. Forgive me, Betty, for squandering all the years we could’ve had.


My birth father’s identity remained a mystery. Records showed Betty had been married to a Robert Workman, but they had divorced a couple of years before I came along in early 1961. At the hospital where I was born, 39-year-old Betty gave her name as “Mrs. Richard Williams.” Who or where Richard Williams was, nobody knew. This much was clear from the records: Bob and Betty had been the parents of three children — Crys, Robin and Teresa, or Terry. I had two brothers and a sister I’d never known about. From left: Crys, Terry and Robin Workman, in their Huntington home in 1955, didn’t meet their parents’ fourth child until a half-century later. The next morning, I called Crys in Colorado, introduced myself and awkwardly explained that I was near-certain we were brothers. I sensed his acceptance immediately and spent almost two hours gaining my first glimpse of my birth family. Crys, at the time a 61-year-old retired electrician and father of three (one adopted), was born 17 years to the day before I was. He had a hazy memory that Bob was in and out of the picture after his parents split. He had never heard of Richard Williams. He remembered Betty’s pregnancy, but never saw his new brother. Betty told Crys she had lost the baby.

Voice of author Frank L. Christlieb If I could say one thing to my birth father today Voice of author Frank L. Christlieb on what he would say to his birth father if he were alive today. I have been trying ever since to figure out who this stranger is to me.

Family secrets In that first phone visit with Crys, he calmly and openly told me of his father’s drinking. Bob was often too hung over to work and couldn’t hang on to jobs as a refrigeration mechanic. I hated to hear how Bob’s alcoholism had ripped apart his family, but I didn’t linger on his behavior because I believed some other man was my father. As I was getting to know Crys, one of my contacts in West Virginia emailed to say she’d been thinking about it and didn't believe Richard Williams was my father's real name. Betty had probably called herself Mrs. Richard Williams for appearances — and, it would become clear, to protect me from my father. Then it hit Crys and me — Richard Williams had the same initials as Robert Workman. Had this been Betty’s way of concealing — and yet slyly acknowledging — my father’s identity? Three days after our first call, I awoke to an email from Crys’ wife. She confided that Bob had sexually abused Crys as a boy, and that he had been in therapy earlier that year. I was sorrowful and angry that this gentle soul, with whom I was already forming a brotherly bond, had been betrayed by his father. (Crys and I have talked about his abuse and he supported my telling his story.) For three years beginning in 1951, Bob had fondled his young son, whose flashbacks still evoke the smell of alcohol on Bob’s breath. Crys was between 7 and 10 years old. I couldn’t wait to hug him. Three weeks after that first phone call, my wife, two young children and I drove to the Denver area to meet Crys, Terry and their families. My new siblings and I teamed up for a DNA test, and soon we had the results: 99.99 percent chance that Betty and Bob were parents to all of us. I would have to live with the legacy of this man’s blood in my blood. Bob holds his oldest son, Crys, in 1944 outside their home. Bob’s abuse of Crys in later years would be a source of deep pain. My resentment toward him festered. Much as I wanted to know everything possible, how could I reconcile that insatiable thirst with my disgust for a man with whom I felt not a shred of kinship? Crys and Terry’s account of Bob’s last moments with his family only deepened those feelings. A bitter departure It’s evening in June 1960 as Betty, 5-year-old Terry and 12-year-old Robin walk up the steps to their rented duplex on Eighth Avenue in east Huntington. Some details are lost to time, but Crys recalls that school had just let out for the summer. Betty, with Robin (left) and Crys, was known for her compassion, love for her family and beautiful singing voice. Betty doesn’t have her key so she knocks, knowing Bob’s there. They’ve been divorced just over a year, but God knows why, he’s back despite a judge’s injunction forbidding him from “further bothering or molesting her.” Betty spent a lifetime showering folks with compassion and forgiveness, especially her two alcoholic husbands (the second came after Bob). She was undeniably strong and resourceful, but also could be naive. She kept biting on Bob’s line that he’d make things right and quit drinking. Terry can see the glowing TV through the darkened window. Bob opens the door, drunk. Soon he’s yelling at Betty in their upstairs bedroom, as 16-year-old Crys pleads with him to stop. “Let’s see just what kind of man you are,” Bob, standing 5-10, challenges his 6-1 son. Bob grabs little Terry, shouting, “I’m keeping the baby!” and pushes Betty away. Terry breaks free, hurrying downstairs and out the back door. Robin runs after her. Mrs. Arthur, the neighbor, calls the police, who handcuff Bob and haul him away. As Bob disappears down the road, never to return, Betty may be unaware that she’s pregnant with their fourth child.

