North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Debbie

I was more independent and felt like you know they perhaps didn't have as much control over me as they had previously had so I sent away for my birth certificate got my birth certificate and then did nothing at all with it for 6 years (pause) em put my name on the register and found there wasn't a contact there so I didn't do anything else about it really and em I kept thinking about it - it was always in the back of my mind but it was something that wasn't really important and I knew that it was going to be a hassle anyway with my family's attitude

so erm I didn't do a great deal about it and then all of a sudden I decided well yes I did want to do something about it when I was 41 why when I was 41 I've no idea but I suddenly decided it was important to me and really did want to know (pause) so I saw an article that NEPAS had in the local paper and so contacted Steve and er he was very helpful er pointed out the negatives as well as the positives which er you know asked me questions which I perhaps er didn't really want to answer but never mind erm you know why exactly I was doing it which I don't think you're always entirely honest with yourself about (pause) and erm decided I would go ahead with the search erm and that would be about 2 years ago now (pause) er yeah about 2 years ago and erm what did I do first (pause) oh that's right first of all we got a copy of my file from social services from when I was adopted my adoption file which was really very interesting erm told me things that I didn't know about my own family as well as em my birth relatives erm that my parents had actually wanted a boy not a girl when they'd tried to adopt me not that that's a problem you know I just thought that was funny and they er actually wanted a baby several months old and its quite strange that contrast and why they wanted a baby several months old because I'm not supposed to know this information but er anyway they didn't get that they got me and I was 6 weeks old but erm that wasn't a problem erm it gave more details about my mother and the fact she wasn't a teenage mother at all she was 29 when she had me and she already had 1 child who was 6 years old at the time and according to the information in the erm social services file she just quite literally couldn't afford a second child so she'd had to give it up for adoption and she was still living at home with her father her mother had died various other family I found out later were still around but at the time there was just her and her father and son living in the house and erm she was more or less told that she couldn't you know keep this baby and erm so I was put up for adoption (pause) so the next step was to try and trace her and so I erm went down to the electoral register to the small town where she lived and looked though it and I found that fascinating very interesting to do and erm in about 2 hours I'd traced about 8 different relatives who had all lived at the same address that was given as my address when I was born all with the same surname so you know I could easily presume they were relatives and erm there was my brother and my mother who had continued to live in the house with who was actually my grandfather I suppose for a period of 13 years and then my birth mother had disappeared from the house but my brother and grandfather had remained in the house and that was as much as I could really get from the electoral register except that I found that an uncle who erm still lived in the area and we got his address so I knew I had a contact although all the other people had all disappeared long before erm I started the trace.