Elise has always been into genealogy and loved looking at family photos & records when she was a child. As a child of adoption, she wondered where her family of origin was? Reunion has had its ups and downs for Elise. The experience with her birth father’s family has been great over the last 20 years. She’s used her genealogy skills to solve a mystery about her paternal grandfather. Elise keeps a door open for communication if her mother or maternal family want contact, yet she understands and accepts that her mother may not be in a position to have a relationship.

Elise says, “I am so appreciative of my journey, the good and the bad parts because getting to work out some of the puzzle pieces of my story and my paternal grandfather’s has been a gift and has helped me have a better sense of self and wholeness.”

Read Full TranscriptElise:                           00:00               I will say the most important thing I found out about after meeting both of them is that you can truly appreciate having the entire puzzle put together because I could totally see like what I got from my mom and dad and what I received from my mother and father and you can appreciate what came from the nature side and what came from the nurture side.

Voices:                        00:30               Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon:                       00:41               This is who am I really a podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and on today’s show is Elise from Minnesota. She always wanted to search for her birth family and her interest in genealogy from a young age turned into a life’s passion to support adoptees after she found her own parents. After years of searching, Elise found her birth mother who located her birth father for her almost immediately. The reunion started off really well, but then it stalled when her mother closed the door. Thankfully her father still wanted to know his daughter and they fostered a long distance relationship before meeting in person. He told Elise that she had paternal roots in Fargo, North Dakota, but trying to connect to those roots revealed they had originated hundreds of miles away at a place, Elise was very familiar with, here’s Elise’s journey.

Damon:                       01:39               Elise had one younger brother in her family, whom she remembers bringing home when he was adopted too. They had a large extended family with 16 first cousins. They were all so close in age they seemed almost like siblings. As time marched on, they grew up and had families of their own and over time it became more obvious how biological families kind of look and act similarly to one another, but Elise says she had an innate curiosity about the differences in herself and her family and the ultimate question of what she learned from them that had shaped her and what traits have been passed down to her.

Elise:                           02:13               I always from a very early age, wanted to know where I came from, like what was the connection? How did I fit into the world? You know, that whole did you pop out down from a spaceship kind of thing?

Damon:                       02:23               Yeah. Yeah. What kinds of things did you think about when you wanted to know more about yourself?

Elise:                           02:28               Um, I didn’t really look like a lot of people in my family because most of the people in my family could go to the beach and not fry. I would go to the beach and turn into a lobster. So you know, I wanted to, and I kind of just wanted to know like where, you know, my interest came from and my personality and you know, what was nature and what was nurture and just where did l come from?

Damon:                       02:50               Yeah. Yeah. I could imagine. You had one younger sibling who was also adopted. Did you guys talk about adoption at all as you got a little older?

Elise:                           03:00               my parents and I talked about adoption a lot. My brother never really, I mean every once in a while he would talk about it, but it wasn’t, he and I didn’t talk about it a lot. I spoke about adoption with, I had some cousins that were very close in age to where I am and you know, I would speak to them about it.

Damon:                       03:19               And did they get it? Did they understand it? Did you fit in with them? Were they at arms length? What did you get from them?

Elise:                           03:26               No, we were, we were very close growing up. I mean most people in the town where we grew up, some people thought that my cousins were like my brothers, they didn’t, they were like, oh wait, are you brothers or cousins? Like how are you all connected? Because we were always together because there was this whole little clump of kids in the same age group. I’ve always wanted to search. I always knew I was going to search, but it wasn’t until like my older cousins started getting married and having children. And then you could see like how everything fit in their family. You could see like my grandparents and their parents and then my cousins and then their children. And you could kind of see how they all fit. And I was like, wait a second, where’s my fit? You know, and not taking anything away from my adoptive family because I’m very close to them, but you could just kind of see like at Christmas I was, I love photography and I would go around and take pictures of everyone and the kids and the grandchildren, the great grandchildren and it was like wow. Like they all look alike. They all have, you know, the same giggle or the same quirks or whatever it is, mannerisms and that kind of thing.

Damon:                       04:31               In high school in the mid 1980s Elise’s parents decided they were going to help her accumulate some information about her adoption. They wrote a letter to the adoption agency which sent back her non identifying information. The Info she received was very brief, so she really had to be an investigator on her own to get some answers. She signed up with every adoption assistive resource and registry she could find. She also joined support groups for adoptees to learn more about the perspectives of birth parents and other adoptees.

Elise:                           05:02               You know, this was way back in the days where you would have to go to the library and check out all the books about adoption and searching. Spread them out on your apartment floor, your dorm room floor, and figure out how to do it. You know, signing up with all the databases and, ALMA, there was adoption crossroads in New York. I mean there’s just all these places. Like anywhere I could possibly sign up, I signed up and I just kind of kept plugging along and there wasn’t really a lot of information.

Damon:                       05:31               It sounds like you signed up across the board nationwide no matter what the geography of it was.

Elise:                           05:38               the interesting thing about it is I, when I got the non identifying, it said that both of my parents were from the state I was born in and I knew in my gut that wasn’t true. I had no idea where they were from, but I knew they weren’t from the state where I was born.

Damon:                       05:53               That’s fascinating. Really.

Elise:                           05:54               Mine were from both coasts.

Damon:                       05:57               So your gut was right?

Elise:                           05:58               Yeah, completely.

Damon:                       05:59               That is really fascinating. Wow. 11 years later in the mid 1990s she was able to get a last name to work with, but it was a very common name. So it didn’t help very much in Elise’s research, so Elise recruited professional assistance. She hired a private investigator to advance her search. However, her story should serve as a warning to be on guard against people that might take advantage of your need for more information along your journey.

Damon:                       06:26               11 years. It took you just to get a name. How did you get the name at that point?

Elise:                           06:30               Yeah, there’s a loop here in our state where you can sometimes petition a judge. Now, no one I had ever known had gotten a judge to give over the last name, but I was living outside the state and I used to lawyer outside the state to petition the court. And for whatever reason the judge sent that last name back. No other information. It just said your mother’s name is, and it was her maiden name.

Damon:                       06:55               Wow. Fascinating.

Elise:                           06:57               And it was a very common name, so it took another, I think it took about nine years, eight or nine years to get that. And then another three years of searching before we figured out who exactly she was.

Damon:                       07:09               So how did you find her?

Elise:                           07:11               I ended up having to pay someone, which is not my...