Clippings from The Tampa Tribune document Bob’s lonely death in 1962 and the investigation that followed. The minister for the funeral said no one else was there, but recalled his conversation with a groundskeeper: “We talked about, despite the fact of how it happened, it still was heart-rending, because he was somebody’s brother and somebody’s son and somebody’s father.” (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

Voice of Crys Workman, author’s biological brother If I could say one thing to my birth father today Voice of Crys Workman, author’s biological brother on loving and forgiving his father. I would have to live with the legacy of this man’s blood in my blood.

Death in the river Somehow, Bob made his way to Tampa after his arrest in Huntington. With the help of a genealogy researcher, I got my hands on a Tampa Tribune clipping about his death. It was dated July 3, 1962. Body of Tampan Found in River

Two Held After Police Told of Drunken Fight The body of a 45-year-old man was recovered from the Davis Island shipping channel yesterday evening, providing a tragic proof of a “drunk’s story” about a fatal fight at the Fortune Street Bridge Sunday night. The story said two men were arrested for public drunkenness and held for investigation of murder after a fight in which Bob was either pushed or fell into the water. The article reported Bob had been arrested twice previously for public intoxication. The address police found in his moneyless wallet was a Salvation Army shelter. Betty told her children Bob had drowned after he fell from a bridge in a construction accident. Late that month, I received a 19-page stack of copies from the Tampa Police Department: the file on Bob’s death, along with his autopsy. Barely legible on the front page were the words HOMICIDE REPORT. From Page 3:

