Family histories, family stories and family secrets:Late discoveries of being adopted

This paper reviews what we know about the experiences of adopted people who discover in later-life that they are adopted. It begins by discussing how and why various facets of the adoption experience have come to the fore over the 20th and 21st century time span of contemporary adoption. The paper concludes with the fact that research on the late discovery of adoption is in its infancy. It also points to parallels that will exist for people who have been conceived by anonymous donation and raises additional areas for possible research

“The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past” (Faulkner, 1919 Requiem for a Nun p. 85):Mapping and taking care of the ghosts in adoption

The Code of Ethics of the Association of Professional Genealogists promotes the communication of coherent, clear, and well-organised information). It is not that simple when adoption features in a family’s history. This paper suggests that standard approaches to family tree-construction will struggle to capture the complexities, gaps, and challenges posed by adoption. Firstly, the paper makes the case for family historians having an alertness to adoption by noting the number of people affected by adoption. It then goes on to look at the literature that argues that adoption involves erasures of birth families and makes ghosts of them. Adoption also creates possible selves and lives; the adopted person’s “could-have-beens” had there been no adoption, the biological child that the adoptive parents might have had and could not, the birth mother’s life with the child lost to adoption. These presences and possibilities haunt all involved in adoption, and writers have posited the existence of a “ghost kingdom”. This paper maps out a greater ghost world of adoption, paradoxically full of life, and because of access to birth records, a world that offers a much greater potential for materialisation. The paper avoids the traditional notions of ghosts as things to be shunned or as representatives of pathologies. Instead, it asks for respect for the “not-dead”/“not-past” of adoption and for family history researchers, a capacity to embrace the jumbled, the murky, and the disorganised. People everywhere are increasingly constructing their own family trees, with all the potential for pleasant surprise but also the shock that this might bring. Should genealogists overlook adoption’s ghosts then they overlook the opportunity to professionally map a rich and varied world of family knowledge and connections. The paper concludes with this observation coupled with a discussion of other associated ethical implications of family history work where adoption features

A Social Work ‘Academic-in-Residence’?

This paper outlines ideas in action relating to establishing closer connections and collaboration between a University Social Work team and a third sector children and families social work agency. It suggests that there is much scope for such cooperation and advances the notion, common elsewhere but not so in social work education and practice, of establishing within the agency an ‘academic-in-residence’. It is argued that this is a further development of knowledge exchange and capable of producing much benefit for agencies, faculty, practitioners and students.</p

Close relations? The long-term outcomes of adoption reunions

There has been a number of studies on the outcomes of adoption reunions, most of which have focussed on relatively &lsquo;fresh&rsquo; reunions. Very few studies have looked at long-term outcomes. Fewer still have discussed reunions and kinship with controversy over firstly, the longevity of reunions, and secondly, what such reunions might engender regarding the relative kinship statuses of adoptive and birth families. This paper critically discusses the existing literature on reunions and kinship, and then reports on the long-term outcomes of 200 &lsquo;matches&rsquo; on the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland between 1996&ndash;2006, presenting qualitative detail from the 75 respondents who completed questionnaires and sent in stories. The paper invites us to think about how adoption can form an adoptive family and deform a birth family, and how adoption reunions re-form both and everyone included. However, it will especially focus on what a coming together of two people separated by adoption means for the way that they frame their relationship with each other and those around them

A Social Work ‘Academic-in-Residence’?

This paper outlines ideas in action relating to establishing closer connections andcollaboration between a University Social Work team and a third sector children and families social work agency. It suggests that there is much scope for such cooperation and advances the notion, common elsewhere but not so in social work education and practice, of establishing within the agency an ‘academic-in-residence’. It is argued that this is a further development ofknowledge exchange and capable of producing much benefit for agencies, faculty, practitioners and students