North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Maureen

I did want to go into education.  Went in to education college but I only stuck that for three months, I didn’t really like it and then I decided I would go down to Birmingham.  So I told them I was going to Birmingham and that was when I went down, down to Birmingham and there were little offices down there erm, and I was getting on well and went to a dance one night and that is where I met er, my husband and er, we met in the August, August Bank Holiday ’65 er.  We never, we never er, said we were actually going to get married.  We used to go along the shops and say, ‘oh god that’s lovely, we would have that’ and er, we used to, ‘what do you think of that ring?’ and I says, ‘oh it’s lovely’ and in November we got engaged and then so we just said, ‘what’s the point in waiting around?’  So at the end of March we got married in ’66.  We were always looking, he was always looking around for flats to stay and er, they wouldn’t take children.  We had none at that time but we were expected to have a family anyway.  So it was little point of going in to accommodation where you weren’t allowed pets or family and I said, ‘well I have nobody in England really belonging to me’ , had fell out with everybody, I had, had the odd letter and that was it and I said, ‘well, you have got your mother and family over in Northern Ireland’, I says, ‘we’ll just go over there’.  So we got married in the morning and we left that evening to go to Northern Ireland and we stayed with his mum way up in mountain, ye know.  No amenities up there either for three months and then, from then on we started getting houses ourselves and er, then the family come along and I had a son and then the next year I had another son, the year after that I had a daughter and that was our family up until 1976 whenever, Jeannette come along.  So that was our family.  And then we went down to the ‘….’ that we talk about now and I was in that house for thirty years.  So it was discussed and we thought we would start to buy it because it was like a wee council cottage, semi-detached cottage and er, so we were actually buying the house and then erm it was one day, ye know different time my friends used to say to me, I always told them I was adopted, it was never a hidden thing.  Ye know, ‘what about tracing family and that?’  And I went, ‘no’.  I wouldn’t say exactly why.  Well at that time I had no means.   I had no telephone, I didn’t know where about you would go.  Didn’t even know at that time that adoptees could actually trace, ye know, I think it come in about ’76 or something like that and at that time I was raising a family.   And ye know I was very busy I never really heard about this but erm, there was one day anyway, and by this time we had a phone because my son with his work he had to have a phone and he put the phone in to the house.  And er, I said to myself, we’d got Christmas cards from a family over here that’s er, would have been my adopted mother’s family, Stevens, I’ll explain it that way.  She was Stevens and there was like her Uncle Jimmy and it was Jimmy’s daughter had tried to keep in contact with her but she was a woman that would never give information out.  I couldn’t ask her a question because she would just blank you and if she’d seen somebody at the door, she wouldn’t open the door, she would stay in and she would hide ye know and er, but they had tried to keep in contact, ye know, I think she, this lady always done, ye know the history of the area, like the historical.  Ye know the historical classes she would go once a month or so whenever she had time and I think she was more or less trying to keep ye know like a family tree.  Whenever, she erm, she got our address, cause we kept getting Christmas cards, ye know, we sent her Christmas cards back, ye know.  So this day I had her telephone number in the house.  It was in August 1999, I was sitting out in the garden and the sun was blazing and I got myself, I was just ask her how, how do you start ye know, tracing or trying to find out and so I phoned her up and she said that you can get a book called Family Tree; and I had never heard of it and she said, ‘well I’ll tell you what Maureen, I’ll send you one and then once you have one, maybe people round they can actually, order ye one in’.  So she sent me this one and it was oh, 1999 I think I can, number ………, at the minute and er and it showed you in the back, gave you all different names ye know people all over the world you can contact, people in Canada, Australia, ones that specialise but I come across this man, he was in Blyth and I thought to myself, ‘I’ll try, maybe try him’ and I phoned that evening anyway and I got an answer machine said, just leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.  So then I started explaining that I would be interested in maybe trying to find out about family.  And he, well told me that, ‘Now, I have to charge so much an hour but my brother does it, ye know, and he wouldn’t be just as much’.  And I said, ‘no, I have told you my story’, I says, ‘no you just go on ahead’.  So, erm, he sent me, after a while er my erm, my mum and dad’s marriage certificate.  He said he had got in London and then he sent me my mother’s birthday, birth certificate and then my father’s birth certificate and then he went through and he got er a birth certificate of erm my Aunt May.  And er, so Jeannette, my daughter at the time she said that she was always going to get a computer because if I wanted to start she would help me to try and get, at this time she was living down in Manchester.  And, every so often I would get a phone call or I would get something in the post and then I would have to ask him, ‘how much do I owe you?’ ‘Och, just send me something’.  He would never, never stuck me to something, he was very good.  So I would send him whatever I thought at the time ye know and I would say, ‘is that alright?’ and he’d say, ‘fine’.  And then at that time I had a digi box that I could get email and all on my television over in Northern Ireland.  Erm, it’s different from over here.  It’s the one that went actually, it went bust but erm I would send emails and he would send me emails and I emailed him and then erm.  So I was giving Jeannette all the information I was getting on these forms and er then eventually she did, she got her computer and she used to sit up night after night and ye know looking trying different sites because we hadn’t a clue.  Cindy’s lists like they were American and you were getting all the information about America and stuff, and of course we didn’t know everytime we were putting in my mother’s name in it was always coming up a blank.  And John Raine, and er Mr Richardson that was doing the work he was coming through, forward ye know, in the lists and he says that er, he’d found other members of the family and I say’s, well, ‘is there any point of getting, ye know, all the birth certificates?  Can you come forward until you get the marriage ye see and then after that look for ye know, from me onwards or before me to see if there is any, ye know, siblings; if I have any brothers or sisters’.   So I don’t know how he’d missed the first one but he come up to the marriage anyway and he come to me and after me, ye know, he says, ‘I think you are the only one’.  So then he was looking for death certificates, couldn’t find anything at all so I was telling Jeannette and er, so she, as I say, tried all different sites all over the place until she comes to, she says, ‘mammy, you’ll never guess what, she says, there’s a charity one called NEPAS’ and the man Steve said that he knew where Countess Avenue was, because that was the first house that I remembered, Countess Avenue.  And er, so here he sent a photograph of Countess Avenue in the post and he’d been trying to, ye know, look for my records over there because I even got the social workers form Northern Ireland to help me with numbers, cause ye know, they said, ‘try this number, try that number’ and I always come against a blank wall, like nobody had my records.  Couldn’t get a number, for the files ye know, couldn’t even get a number.  Files nowadays seem to have a number.  If you can get that number you can get access to your file but they couldn’t get a number.  Whether that was because adopted in ’47 which was maybe was different, I think may be the things changed in 1948 from then on it was more or less social workers and they had to have a number for the file because I couldn’t get a number at all.