“Subject who identified himself as: Burnett Peters, had witnessed a w/m being beat up by another w/m identified as: Harold Wicks and that Wicks knifed the unidentified w/m in the stomach with a fish knife and threw him off the pier into the river and then, took a pole, struck him on the head when Peters threw him a line trying to assist the subject to get him out of the water.” It seemed so inconceivable, I couldn’t absorb what I was reading. Had Bob really been murdered by Wicks, a drunk who told police he was 72 years old? I scoured the report several times. On the next page, the plot did a 180. Peters, described as a wino, recanted his story of a stabbing. He told police he’d been medically discharged from the Army because of blackouts and amnesia and couldn’t explain how he’d concocted his earlier tale. Now he said he’d been drinking wine near a fishing boat when the fight broke out and one of the men fell into the water. He tossed out a rope, but said “the subject seemed to just sink into the water under the boat.” Wicks’ story was that he had been sleeping off a drunk aboard the Six Brothers. He stepped off to use a restroom on the dock, then returned to the boat. His version continued on the next page: “A w/m unknown to him” — that would be Bob Workman — “grabbed him around his waist and stated, ‘I think I’ll throw this old S.O.B. in the drink.’ With this, Wicks states that he threw his arms out, causing the subject to break his hold on him and … the w/m fell over the side. … He states that the subject in the water appeared to be swimming alright so he went back aboard the Six Bros. and went back to sleep.” That was about noon on Sunday, July 1. Bob’s body wouldn’t be recovered downriver until 5:45 the following afternoon. The state attorney’s office closed the case as an accidental drowning. Perhaps because it was concluded that Bob started the fight and the old man was protecting himself, Bob was deemed at fault for his own death. With little desire to think the whole pathetic story through and try to understand what might have put Bob on his miserable road to dying destitute, all I could do was blame him for throwing away everything for nothing. I felt anguish for Betty and her family but could muster only contempt for Bob, hardly taking his humanity into consideration. Lonely burial The names in the police report beckoned to me. An internet search led me to Billy Hodgin, a retired auto worker then in his 80s and living in Florida. He’d been on the boat that found Bob’s body — and he remembered everything. Hodgin told me it was a perfect afternoon on July 2, 1962, when he, his wife and another couple, all on vacation from Indiana, chartered a boat to cruise the Hillsborough River into the bay. “I looked up and said, ‘Hey, there’s something floating up there in the water — it’s a man!’ ” recalled Hodgin, a World War II veteran who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the Sea Star’s owner tied a rope to the body and the craft pulled it to a concrete pier, officers were waiting. “They came on the boat and said, ‘This looks like the fella we was huntin’ last night,’ ” Hodgin said. Captivated by the drama, Hodgin snapped a slew of photos — crime scene and all. Incredibly, he still had them five decades later and was happy to send them to me. Seeing the images of a white sheet covering the body was more compelling than shocking or sad. I was bewildered to find in Bob’s autopsy report that he had three names tattooed on his right shoulder: Crys. Robin. Teresa. Not his wife. His children. He loved his kids so much, he had their names etched on himself for eternity? Did he get the tattoos after leaving West Virginia because he so profoundly missed them? Or was he obsessed with them, to the depraved extent of sexual abuse? As I struggled to process the final months of Bob’s torment, I felt somewhat sorry for him. Since his move to Tampa, he’d become a homeless drunk whom some witnesses knew only as “Poor Boy.” No man, no matter how shameful or immoral a life he’s led, deserves such an end. Bob was buried in an unmarked hole at Orange Hill Cemetery, in the back section where derelicts were laid to rest. Searching the internet, I found the minister listed in the obituary: the Rev. Babb Adams of Orient Park Baptist Church. He had been 33 years old when a funeral home owner asked him to perform one of his life’s more depressing duties. “There was no one there. I remember having a conversation with the groundskeeper about dying alone and being alone,” Adams told me. “We talked about, despite the fact of how it happened, it still was heart-rending, because he was somebody’s brother and somebody’s son and somebody’s father.” Somebody’s father. But not mine. Alive on tape After our brother Robin died unexpectedly at 61, his wife gave Crys and Terry three old reel-to-reel audiotapes that Robin had kept for years. Family lore had it that they contained a recording of Bob singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Maybe Betty was on there, too. My siblings spoke glowingly of her singing ability, which she’d given of freely as a performer with dance bands in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky from the 1940s into the ’60s. There had to be something rich and sentimental on those tapes, something that would nudge me ever nearer the parents I’d missed out on meeting. A couple of days after Christmas 2010, I found a man in Irving who had the equipment to play them. Sitting in this stranger’s home, I listened, damp-eyed, to the reverie of Betty’s first-rate rendition of “It Had To Be You” in a recording dating to 1951. “Ladies and gentlemen, the music you have just heard was recorded in Logan, West Virginia,” a nameless announcer said. “As you heard, it was a benefit program for the March of Dimes. I re-recorded it onto tape for future reference and future listening because I enjoyed it so much.”

Photos and reel-to-reel audiotapes of performances by Bob and Betty provide an enduring reminder of their shared love of music. (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

