A quest for answers: New Jersey adult adoptees' search for their birth families

When Bob MacNish was 22, his dying father told him that he’d been adopted. MacNish spent the next 50 years searching for his birth parents.

Jayne Gastineau lost her adoptive mother, father and brother all within a few months. She wondered about the five siblings mentioned in a report from her adoption agency. With few living relatives left, she longed to see if she could connect with that other family — her birth family.

Theresa Carroll spent her childhood feeling like an outsider in her own family. "Who do I look like?" she wondered. Where did her talent as an artist come from? Did her genes explain the health problems that caused her chronic pain?

Adopted as babies, they were haunted for years by these mysteries. They wanted to know: Who am I? Why was I put up for adoption?

Under a new law that allows adult adoptees to receive their New Jersey birth records, the three were among the first to receive copies of their original birth certificates last year – a first step in reconnecting with their biological families.

Over the last 12 months they have learned some answers: Carroll knows who she resembles — in looks, talent and health. Gastineau found not five, but nine half-siblings. And Bob MacNish met his birth mother for the first time — at age 73.

More than 4,100 other adoptees have received copies of their original birth certificates since the New Jersey Adoptees Birthright Act took effect last year. Though numerous, they are a small fraction of the estimated 300,000 adoptees whose birth records are under seal.

The 2014 law superseded a 1942 measure that kept the records secret. After the 2016 expiration of a grace period for birth parents to request their names not be revealed, adults born or adopted in New Jersey can now request their records.

They have been able to learn the time, date and place of their birth. In addition, they can learn how many previous births their birth mother said she had, her ethnic background, and her address and occupation at that time.

Most importantly, most have learned their birth mother's name. (Birth father’s names were often omitted, or sometimes replaced with the notation “O.W.” for out-of-wedlock, or “bastard.”) Redactions were requested by just 558 birth parents.

These nuggets of information may seem trivial to anyone who isn’t adopted. But for adoptees who thought it was off-limits forever, it can be life-changing.

Carol Barbieri said she cried when she saw the actual time of her birth: 4:20 a.m. The Monmouth County woman was adopted with a twin sister after their birth mother abandoned them. “My adoptive parents tried so hard to hide my past from me and my twin sister, it felt sometimes not as if I were born, but that I merely landed on earth,” she said. “I felt for the first time as legitimate as every other person on earth.”

Information from the birth certificates has led to searches, reunions, and unexpected revelations. It has affected not just adoptees, but their adoptive and birth families. And because the records have been sealed for so long, the people at the center of these head-spinning dramas are often in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

A few reunions may seem ready for the Hallmark Channel, but finding and connecting with blood relatives after a lifetime of separation and anonymity is usually complex and layered. The process advances with stops and starts. It is challenging, surprising, and sometimes painful.

"We create people in our minds from the day we're told we're adopted: who our birth parents are going to be. We make up these people," said Carroll, who is 51 and lives on Long Island. When she met her birth mother, "Of course, she was nothing of who I made up."

Whenever a child is relinquished – now or then – it signals "a fracture," said April Dinwoodie, former chief executive of the Donaldson Adoption Institute and herself a trans-racial adoptee. Something has gone wrong: the pregnancy was unwanted or a mistake; the mother a teenager, unwed, or not married to the father; the parents – usually the mother – too poor to bring up the baby.

Years later an adoptee may be rejected because she is an unwelcome reminder of a terrible time: she was conceived, for instance, as the result of a rape.

An adoptee may learn, as Rebecca Tillou did, that her mother was an alcoholic whose drinking caused Tillou's long undiagnosed fetal-alcohol syndrome, the source of her social and academic struggles.

An adoptee may find, as a Philadelphia man did, that the relationship between his birth parents – a 16-year-old Roman Catholic boy and a 17-year-old Jewish girl — was transgressive for its time and place, in 1950s South Jersey.

Or she may learn, as Carly DeThorn did, that her mother’s husband never got over the betrayal that led to her birth. He was fighting his way onto the beaches at Normandy in World War II when his 22-year-old wife became pregnant in an affair with a cabbie. The baby – Carly — was placed in an East Orange foster home. Although her mother told her husband, the child was never spoken of again; the couple never had children of their own.

DeThorn – like many other adoptees — received her birth record too late to meet her birth mother.

But the 73-year-old, who lives in North Carolina, did find her mother’s sole surviving sister, a 98-year-old Pennsylvania woman she now calls Aunt Francis. And when DeThorn met her mother’s caregiver, a surrogate daughter whom DeThorn now regards almost as a sister, the woman gave her the quilt that had been passed down from previous generations to DeThorn’s mother.