He went on to list the band members, including “the beautiful, talented Betty Workman.” But when I heard the words “Bob Workman on bass,” I knew: Bob was the announcer. My siblings had told me Betty wasn’t our only musically gifted parent — Bob played string bass, guitar and drums. Bob (top left) takes a turn on the string bass in a band in Logan, W.Va., in this photo, which was taken around 1950. As improbable as it seemed, I’d been given the chance to hear the voices of both parents in the same poignant setting without being in their presence. As I listened to this man I’d come to know primarily as a drunk and a pervert, I wasn’t thinking about his failings. I was immersed in the moment, visualizing him speaking into a microphone while pretending to be a radio announcer as he introduced Betty’s songs. He embellished his little production by saying she was accompanied by Nat King Cole, Frankie Carle and Fats Waller, when it was really the Logan musicians. Near the end of the tape came Bob’s attempt at singing, as he crooned “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” and “Minnie the Mermaid.” I smiled, thinking, for the first time, that he sounded like a fun, decent sort. He probably downed a Falls City — a Louisville beer and one of his libations of choice — while he made the recording. It was obvious that, along with inner forces he could never defeat, Bob had a creative sense of humor and a flair for showmanship. Hearing his voice humanized him and left me thinking: He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. Haunted by worries So he could sing and tell a joke. Still, a simple, obvious question haunts this whole enterprise: Am I like him? I’m not an alcoholic, and I don’t become an arrogant jerk when I drink. I’ve never sexually abused anyone. I’ve never smoked. I’ve never done harm to my wife and children and don’t have vices that would hurt or bring humiliation to my family. But I can be impatient and short-tempered. Did I get these character flaws from Bob? Like him, I have frailties that have been tough to overcome. Sometimes when I do something I regret, whether inappropriate or mean-spirited, I can’t help thinking he’d also have done it. My wife insists I’m nothing like him and could never be. But Bob and I are flesh and blood, and there’s no knife sharp enough to cut all the way through that tie. I’ve seen dozens of photos of him, and I’m always struck by how different we look. Bob had a mechanical mind and a handyman’s knack — again, that’s not me. “One of his best qualities was his knowledge of how things worked,” says Crys, now 73. “He was very serious about working things out and explaining things logically.” As Bob’s addiction swelled, he withdrew from his family. There would be anger, threats and physical violence, but when sober, he could be reserved and thoughtful. Those last two traits, I’ll willingly put in the similarities column. But the apprehension about whether Bob and I have more in common than I’m comfortable with lingers. The fix-it man I spent scattered, eye-straining hours poring over the 1956 Huntington city directory online, parsing its listings of residents and their occupations. My obsession of the moment was locating anyone listed as an employee at the Fix-It Shop, an appliance repair business where Bob worked in the ’50s. My search led me to Junior Robbins, who’d been a novice refrigeration mechanic during those years. He provided the first detailed, candid perspective of Bob I’d get from someone other than my siblings. “You’re prepared to hear the worst, aren’t you?” he warned upfront. I was. “Everybody felt sorry for him in a way. He was such a talented person, and he was just likable. And yet it seemed like he had no control over that part of his life,” said Robbins, who was in his early 20s when he and Bob, in his early 40s, worked at the shop. Bob Workman, who was born in September 1916 in Covington, Ky., as a young boy with his father, Orval, and mother Kathryn. Hearing nuggets of decency sprinkled in with what had been an avalanche of reasons to despise Bob was refreshing — and unexpected. “When it comes down to it, it is sad that a boy with his talents, and the chance at life he had, that bottle robbed him of all that,” said Robbins, who was 77 when we spoke. Bob’s boozing was a source of constant concern for his well-being and that of the business, owned by devout Baptists Howard and Bonnie Young. Often, Bob headed out on repair calls in one of the Fix-It Shop’s trucks and wasn’t heard from all day. Co-workers would have to drive out to the eastern outskirts of Huntington, find the truck at the joint where he was swimming in spirits, and get him home to Betty. “I never did meet your mother, but everybody said she was a good-lookin’ woman, so they couldn’t understand why Bob didn’t straighten up,” he said. Later, Robbins connected me with a fellow who’d worked with Bob while attending Marshall College in town. Went on to be a journalism professor on the same campus for 32 years. “The Youngs had a lot of respect for your father and his great knowledge about appliances, and they also knew how important Bob was to keeping the shop going,” Ralph Turner told me. Bob took more pride in his appearance than most others at the shop — gray trousers, black leather bow tie, shirt with a name patch, well-groomed hair. “He looked like the Maytag guy,” Turner said. “He was more professional with his dress than his dependability of showing up for work every day.” Through the eyes of a college student, Bob Workman was a middle-aged enigma, and the shop’s smartest employee. Bob didn’t like to waste time with BS. Results, not excuses. But Turner gained another impression of Bob that jolted me, dulling some of the unsavory memories I’d collected. Bob didn’t like to see people mistreated, and he felt great empathy for those who’d been dealt a losing hand. Surely in them, Bob saw himself — or at least the part of him plunging ever downward. Something in his psyche prodded him to feel the pain of strangers. But what about the years of pain he’d inflicted on his own family? I welcomed the contradictions Bob’s colleagues had offered me, as they helped dilute my negative perceptions of him. I’d become determined to see good in him and move closer to acceptance, if not vindication.


Painful memories For nearly 10 years, I couldn’t ask Crys about it. A quick mention of his abuse would come up every so often in conversation, but I was reluctant to be so inquisitive as to bring it all flooding back. I was visiting him in January 2015 when he made a passing reference to what his father — our father — had done to him. I asked him to say more, and with courage and candor I still admire, he did. The family had moved back to Huntington in 1951 after a couple of years living in the coal-mining community of Logan, where Bob worked at a Borden dairy and he and Betty played gigs with a local band. Crys was a 7-year-old second-grader, and Betty worked late-night shifts at the Owens-Illinois glass factory, one of Huntington’s largest employers. “Twelfth Avenue was when he started taking me to bed with him,” Crys said matter-of-factly, in his usual soft voice. He said Bob would bring him into his bedroom while Betty was at work. Somehow, the youngster always woke up in the safety of the room he and Robin shared. “I was afraid of him at that age,” Crys said. “He was so much bigger and I was a kid and didn’t know what to think. Obviously sexual touching is a good feeling. It was just tactile. There was no sexual penetration or anything like that. The more he did it, the more it bothered me.” Crys borrowed his dad’s pipe while reading on a couch around 1955. Of the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands, he says: “I can’t just hold a grudge. I’m not that kind of person. I can’t hate. So that’s where I’m like our mother — I’d rather be forgiving.” As he grew older, Crys stayed away from home at night to avoid Bob. Meanwhile, through the rest of the ’50s, Bob’s drinking escalated from fairly manageable to uncontrollable. Crys doesn’t think Betty ever caught Bob with him, and Crys never told her about the abuse. But he believes that Betty had her suspicions about Bob, and that she divorced him after 20 years of marriage partly to protect her children. “I don’t think our dad was a sexual deviant. I think he was an alcoholic, and that lowered a lot of inhibitions, maybe brought out some feelings deep down,” Crys surmised. The likelihood that Bob was abused as a youngster, and that his father also drank excessively, seems high. But after his traumatic childhood experiences, Crys didn’t fall into the same pattern. The cycle ended with Bob. My conversations with Crys couldn’t have come at a better time for me. For a handful of years, my attitude had slowly softened as I saw how shortsighted I’d been, harshly judging Bob without acknowledging his demons. But I had not been able to forgive. Now I could see how following Crys’ example would help me shed the dead weight of hardheartedness. “I can’t just hold a grudge,” he said. “I’m not that kind of person. I can’t hate. So that’s where I’m like our mother — I’d rather be forgiving.” Me too, big brother. On his first trip to meet his birth siblings in 2005, Frank L. Christlieb (right) visited brother Crys Workman and introduced him to his wife, Kay, and children Lindsay (left) and Will. Eight years later, siblings Crys, Terry and Frank were in the holiday spirit when they got together in Colorado at Christmastime. From your son You never knew about me. But I’m your son. I’m glad you weren’t the father who raised me. I love the only father I’ve ever known too much to wish for that. “I’m an alcoholic,” you admitted, in front of your oldest son, to the minister Betty invited to the house. The first step to recovery. So why didn’t you try to get help? Did you know there was an Alcoholics Anonymous office on Fifth Avenue in the ’50s? When and why did your life turn the direction it did? Were you, as the cliche goes, drinking to drown your sorrows? Or did you just like the taste, like how carefree and invincible it made you feel, like being with your drinking buddies? You used to do some of the things a father does — play catch with your sons, teach them to mow the yard, let them plunk the strings on your old ’40s arch-top guitar. When did all that stop mattering? You were so black and white. There was a certain way to do things, and nobody could question it. I can be a bit like that, unable to see the big picture, but not to your extreme. It’s part of the reason my feelings about you budged so little — you were just a bad person, and I couldn’t shake that bias. If it had all worked out, if you’d beaten your sickness, if the family had stayed together, I would have grown up a Workman, and you might have done to me what you did to Crys. Like him, I was a shy, sensitive, passive child. But I don’t think you would’ve. Beneath your tough exterior, past the antagonistic alter ego alcohol created, in your heart and mind you must have been a good and decent man. Crys believes it. The guys you worked with at the Fix-It Shop believe it. I know Betty believed it. And after years of seeing only the worst in you, I believe it.