“I know my beginning now,” Carly said. “I can’t say it’s made me happier, but maybe more content."

So often in that earlier era, silence was the only antidote to shame. Both sides of the transaction felt its sting, Dinwoodie said: the adoptive parents, because they had not produced their own biological child, and the birth mother, because of the stigma of her poverty or pregnancy.

But birth control, legal abortion and the acceptance of single-parent families have produced a steep decline in such domestic adoptions. Now adoptions are usually “open”: the adoptive and birth parents communicate before the baby is born, the adopting parents can be present for the birth, and the families stay in touch.

International adoptions also have dwindled. The most common form of adoption now is from foster care. And parents who are unable to conceive have other options: sperm and egg donors and surrogate mothers. No one knows how the quests for identity of the children so conceived will be handled in the future.

Meanwhile, state laws regarding information available to adult adoptees are changing. Nine states currently allow unrestricted access by adoptees to their birth records, according to the American Adoption Congress. Another 11 states, including New Jersey, have put some restrictions on the records. In 22 states, including New York, California and Texas, the records are still sealed.

“All persons deserve to know the truth of their origins,” Kimberly Paglino, an adoptee and social worker, said last year as she celebrated the New Jersey law in Trenton. “This is a restoration of human rights."

The state Catholic bishops’ conference was among the opponents of the New Jersey legislation, before it was passed. It argued that the Catholic agencies that had arranged many adoptions would no longer be able to keep their promise of lifelong anonymity for the birth parents.

In the year since the law was implemented, however, “Our office has not had any calls from any birth parents who had a negative experience” said Patrick Branigan, executive director of the conference. He said he was “very happy it seems to have worked out so well.”

For some adoptees, the availability of the records is a moot point. They have one family, they say – their adoptive family. No need to dig further. Or they may request the record, take a look, and stop there.

But some — their quests accelerated by affordable, easy DNA tests, searchable online databases, social media and, in some cases, professional assistance – have found their birth parents, siblings, or other members of their family of origin.

These are some of their stories.

Bob MacNish received a call last June with stunning news.

After obtaining his original birth certificate under the new law, he’d requested the help of a “search angel,” a volunteer genealogical researcher.

The volunteer, a stay-at-home mom in Austin and search hobbyist, spent 80 hours building MacNish’s family tree. She relied on his genetic information, because it turned out information given on the birth certificate for his mother’s surname was false.

She called in June with the results.

“Your birth mother is still living,” she said. “She’s 95, and she lives in Texas. She has a daughter named Sheila who lives with her.”

MacNish, a 73-year-old retired Port Authority systems analyst, lives in New Milford with his wife, a retired teacher, and their 19-year-old son, whom they adopted from Russia.

MacNish had questioned his adoptive mother after his dying father told him as a 22-year-old that he was adopted. But she could tell him only a little about his origins. The family doctor in Union City had contacted them with an offer in 1944, knowing that their first-born had died of pneumonia two years earlier, when he was 7.

The doctor knew through a colleague in Brooklyn of an unwed pregnant young woman who wanted to give up her baby. After the MacNishes agreed to adopt the infant, the two doctors arranged for the mother, Jean, to travel from Brooklyn to North Hudson Hospital in Weehawken when she went into labor.

It was St. Joseph’s Day — March19, 1944 — and she was Italian, so she named the baby Joseph, even though he took another day to arrive. Then, inexplicably, when the birth certificate was filled out, her mother used a fake surname.

A few days later, Thomas and Gladys MacNish drove up to the front steps of the hospital, where Jean and her mother waited with the infant. The young woman handed the baby boy over and the MacNish family drove home. A lawyer subsequently formalized the adoption.

Growing up in Jersey City, Bob thought about adoption only twice: Once, a neighbor kid taunted him by pointing to his house and saying, “Those aren’t your parents – you’re adopted.” And another time, he startled the family at a Thanksgiving dinner when he was 10 by asking what “adoption” meant.

Only when he came home from the Navy in 1966 did he learn the rudiments of the story, minus the names.

After that, “it was always on my mind,” MacNish said. He looked for his birth record at Weehawken’s municipal offices, but wasn’t permitted to see it. He attended adoptee support groups. He visited Trenton with advocates lobbying for the birthright law. And a couple of years ago, he swabbed his mouth for a DNA test. To his amazement, the boy who’d grown up thinking his ancestors were Scot, Irish, German and English learned his heritage was mostly Italian.