Follow Frank L. Christlieb on Twitter at @FrankChristlieb. Editor’s note: Dallas Morning News multiplatform editor Frank L. Christlieb wrote a version of this story for the 2016 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, where it placed first in the reported narrative category. The 2017 Mayborn is scheduled July 21-23 at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine. For more information, go to themayborn.com.

Digging up your roots

Ask your adoptive parents for information they might have, such as names or your original birth certificate.

for information they might have, such as names or your original birth certificate. Sign up with online mutual-consent registries , where adoptees and birth parents can find each other. If you were born in Texas, the state has a central adoption registry at dshs.texas.gov. Contact the agency that handled your adoption and ask if it has a registry.

, where adoptees and birth parents can find each other. If you were born in Texas, the state has a central adoption registry at dshs.texas.gov. Contact the agency that handled your adoption and ask if it has a registry. Full or partial access to adoption records is becoming law in more states, but bills have stalled in Texas. If you were born in 1957 or later in Dallas County, you can pay $5 to petition the district court to search for and open your adoption file. That also gives you access to your original birth certificate in Austin, and if you know the name of the adoption agency, the court order opens those records. Email dcjuvenile@dallascounty.org.

is becoming law in more states, but bills have stalled in Texas. If you were born in 1957 or later in Dallas County, you can pay $5 to petition the district court to search for and open your adoption file. That also gives you access to your original birth certificate in Austin, and if you know the name of the adoption agency, the court order opens those records. Email dcjuvenile@dallascounty.org. Try a DNA test. Through resources including ancestry.com, 23andme.com, familytreedna.com, you can find biological relatives. Contact them, and there’s a good chance they’ll be able to help you identify one or both of your birth parents.

Through resources including ancestry.com, 23andme.com, familytreedna.com, you can find biological relatives. Contact them, and there’s a good chance they’ll be able to help you identify one or both of your birth parents. Attend adoption support group meetings . Adoption Network of Texas, a D-FW group focused on reunion support, meets the second Saturday of each month and the North Dallas Adoption Triad Support Group meets fourth Saturdays. DFW Triad Support Group meets 1 to 3 p.m. second Saturdays at Hope Cottage, 609 Texas St. in Dallas. For information, email scampbell@hopecottage.org or call 214-526-8721.

. Adoption Network of Texas, a D-FW group focused on reunion support, meets the second Saturday of each month and the North Dallas Adoption Triad Support Group meets fourth Saturdays. DFW Triad Support Group meets 1 to 3 p.m. second Saturdays at Hope Cottage, 609 Texas St. in Dallas. For information, email scampbell@hopecottage.org or call 214-526-8721. Contact a search angel . There are many online, and most know the ins and outs of these searches and will do one for you — for free.

. There are many online, and most know the ins and outs of these searches and will do one for you — for free. Read books on adoptees, searches and reunion. Many adoptees consider Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness, by Betty Jean Lifton, to be their bible.