Then the birth certificate arrived last January, followed by his search angel’s call with the news. MacNish wrote to Sheila, the daughter with whom his birth mother was said to be living.

“I am an adopted man searching for my biological parents,” his two-page letter began. He shared the place and date of his birth, as well as other details of the relatives found through his DNA search. “If all this is shocking to you, I understand,” he wrote.

In fact, Sheila hadn’t the slightest inkling her mother had another child. Nor had her father, Jean’s first husband, known before he died. Jean had met him at the Brooklyn Navy Yard a few years after Bob’s unplanned birth and accompanied him to his home state of Texas.

Sheila read the letter over and over. Then she approached Jean. “Mom, “she asked, “did you have a baby when you were 21 and give it up for adoption?” Jean, 95 years old, broke down and cried.

Six days later, Sheila called MacNish. “This is your sister,” she said. “And you have found your mother.”

His 51-year search had ended.

MacNish and his wife flew to Houston. He met his birth mother outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant near Beaumont. She was a tiny woman, mentally fine. When she stepped out of her daughter’s car, “I thought I would be all emotional and crying,” he said, “but I wasn’t. I was pretty calm.”

His mother cried, though – tears of joy. She had wanted to keep him, she said. She’d thought about him every day and had hoped he was with a good family.

MacNish’s biological father was an older man whom Jean had met at a Brooklyn hatmaker’s where they both worked, she told him. He had joined the army during the war, and never knew about the baby. Both he and his son — MacNish’s half-brother — have died.

Sitting now in his dining room, MacNish shares photos of his reunion with his birth mother. He has other pictures too, of Jean in her 20s, and of Jean’s parents – his maternal grandparents. He has an entire family tree, all the way back to Italy.

“It’s kind of a weird experience,” he said, with the patience of one who has been through a lot.

“All of a sudden you find out you’re not really who you think you are.”

The walls of Jayne Gastineau’s living room are a shrine to family. In one black-and-white photo, her mother and father smile as newlyweds. In another, Jayne poses for a portrait as a little girl. There’s her brother in his Cub Scout uniform, and her grandparents looking down from the highest frame.

Gastineau, who is 57, doesn’t use the word “adoptive” to describe the people in the photos. They’re just family.

But this month, Gastineau had prints made showing other relatives – the “newfound family” of her birth that she’s met over the past 12 months.

It has so many members, she can’t count them. “I went from a family of four – having a daughter and one nephew – to having seven brothers and sisters – no, eight brothers and sisters,” she said. (Actually, it’s nine.) “And probably 30 to 40 nieces and nephews.”

Out of respect for her parents — a common refrain among adoptees — Gastineau waited until they’d died to search in earnest for her birth family.

She’d been curious since her father told her when she was eight how special she was: her parents had gone up and down the aisles of babies, he said, and picked her to be their daughter. Growing up in Berkeley Heights, Gastineau took piano and clarinet lessons, went to summer camp, joined church youth groups and played on a softball team. She had a big brother, one who’d been adopted five years before her.

A three-page report she requested from the adoption agency got her started. Her birth mother was 42 when she had Jayne, and had five other children from her then husband, it said. Jayne was “an accident.” The birth father, who wasn’t her husband, had been informed and “took care of everything.”

The report contained no names. That came when Gastineau received a copy of her original birth certificate last January. A friend with an interest in genealogy did some research and came back with a photo of Mary Elizabeth Burgess, her birth mother, and a relative to contact in Massachusetts.

From there, Gastineau connected with cousins, nieces, nephews and siblings – but not Mary Burgess, who’d died years earlier.

Turns out her mother was flirtatious, to put it politely. Her second husband, a car salesman, had moved to Florida in 1958 and never come back. Then the widower down the street in East Orange came to call. He had two kids of his own. He was Jayne’s father.

Gastineau’s mother tried to keep the pregnancy secret from the five children living with her in the top floor of a double-decker house. She had two other daughters, too, by her first husband: the oldest, 25, had already moved out, and the other lived downstairs and was pregnant at the same time. Jayne’s niece, who lives in Lyndhurst, is three weeks younger than her.

Gastineau’s family tree is sprawling. Her relatives have had their share of difficulties, including alcohol and drug problems, and Gastineau can relate: she herself struggled with alcoholism for many years and often wondered why, because her parents never drank more than half a beer each. Seeing that side of her birth family helped her understand. And her new nephews, like Gastineau, are big football fans, so she took delight in inviting them to a Jets game.

“I feel as if I’m just beginning to start the best chapter of my life,” she said. “No disrespect to my parents – but it was so joyous and happy to be found.”

At a reunion in Lyndhurst last fall, she asked if anyone might know the name of her birth father. The adoption agency had described him as a man with big ears and glasses, who already had a son and daughter. By calling different family members, her half-sisters came up with a name: John Lyons. Many phone calls and FaceBook connections later, Gastineau reached her father’s daughter – her own half-sister — in Texas.

“Are you sitting down?” Gastineau asked, laughing, as she told this story.

Her half-sister, now 71, had given birth to a son out of wedlock and put him up for adoption. He, too, obtained his birth record last year from the New Jersey Office of Vital Statistics and found his mother. In 12 months, she discovered a sister, a son, a daughter-in-law and a grandchild.

Said Gastineau: “Every time I turn around, I want to know more, find out more.”

When state Sen. Joe Vitale handed Theresa Carroll a brown envelope at the Statehouse last January, her waiting was over: a copy of her birth certificate was inside.

“I’ve been wanting to know everything I could, but I wasn’t allowed to ask,” she told the assembled advocates, reporters, and legislators. “It bothered my mom, so I respected that. She passed away. My dad passed away. I have a whole new beginning now.”

Carroll and her husband Tim had traveled from Long Island to the ceremony in Trenton. They found a quiet alcove and, her hands shaking, she opened the envelope.

The first thing she noticed with surprise was that her birth mother had given her a name different from the one she'd grown up with. But her birthdate was as she knew it. And then, there it was: her birth mother's name.

She returned to the investigator she'd hired years earlier with her this new information. Two days later he came back with her birth mother’s address, phone number and email address. “I couldn’t believe it would be so easy,” she said, "just because of that piece of paper.”

Finding people, as many adoptees have learned, however, is the easy part. Developing a relationship is another matter. Though biologically related, the differences in lifestyle, upbringing, class, and even language can be challenging.

To prepare, Carroll had read about adoptee searches and reunions. She sent her mother a handwritten note, enclosing photos from the Trenton event, and emailed her, too. Her birth mother, who lives in Pennsylvania, responded three days later:

“Oh my God, my daughter. I can’t believe you found me.”

Carroll's was "a black-market adoption," she now understands. That's why the lawyer who arranged it claimed the records had been destroyed. Her birth mother was 16 when she became pregnant. It was a quick hook-up; within a year, the teenager who impregnated her also impregnated her cousin.

The unwed teen moved in with her grandmother and delivered her baby at Dover General Hospital. There was no money to raise another child. A woman mysteriously appeared at her hospital bed with an offer to arrange the baby's adoption and take care of the bill. Perhaps other money changed hands, Carroll said, because soon her mother had an apartment of her own.

The hand-off was simple. When her birth mother left the hospital with the baby, the arranger waited in the parking lot. She took the baby and handed the infant girl to another couple – Carroll's parents – who drove off.

Last summer, Carroll and her husband drove to Pennsylvania to meet her birth mother. "It was a disaster," she said. Unwilling to let the relationship end on such a note, Carroll met her mother alone a few weeks later, and they took a walk together. "Even if I never see her again, it was beautiful," Carroll said. "It gave me so much closure."

Her birth mother was dyslexic, she learned; "I got that from her." They shared the same intestinal problems. Her birth father's aunt was an artist. Baking, painting, gardening — the seeds were all there.

And yet, her birth mother had no curiosity about Carroll's life. She had never sought to find her. She gave one of her two daughters the same name she had given Carroll. Of the two half-siblings, only one met Carroll briefly.

Carroll's reaction to these discoveries has been up and down. "I get angry," she said ruefully. “I never expected to do that. I did all this work to find them, where's the big family reunion? Didn't she want to know what she'd missed out on?"

"There's a lot of disappointment," she said. "And also a lot of good."

Her mother shared information that enabled Carroll to find a half-brother on her father's side, who invited Carroll to his home, the same one in which he'd grown up with their father. He shared family photos and told her about their aunt's paintings. When they parted, he gave her a tiny vial of her birth father's ashes.

Now when Carroll looks in the mirror, she sees her birth father's nose and her birth mother's chin and eyes, "the same exact color, kind of brown, hazel-y."

Her questions have been answered. "It helps me understand myself more.” But, she admits, “I couldn't call her Mom."